It includes the buffalo chip song, which tries to make collecting buffalo chips feel ... sexy?
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For the record, pioneers also used wild sage as fuel, though buffalo chips were known for making a nice hot fire.
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Although operating Dutch ovens and kneading dough was difficult on the trail, many baked good bread and even pies. For fuel to heat food, travelers would collect cedar wood, cottonwood, or willow wood, when available, and sometimes dry prairie grass. More frequently, however, travelers relied on "buffalo chips"—dried bison dung—to fuel fires. Buffalo chips resembled rotten wood and would make clear and hot fires.
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While unusable for transportation, the Platte River and North Platte River valleys provided an easily passable wagon corridor going almost due west with access to water, grass, buffalo, and buffalo chips for fuel.Mattes, Merrill J. The Great Platte River Road. Bison Books, 1987. The trails gradually got rougher as it progressed up the North Platte.
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While unusable for transport, the Platte River and North Platte River valleys provided an easily passable wagon corridor going almost due west with access to water, grass, buffalo, and buffalo chips for fuel.Mattes, Merrill J. The Great Platte River Road. Bison Books, 1987. The trails gradually got rougher as it progressed up the North Platte.
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Walls were lined with newspapers pasted or pinned up with small, sharpened sticks to keep dirt from flaking into the home's interior. Some families used fabric on their walls while others created a plaster coating from local limestone and sand. Some were carpeted and other variations included building on a second room for school teachers or guests. Heating could be provided by burning buffalo chips or cow chips.
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Soldiers cutting up abandoned horse on Crook's "Horsemeat March." Crook's "Horsemeat March" marked the beginning of one of the most grueling marches in American military history. Crook's command consisted of about 2,200 men: 1,500 cavalry, 450 infantry, 240 Indian scouts, and a contingent of civilian employees, including 44 white scouts and packers. Crook's civilian scouts included Frank Grouard, Baptiste “Big Bat” Pourier, Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier, Captain Jack Crawford and Charles "Buffalo Chips" White.
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They made nearly 200 different articles from the horns, hide, and bones of the buffalo. Removing the lining of the inner stomach, women made the paunch into a water bag. The lining was stretched over four sticks and then filled with water to make a pot for cooking soups and stews. With wood scarce on the plains, women relied on buffalo chips (dried dung) to fuel the fires that cooked meals and warmed the people through long winters.
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On September 10, Crook led his famished force away from the smoldering village, headed for the Black Hills and the promised food and supplies. The Sioux kept up a running fight with his troops for the next few days, before Crook finally made it to a supply column on September 15. The fighting at Slim Buttes cost the lives of two cavalrymen and one of Crook's civilian scouts, Charles "Buffalo Chips" White, as well as those of at least 10 Sioux.
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Reese was a founding figure of the Buffalo Chips Running Club, and one of the best ever 50-59 age group runners. He set numerous national records in his 40s through his 80s, running in the 2:36 territory for a marathon in his mid-50s, and also a low 13-hour 100 miler in his 50s. He wrote several books chronicling his many cross-state and cross-country runs. In December, 1997, he finished, with Hawaii, running across all 50 states.
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The Platte River valley provided an easily passable wagon corridor; it sloped gradually up in height as it went almost due west from the Missouri. The Platte route had access to water, grass, buffalo and buffalo 'chips,' which the Indians and emigrants used as fuel for fires.Mattes, Merrill J.' "The Great Platte River Road"; Bison Books; 1987; Long Native American use had created trails on both sides of the muddy, about wide and shallow Platte River. The Platte's water was silty and bad tasting, but it was usable if no other water was available.
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The prairie grass in many places was several feet high with only the hat of a traveler on horseback showing as they passed through the prairie grass. In many years the Indians fired much of the dry grass on the prairie every fall so the only trees or bushes available for firewood were on islands in the Platte river. Travelers gathered and ignited dried buffalo chips to cook their meals. These burned fast in a breeze, and it could take two or more bushels of chips to get one meal prepared.
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A buffalo chip, also called a meadow muffin, is the name for a large, flat, dried piece of dung deposited by the American bison. Well dried buffalo chips were among the few things that could be collected and burned on the prairie and were used by the Plains Indians, settlers and pioneers, and homesteaders as a source of cooking heat and warmth. Bison dung is sometimes referred to by the name nik- nik. This word is a borrowing from the Sioux language (which probably originally borrowed it from a northern source).
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His solo drumset project, Singin' Drums, premiered at the Williamsburgh Music Center in 1995 and grew with projects Virginia Peanuts Meets Buffalo Chips with saxophonist Joe Ford (The Internet Cafe 1996) and Sound of the Drum/Language of the Heart with dancer/choreographer Mickey Davidson (The Internet Cafe/JVC Jazz Festival 1997). In 1997, he collaborated with Horacee Arnold in Dialogue for 2001: A Duet for Drumset, as part of Many Festival, Performance on 42nd, Whitney Museum of American Art. See Discography below for two recordings of Singin' Drums on Innova label. In 1999, Singin' Drums was presented live-in- concert on Jazz Corner, the BETA Award-winning New York cable TV jazz show.
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In emergencies, the early pioneers, with and without Army help, nearly always organized relief parties. To get the two essentials, water and grass for the travelers and their animals, the trails nearly always followed river valleys across the continent. The other "essential," 'wood' for fires, utilized any easily found burnable fuel—trees, brush, 'buffalo chips', abandoned wagons and supplies, sage brush, etc.. The wagons and their teams were the ultimate "off road" equipment in their time and were able to traverse incredibly steep mountain ranges, gullies, large and small streams, forests, brush, and other rough country. Initially, the almost total lack of improved roads severely constrained travel in some areas, as the pioneers had to detour, find, or make a way through or around difficult terrain.
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For all colonizers, the scarcity of potable water and fuel for fires was a common brutal challenge on the trip, which was exacerbated by the wide ranging temperature changes common to the mountain highlands and high plains where a daylight reading in the eighties or nineties can drop precipitously to a frigid seeming nighttime temperature in the low 40s. In many treeless areas, buffalo chips were the most common source of fuel. Routes of the California, Mormon and Oregon Trails west of the Rocky Mountains During the Mexican–American War, the wagon to California road known as Cooke's Wagon Road, or Sonora Road, was built across Nuevo Mexico, Sonora and Alta California from Santa Fe, New Mexico to San Diego. It crossed what was then the northernmost part of Mexico.
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Chimney Rock, Nebraska Scotts Bluff, Nebraska Trail Ruts, Wyoming The Platte River in the future states of Nebraska and Wyoming typically had many channels and islands and was too shallow, crooked, muddy and unpredictable for even a canoe to travel very far on as it pursued its braided paths to the Missouri River. The Platte River Valley, however, provided an easily passable wagon corridor sloping easily up as it went almost due west with access to water, grass, buffalo meat and hides and 'buffalo chips' for fire 'wood'.Mattes, Merrill J.' "The Great Platte River Road"; Bison Books; 1987; There were trails on both sides of the muddy, about wide and shallow ( to ) Platte River. In all the trail(s) traveled about in the present state of Nebraska in the Platte River Valley.
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