Part 1: The Shifting Plains: Buffalo and the Frontier Economy

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he Seline River Valley in Kansas was once home to immense migrating herds of shaggy buffalo that darked the plains as far as the eye could see. These animals grazed on succulent buffalo and grama grass, drank from the local creeks and rivers, and wallowed in the hard-packed alkaline soil to lick salt from the ground. While Native Americans historically relied on these massive herds for food and clothing, they were not the only ones who hunted them. By the 1840s, the American Fur Company was purchasing thousands of buffalo robes annually. As more people entered the region following the 1859 gold strike at Cherry Creek, frontier merchants like Charles Rath arrived to establish trading contacts with the Southern Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Northern Comanche bands. Rath even strengthened these alliances by marrying a Cheyenne woman in 1860, the same year he took over a trading post on Walnut Creek following a deadly clash between the Kiowa tribe and the post's former owner, George Peacock.

As the decade progressed, tensions escalated between Native Americans and white settlers, leading to multiple raids on Rath's Walnut Creek trading post despite his efforts to maintain peace. For his own safety, his Cheyenne wife eventually convinced him to divorce her. Meanwhile, the expansion of the Butterfield Overland Dispatch freight service and the arrival of the railroad transformed the region's landscape. The military established several forts to secure the area, including Fort Fletcher (later known as Fort Hays). The rapid construction of the railroads brought in thousands of settlers and specialized construction crews, who were fed by professional buffalo hunters. Skilled marksmen, including Jim White, Tom Nixon, AC Myer, and Josiah Wright Moore, were hired by the railroad to hunt the animals. The hunters then sold the buffalo hides to factories to create the leather belts needed to drive the machinery of the emerging industrial age, fundamentally changing the American West.

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