Buffalo Hunter John Cloud Jacobs. (original) (raw)

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.