Them Bones, Them Bones, by Cindy Regnier

We have all heard the sad story. As many as 60 million buffalo roamed the plains of the American West in the early 1800s. The buffalo provided food and shelter for the Plains Indians and were vitally important to their way of life. Then the railroads brought trains full of buffalo hunters, some who shipped the products back east, but many more who killed them for sport, leaving the dead animals to rot. Buffalo became so scarce they almost ceased to exist and the Plains Indians suffered the same fate.

But something else arose out of the tragic story of the buffalo massacre and that’s the birth of a new occupation, both for enterprising settlers, the ravaged Indian tribes and easterners who came west specifically to take part. So many buffalo carcasses covered the plains that settlers had to clear their land of the bones before they could begin to farm it. Enter the lucrative business of bone scavenging.

Turns out, buffalo bones were worth big money back east. Because of the high phosphorus content in the bones, bone meal fertilizer became a product of high demand. In addition to the fertilizers, bones were used in gelatin and the making of bone china, a prized commodity of those wealthy enough to afford it.

Settlers needing to survive for at least a year before they could produce a crop, collected bones and sold them. Children collected them to help their families make ends meet. The Native Americans collected them so they could buy food supplies to take the place of the buffalo. But the most buffalo bones were collected by those akin to the would-be miners who flock to a gold rush. If there was money to be had, people came to take advantage of it. Many of the collectors owned carts, oxen or horses to pull them, and employed laborers. They formed “Bone cart trains” coined from the familiar term of wagon trains and roamed the plains filling their carts with bones. They would then pile the bones at railroad stops where a bone buyer would pay them for their wares then see that the bones were loaded into boxcars and shipped east to make not only fertilizer or china, but also buttons, knives, even street paving. One source said Topeka Kansas had streets paved with buffalo skulls. Sounds like a rough ride to me.

But, as the buffalo came to a sad end, so did the trade of buffalo bones. So many boxcars of bones were hauled back east that eventually the prairies had been scoured clean with hardly a bone to be found. By the 1890s buffalo bone shortages saw the price skyrocketing, but no one could find them anymore. Even that remnant of the buffalo was gone.

By 1900 only around 300 buffalo still roamed the plains. Future minded conservationists established buffalo preserves such as Yellowstone National Park until the present-day buffalo count numbers about 400,000. Fertilizers and china are still made from bones, but rarely of the buffalo variety.

Would you have come west to scavenge for bones? Many did and made a fortune, for a few years anyway. Certainly an interesting but odd occupation.

Carly travels west to Kansas to become the wife of a man she’s never met. She must escape the evil plans of her ex-fiance to use her artistic talents for a counterfeit operation. Rand, a Kansas cattle rancher, knows his two orphaned nieces need a mother. He advertises for a mail-order bride, willing to do whatever it takes to give Mary Jo and Jenna a proper home and upbringing. Can Carly and Rand find love where they least expect it, or will the shadows of the past dash their hopes for the future?