"When the white men wanted to build
railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still
protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They
chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the
Kiowas loved them... Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill
the buffalo."
~
Old Lady Horse
"The buffalo didn't belong to anybody.
If you could kill them, what they brought was yours. They were walking gold
pieces...Was I not lucky that I discovered this quick and easy way to fortune?
I thought I was...The thing we had to have, we businessmen with rifles, was one
shot kills. We based our success on...the overwhelming stupidity of the
buffalo, unquestionably the stupidest game animal in the world...If you wounded
the leader...the rest of her herd, whether it was three or thirty, would gather
around her and stupidly "mill"...All you had to do...was pick them
off one by one...I once took 269 hides with 300 cartridges. Adventurous? No
more than shooting a beef critter in the barnyard...It was a harvest. We were
the harvesters...One by one we put up our buffalo rifles...left the ranges. And
there settled over them a vast quiet...The buffalo was gone...Maybe we served
our purpose in helping abolish the buffalo; maybe it was our ruthless
harvesting of him which telescoped the control of the Indian by a decade or
maybe more. Or maybe I am just rationalizing. Maybe we were just a greedy lot
who wanted to get ours, and to hell with posterity, the buffalo, or anyone
else, just so we kept our scalps on and our money pouches filled. I think maybe
that is the way it was. "
~
"It would be hard to imagine anything
more deeply hurtful than the loss of something ineffably sacred. One can only
guess and imagine. We can't know what that is now. But certainly confusion,
first of all, I suppose. Why is this happening? Why are you killing the
buffalo? We do that, of course, but we do it in order to survive and we do it
in a sacred manner. But this wholesale slaughter must have been first
confusing, and then -- you know --a devastation. A wound in the heart that we
cannot conceive of now."
~
N. Scott Momaday
"Who
will provide the grand design, what is yours and what is mine?
'Cause there is no more new frontier, we have got to make it here.
We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds
in the name of destiny and in the name of God."
~The Eagles - The Last Resort
Hotel
Source:
Ken Burns' "The Grandest