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Hollywood
has seldom – if ever – portrayed buffalo hunters as civilized, erudite
men. Screen writers and producers of Westerns usually have their
buffalo hunters play the role as coarse, scruffy men ready to drink
or kill anything.
But as the story of one-time buffalo hunter John Cloud Jacobs demonstrates,
reality is not always that simple.
“To see him saluting, bowing and smiling at the ladies you would
not think he ever shot anything larger than a cotton tail rabbit,”
fellow pioneer George W. Saunders later wrote.
Jacobs probably didn’t wear his Sunday school clothes went he went
out after buffalo, but in later years, Saunders described him as
“dignified and very modest.” He also could write complete sentences
and string them together into logical paragraphs.
Born and raised in Kentucky, Jacobs got to Texas as soon as he could.
Arriving in the Lone Star state at 19, he drifted west like the
herds of bison he would soon begin hunting. In 1874, voters elected
him sheriff of sparsely populated Shackelford County. He was only
20 years old.
But there was a good bit of trouble, plenty of risk, and not much
money in being a county lawman. Jacobs turned to cowboying, but
soon went on to pioneer a new industry for Texas: buffalo hunting.
“When we started to the range for the winter hunt we bought one
ton of ammunition – 1,600 pounds of lead and 400 pounds of powder
– besides shells, paper caps, etc.,” he wrote in The Pioneer, a
long-defunct magazine then published in San
Antonio by Saunders.
Jacobs went on to describe how he and his colleagues made their
living shooting buffalo by the thousands. He said each of the shaggy
beasts amounted to a walking $1 bill, the value of one hide. But
while the great buffalo herd constituted a vast natural resource,
it was not a renewable one. In fact, Anglo Texans understood that
when the buffalo were gone, so would be the Indians.
“The buffalo hunters are often blamed for the slaughter of the buffalo,”
he wrote. “It is true that we averaged from four to six thousand
hides a season…but it had to be….Now there is a cow where there
used to be a buffalo, and the country is dotted over with thrifty,
happy homes.”
After the buffalo virtually disappeared, in large measure thanks
to Jacobs and his colleagues, the former hide hunter moved to South
Texas. Soon he took on another novel job involving animals:
Collecting tropical birds and other exotic species in Mexico for
sale to zoos and museums.
In 1904, he settled in San
Antonio and bought a place he named the Deer Park Polo Ranch.
There he raised and trained polo ponies, bred cattle and sheep,
maintained a tropical bird aviary and kept a herd of deer.
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