Two and Four-legged Traffic Westward
To give you an idea what the traffic was like on the various westward trails such as the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, as counted and recorded at Fort Laramie, Wyoming in 1850, 55,000 people went west. Along with these people that year alone there were 7,472 mules, 30,616 oxen, and 22,742 horses. And the count increased for the next decade or two, what with gold being discovered in one place or another.
The Cow verses the Buffalo
Of course with all this traffic, people and domestic animals, the grass on the plains was being trampled and eaten, leaving little for the buffalo to survive on. And the buffalo was virtually the Native Americans' grocery and hardware store on the hoof. This was not a situation the Indians cared for and set out to show their dissatisfaction of the situation. It was clear that something had to be done.
Kill the Buffalo, Subdue the Indians
In the eyes of the United States Government the solution was clear: force the Indians onto reservations. One major way of doing this was to get rid of the buffalo that the Native Americans so depended on just to survive. It was time to bring the white buffalo hunter forward onto the western stage.
Within a few years there were no more vast herds of buffalo roaming the plains. But there were homesteads, ranches, and towns sprouting up all across the Great Plains. Oh, the west was still wild but now in a different way.
Uncivilized Civilization in the West
Towns sprung up, then the railroad came through. What became known as cattle towns, such as Dodge City, Kansas, were born. Now the west was filled with hard-working cowboys, gamblers, outlaws and lawmen, and those ever necessary at the time Soiled Doves.
Earp, Custer, and Crazy Horse
As the west moved toward a new century Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were shooting it out at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Billy the Kid took a deadly slug from Pat Garrett, and George Armstrong Custer fought his last fight at the Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull returned from Canada and traveled for a while with Cody's Wild West Show. Crazy Horse turned himself in and was murdered by one of his own kind but Red Cloud lived to be an old man.
Black Hills, Hickok, and Deadwood
Sometime after the Black Hills were taken away from the Sioux so the whites could get to the gold there, the town of Deadwood sprung up and, there, Wild Bill Hickok died with a bullet in his brain. Perhaps that was when the Wild West really began to die. Perhaps all of these events, and more, were just minute breaths extinguished as the Wild West died, only to live forever in the hearts of all of us that still dream about when the west was young and wild and buffalo roamed across the Plains.
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