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00:00Great, 60 million, they came from Pennsylvania to the Ross and from the Great Slave Lake
00:10to the Rio Grande. The herds were growing when the Spaniards saw them in 1521. Sixty
00:17million and growing. This was the new world and 300 years went by. A frontier was pushing
00:25on the west. Now there were 40 million buffalo and all west of the Mississippi. It was 1830
00:34and there were 40 million buffalo. Then came the rifles, the rum, and the call for robes.
00:41The railroads followed. Only 58 years in 1888. It was 1888 and four gone, only a few hundred
00:50fugitives. It was the buffalo. The buffalo was food, clothing, shelter, sport, trade
00:58goods, and every utensil. His bile was seasoned and his chips were fired. The great mysterious
01:09one had given the buffalo. Huacantanca, the great grandfather, had given the buffalo.
01:15And the great bull buffalo had been named with the reverence of their word for father.
01:21The Sioux called him Totonka. To the Indian, Totonka was part of the unbroken hoop of the
01:39world and each spring new herds rumbled out of a legendary cavern and covered the land
01:45with abundance.
02:07The wind swept the voice they shared.
02:25The buffalo I. The buffalo I. I make the buffalo come. I am relatable. Some men offered their
02:36spirit powers to bring Totonka. Powers given them long ago in their vision quests. And
02:58the buffalo society danced. They danced to bring the buffalo. Totonka would come if only
03:05they danced long enough. Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, earth lodge dwellers in the days before
03:13horses. Totonka would come. Totonka must come, for they had only moccasins to travel. And
03:23they danced. They danced through days and nights. Totonka would come, but the vision
03:39must be danced and sung. Totonka would come. And they danced the vision of the food. They
03:53danced the vision of the hunt. They danced the vision of the meat. It was meat when a
04:00tired dancer bent low and another dancer sent a blunt arrow to his side. A new dancer replaced
04:06the fallen one. And the women would mock butcher. And Totonka came. A scout sent the
05:00Without horses, they hunted like the wolves that followed the herds. And there was meat. And
05:26there was sharing. And there was joy. And there was gratitude. Yesterday, hunger. Tonight,
05:33feasting. The chiefs and good hunters brought meat to the lodges of the needy. Thirst meat
05:51was for the fire, an offering to the great powers. The host waits and makes tobacco while
06:19the others eat. It is their way. Totonka was near. And so with contentment, good humor, good
06:33stories. Totonka was near. And in his belly boiled a stew. They take the pipe. It is an act of grace,
06:50of universal peace. The earth, the sun, and all directions. They are one.
06:58A mandan could pound the ashes from his pipe and his guests would depart. It was not so easy
07:23to end the gaiety outside the lodges. Morning brings a day of labor. It is a woman's work.
07:40The men are gone to hunt. The hides are scraped with stone and horn. The sinew is stitched in a
07:55quillwork design. The jerky is stripped and dried. The hunters are gone. And the women labor. It is
08:22the time of the blackening cherries. As the jerky is dried, the choke cherries are ground. Together
08:29they are wasna. Wasna, to nourish the hunters far from their lodges. And old white buffalo man waits
08:38and sketches a story of his remembering on his winter count road.
09:08The hunter has joined the hunted. He is a decoy in a surround.
09:39The decoy charms the herd leader and edges toward the cliff. The herd stares and follows, follows, stares and
09:55follows. Suddenly it is surrounded by secret blinds and chasers.
10:25The stampede goes the way of the decoy over the cliff.
11:55For a great hunt, there were grateful offerings. A voice and a robe of the finest quillwork were sent to stay with the
12:15winds, with the earth, with the sun.
12:44Then came the horse. The Spaniards brought them. They strayed, they were stolen, they were bred. Till at last, the plains
13:02Indian was the finest horseman in the world. Now he followed the unpredictable herds.
14:02Behind the hunt came the old men, the women and the children singing a tremolo of joy. They would find the arrows of their family and butcher.
14:32Fresh liver was a delicacy at the end of a hunt, and the juicy entrails might please the young ones.
15:00A new breed, the mountain man. He came as a hunter, a trapper, a trader. He lived on the land, same as the Indians. Sometimes he lived with the Indians.
15:14Fellow and furs were his game and trade, the trade was his rendezvous. The mountain dollars a robe, it was a fair shake. For the Indian,
15:28ten cents worth of watered down whiskey might be an even trade. The traders brought whiskey and they brought guns, rifles to get more robes to trade for more rum.
15:40A cycle had been started, a cycle which had nothing to do with survival for the Indians. Soon the hides began to pour down the Missouri River to St. Louis,
15:56and soon the railroads came. They brought gentlemen hunters who slew for so-called sport. They brought hunters who killed for tongues alone,
16:08and they brought hide hunters with their skinners. The prairies began to rot with wasted carcasses, and the sharps' rifles fired without ceasing.
16:21Horse hunting had become too slow. To get a stand with the long-range sharps was the wholesale way to kill. One man with one sharps could take 3,000 in a season.
16:33By 1869, the Union Pacific Railroad had divided the buffalo into northern and southern herds. By 1873, the hide hunter campaign reached its peak in the south.
16:47The hunters and skinners now covered the plains from the North Platte to the Arkansas River. They were a raucous blend of bumped railroad workers and Civil War veterans.
16:57They liked killing, and they liked whiskey, and they could gorge themselves on hump meat and tongue. Enthusiasm for buffalo meat was legend on the plains.
17:09The roasted marrow of a buffalo's thigh bone could be cause for a wild wingding.
17:39Go home to your wives and sweethearts, tell others not to go, for God's forsaken the buffalo range and the damned old buffalo.
18:09Colonel Dodge had said, every buffalo dead is an Indian gone, and buffalo extermination was the unwritten policy in the winning of the West.
18:25So the butchery went on. On the South Platte, hunters built fires to keep the buffalo from water at night, and killed them as they came to slake their thirst by day.
18:371875 saw the end. In 1875, the great southern herd was gone.
18:53There were still great herds in the north. By 1882, the Northern Pacific Railroad was built, and 5,000 hunters and skinners were emptying the northern range.
19:07Sitting Bull led his people on their last hunt in 1883. Between the Black Hills and Bismarck, they killed 1,200 buffalo in two days. It was the last free herd anyone ever saw.
19:22A year later, the hunters flocked to the range as usual. They returned with empty wagons and broke.
19:34It was 1884. The days of the still hunt, the hide men, and the skinners were over. The massive herds were gone.
19:48For the Indian, the end of the buffalo meant starvation and disease. Still, he could invoke the mysterious powers of Tatanka for healing.
20:00The people still lived on the desperate hope that Tatanka would return. And for those who lived on hope alone, the medicine men became the new leaders.
20:18These were the waning moons of desolation, and the last robes wrapped the bodies of the dead.
20:26Now a resurrection of bones was clearing the prairie. The supply wagons going south from Dodge City returned to the railroads with bones for the fertilizer and carbon works.
20:50Now unemployed hunters, drought-stricken sodbusters, and starving Indians became bone pickers. The bones of a hundred buffalo might bring ten dollars.
21:06The bone-scattered sod was the tragic graveyard of independence for the Plains Indian. Now he came to the reservations.
21:18The bright fires of strong leaders were fading. Wolf Road, Dull Night, Kills Buffalo, Little Wolf, Gaul, High Bear, Spotted Tail, Satanta, Red Shirt, American Horse, Red Cloud.
21:44Still, once more the dream of Tatanka returned. The tree would blossom, and the hope would come back to the people. It was the Messiah dream, a new religion. They called it the Ghost Dance.
22:10They sang and danced endlessly. I will live now, the father said so. I will live now, the father said so. The buffalo are coming, the father said so. The buffalo are coming, the father said so.
22:34The Ghost Dance had been the vision of a Ute Indian. Now it was shared by Kiowa, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux. A new world would come through the dance, and the dance brought visions of the spirit world, of departed loved ones, and of Tatanka coming again.
22:54The holy man, Black Elk, danced until a vision came. His vision took him to the spirit world, where he was given a holy shirt to bring to his people.
23:24When he returned, he told his people of the shirt, which was given to be worn by the Ghost Dancers to bring the vision of the dance.
23:54Soon the Ghost Dancers were wearing the shirt, and soon they believed the ghost shirt would shed the bullets of the white man.
24:10Wounded Knee. The massacre at Wounded Knee. The white man called it a battle. It was a massacre.
24:28Fear that the Ghost Dancers meant to rise against the government brought Chief Bigfoot's band to surrender. Surrendered, hungry, sick. They were being disarmed, then a frightful moment of disturbance, and the nervous rapid fire Hotchkiss guns were loosed on all the people.
25:28Water! Water!
25:58Water! Water! Water! Water!
26:26In the morning, Bigfoot, their leader, lay frozen in the snow. The wagon men loaded their bodies and put them in a common grave. And for the old ones, the hoop of the world was broken.
26:56And for the old ones, the hoop of the world was broken.
27:26The End