Hauling bones in Texas

When buffalo bones were worth a lot of money on the open market, people made a lot of money selling buffalo bones on the open market. The great buffalo slaughter in Texas lasted roughly from 1874 to 1878. But long after the buffalo were gone, the prairies where they lived and died were dotted in every direction with their bones. The bones, frontier journalist Don Hampton Biggers wrote, “remained to speak in silent language of the unequal contest.”

 When railroads came to the newly opened lands where the buffalo and Comanche had once roamed, the bones became more than a silent reminder of the recent slaughter; they became a commodity.  

Scientists found a good use for the bones as a basic ingredient in bone meal, which was used as a fertilizer and as a source of calcium phosphate. Refineries used calcium phosphate to neutralize cane-juice and take the color out of sugar. A booming market existed in Kansas in the early 1870s, until that state’s supply of bones was exhausted. The Texas bones, especially on the Llano Estacado, lasted well into the twentieth century. 

Buffalo bones were a handy little commodity. The animals were long dead and you didn’t have to plant, cultivate or harvest their bones; they were just there for the taking. Finders keepers. The bone haulers piled the bones into mounds, some no bigger than a haystack and others the size a two-story house, depending on how big the killing field had been. Professional freighters hauled the bones out by the ton. 

Prices in the early days hovered around $3-4 a ton but reached outrageous highs of $22-23 in the 1880s.  San Antonio shipped out more than 3.3 million tons of bones from July of 1877 until November of the following year.  In the 1880s, when the price of bones was at an all-time high, Texas was the world’s largest supplier of buffalo bones.

“Hundreds of men engaged in the work and a man never thought of traveling through the country with an empty wagon,” Biggers wrote. “If he had hauled a load of freight to some ranch he would gather a load of bones for his return trip to town.”

Biggers also noted that the bone business contained the last vestiges of the business practices and ethics established by the buffalo hunters. As the hunters had understood a “right of discovery” to a certain territory, the bone haulers also understood that when a man went to work in an old killing field, all the bones in that field were his and his alone, just as the hunters never interfered with another hunter’s “stand.”  Carcasses belonged to the finder but when a man went to work in a buffalo boneyard, he was the finder and keeper of all the bones in the killing field. 

Field agents fanned out across the old buffalo range, buying all the bones they could find. The bone market extended all over the U.S. and to Europe. Settlers sometimes bought the ground bone meal back as fertilizer or as a livestock supplement. The bone market stayed strong through the early decades of the 20^th Century. A few families survived the Great Depression by selling the bones, which even then were still available on the prairies in surprising numbers. 

Once the buffalo bones were gone, Texas exported cattle bones, which sold for about the same price as the buffalo bones, but the bone market was caput by 1937. Science had found a better way to make bone meal and an easier way to get calcium phosphate. Bone hauling, as an occupation, was as obsolete as buffalo hunting.