On The Trail of The Buffalo - "The Buffalo Skinners"

"The Buffalo Skinners"

"The Buffalo Skinners" is an American folk song which first appeared in John Lomax's Cowboy Songs, and Other Frontier Ballads in 1918. The song tells of crew of men hired in Jacksboro, Texas to go buffalo hunting north of the Pease River :

It happened in Jacksboro in the spring of seventy-three,

A man by the name of Crego came stepping up to me,

Saying, "How do you do, young fellow, and how would you like to go

And spend one summer pleasantly on the range of the buffalo?"

The song goes through many verses telling a humorous tale of the trials and tribulations they find on the hunt. The next to the last verse tells of how the trip ended:

The season being near over, old Crego he did say

The crowd had been extravagant, was in debt to him that day,—

We coaxed him and we begged him and still it was no go,—

We left old Crego's bones to bleach on the range of the buffalo.

The last verse ends with:

Go home to our wives and sweethearts, tell others not to go,

For God's forsaken the buffalo range and the damned old buffalo.