In the spring of 1886 William Temple Hornaday, thirty-two years old and chief taxidermist of the United States National Museum at the Smithsonian, went through the museum's bison specimens and found almost nothing worth mounting. The great herds, tens of millions of animals within living memory, had been shot out in little more than a decade, and it was dawning on the museum that soon there would be no wild bison left to collect at all. That May Hornaday went west to the broken country north of Miles City, between the Yellowstone and the Missouri, where reports said a few still survived.
For the Lakota, the Assiniboine, the Crow and the other nations of these plains, whose whole way of life had turned on the herds, the destruction had already meant hunger and the end of their independence. Hornaday had come to record the last of the animals; the loss he was recording was theirs first.
The spring trip found few bison, though the crew caught a live calf. Hornaday came back in the fall with a bigger outfit, and by December the expedition had killed twenty-five. He wrote to the Smithsonian's secretary that they had shot very nearly every bison they saw, and that he doubted thirty head were left in all of Montana. The bones of the slaughtered herds lay everywhere across the plains, and they stayed with him.
The group and the note
The calf, named Sandy for his color, was penned on the museum lawn in Washington that summer, where crowds came to watch him, until he died, probably of eating too much damp clover; his hide went into the exhibit. Hornaday chose six for it, a huge old bull, a cow, a younger cow, a spike bull, a yearling and the calf, and mounted them in a glass and mahogany case sixteen feet long, on real buffalo grass and real Montana dirt. The Buffalo Group was unveiled in March 1888 and was hailed as a new kind of museum display, the animals posed together in something like their own country. Sealed into its base was a metal box holding a note, dated March 7, 1888, to his illustrious successor, telling how the specimens were taken and asking him to protect them when Hornaday was dust and ashes.
The hunt made Hornaday a conservationist. In 1889 he published The Extermination of the American Bison, and he pressed Congress into creating the National Zoo, partly so that living bison could be kept and bred. He went on to run the Bronx Zoo, helped found the American Bison Society, and helped bring about the National Bison Range in Montana in 1908, land carved from the Flathead Reservation.
Home again
The Buffalo Group stood in the Smithsonian for almost seventy years. In 1957 curators modernizing the mammal hall took it apart, found Hornaday's note, and replaced his bison with fresh hides from animals killed on the National Bison Range. In 1958 the six old mounts were shipped to the University of Montana in Missoula for a museum that never came to be, and were scattered across the state. The bull went to the state wildlife department, and in 1970 Jack Lepley, director of the agricultural museum at Fort Benton, acquired it. Between 1988 and 1990 Doug Coffman, a writer from Oregon, tracked down all six, and he and Lepley raised the money to restore them. They stand together again, out of their case, in the museum at Fort Benton now called the Museum of the Northern Great Plains, back in the state where Hornaday shot them.