The treeless great plains cover some 500,000 square miles. Very little is habitable without artesian wells and imported fuel. The few clear flowing rivers were used by buffalo, and their hunters. The climate is perennially inhospitable, cold in winter, dry in summer.
When Antonio Valverde was pursuing the Utes and Comanche in 1719, his mission was foiled by weather. He began by hugging the foothills going north where they could find water and kill deer. Snow fell for three days in late September north of the Purgatorie river. "The north wind blew with such biting sharpness all had arrived on the spot numb." They faced sleet a few days later in early October above the Arkansas river. They also confronted bears, a mountain lion, and a wildcat.
When they turned to follow the Platte east in mid-October, "such a furious hurricane came up that it obliged them to withdraw to their tents, which it seemed would be uprooted. The hurricane lasted all night."
Soon after, they came upon herds of buffalo. Wood became so scarce, they burned dried droppings. When their adversaries turned north again, the Apache scout, Carlana, warned them they had taken a route with "few springs, and those too scanty to support" the horse herd.
After all this, Valverde was forced to retreat. He already knew "the rigor of the snow and cold weather, which in these lands is so extreme that it benumbs and annihilates."
Bourgmont faced different environmental challenges when he traveled west in 1724. It was so dry when they left in July, the Missouri river dropped four feet. Then, on July 20th "toward four o’clock in the afternoon, a strong wind came up, with loud thunder and with lightening." They had heavy rain again on July 22, drizzle on the 23rd, and heavy rain again on the 25th and 26th.
After that spate, the weather got "very hot’ on July 28. The next day they stopped midday "to avoid the great heat." The day after was "very hot all day." That night it rained for three hours. The group soon turned back because illnesses fostered by high humidity and mosquitoes had weakened Bourgmont.
They returned in October and faced the same challenges that had confronted Valverde. They had frost on the 10th and 15th. When they had finally reached the El Cuartelejo Apache, "at one in the afternoon it began to sleet" on October 21. They terminated their meeting, because both groups wanted to move before conditions deteriorated. On their return trip the French "saw many bands of wolves."
We’re all familiar with the workings on the monsoons, which begin in July and often dump in October. But they usually drop rain in fall, not snow and sleet. As near as climatologists can determine, temperatures in the first third of the eighteenth century were still several degrees lower than they are today.
Ed Cook found, until 1713, about 40% of the plains was experiencing drought in any given year. The number dropped in 1713 to about 20%. After that dry seasons affected about 35% of the area.
If the plains were a little wetter it might explain why the buffalo seemed so attractive to so many bands on its perimeter. Estimating their population size is difficult because it ultimately relies on guesses about forage availability, which in turn depended upon rain. Most observations only indicate where animals were grazing, not how many there were in total.
When Juan de Ulibarrí went to El Cuartelejo in the summer of 1706, he only encountered stormy weather once, on August 14. He did not mention seeing buffalo herds or any other game, perhaps because the animals were in summer pastures. When he got to the Apache settlement, the men had to travel to locate meat.
Seven years after 1713, in the area coveted by the Comanche, Valverde’s men started coming upon numbers of deer after the first snows north of the Purgatorie. They continued to catch them north near the Arkansas where the also found "lot of good fat prairie hens" and "met some herds of buffalo."
On October 4, Valverde noted: "many deer and prairie chickens which moved about in flocks were caught to such an extent that nowhere else were more caught because of the abundance of this region."
North of the Arkansas they no longer saw deer, but continued to meet "some herds of buffalo." The numbers increased when they turned east to follow the South Platte. At one point, he recorded the herds were so great, more than 800 head, "that in the distance they looked like rolling hills."
Coming from the other direction five years later, natives with Bourgmont "killed, yesterday and today, about 20 deer and several turkeys." In late July, after a rain storm, they saw a "herd of deer on rise of ground."
When he returned in October, his men accompanied the Kansa west to their hunting grounds. On October 12, his chronicler reported, "We see quantities of bison bulls and cows, herds of stags and does, more than 200 all together. There are turkeys along the streams and rivers."
The next day, Philippe de la Renaudiére wrote, "we saw on all sides more than 30 herds of bison. They are so numerous it is impossible to count them. There appeared to be four or five hundred at least in each herd. We see herds of deer that are almost as numerous." On the 14th, there were "herds of bison in great number, as far as we could see."
Given the October dates and stormy weather, both Valverde and Bourgmont probably were seeing what had been small summer herds that had begun congregating into larger ones for the move to winter feeding grounds. They probably were not familiar with the grazing habits of buffalo, and thought what they observed existed year round. They only reported the herds existed, but never mentioned if they were moving north or south.
The Apache, Comanche and Kansa knew better. They didn’t hunt in summer, but in fall. Still they too may have thought the size of the herds were normal. The older men would have remembered drier times, but in ten years the younger generation only would have known the herds that had expanded when forage had improved.
They likely were living in a small time period before population limits were reached, and population sizes stabilized. If Cook is correct, they all - buffalo, natives, Spanish and French - were living in a golden age of abundance on the great plains.
Notes: Animals identifications are from translations of Spanish and French texts; the translators made no attempt to identify species. The year 1713 is not unique to Cook: Lisa Graumlich found evidence the Sierra Nevada to the west were wetter between 1713 and 1732 than they had been earlier.
Cook, Ed, Richard Seager, and Celine Herweijer. "The Characteristics and Likely Causes of the Medieval Megadroughts in North America," Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University website.
Graumlich, Lisa J. "A 1000-year Record of Temperature and Precipitation in the Sierra Nevada. Quaternary Research 39: 249-55:1993, cited by Scott Stine, "Climate, 1650-1850," in University of California, Davis, Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project: Final Report to Congress, Vol. 2, Assessments and Scientific Basis for Management Options, 1996.
Renaudiére, Philippe de la. Journal of the Voyage of Monsieur de Bourgmont, translation in Frank Norall, Bourgmont, 1988.
Thomas, Alfred B. After Coronado, 1935.
Ulibarrí, Juan de. Diary of expedition to El Cuartelejo, 1706, translation in Thomas.
Valverde y Cosío, Antonio. Diary of the campaign against the Ute and Comanche Indians, 1719, translation in Thomas.
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