- Publisher: Popular Science
- Editor: Sarah Durn
- Published: December 6, 2025
From my What a Difference a Century Makes—or Not column on Pop Sci
Inside cowboy Charles Jesse “Buffalo” Jones's get-rich-quick scheme to restore the plains 100 years ago.
By the mid-1880s, the Great Plains had a ghostly aura. Just a decade earlier the grasslands teemed with buffalo, but when railroads like Santa Fe and Union Pacific cut tracks across Kansas and into Texas, hunters began shooting buffalo from train windows for sport, leaving carcasses to rot where they fell. Commercial hide hunters joined in, followed by the U.S. military, which slaughtered buffalo to starve Native Americans. By 1884, following a killing frenzy that lasted barely ten years, government auditors estimated that, of the 60 to 70 million buffalo that once roamed the plains, only a few hundred remained south of Canada. As national newspapers sounded alarms about extinction, the question became whether the most iconic animal of the American West would vanish before anyone bothered to save it....
The strange Wild West tale of the first cow-buffalo hybrid
Many thanks to Sarah Durn, Popular Science Associate Editor.
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