The year is 1893 and Edgar Howell is headed into Yellowstone National Park for the winter. Howell has constructed a toboggan ten feet long with ski-like runners to help it slide through the snow. His load is 180 lbs. His skis are twelve feet long(!), which he made himself out of spruce or pine. Edgar’s goal is to kill as many bison as he can to sell to taxidermists in Livingston, Montana.
Wild bison were by this point almost extinct. The popularity of bison tongues, heads, and hides Back East had changed the economics of fashion into an economics of extinction. A political force pushed for the destruction of the bison as General Philip Sheridan felt that with the bison gone, the Native Americans would have no choice but to quit fighting, that the Indians would disappear along with the buffalo. Less bison and less Indians would open the Great Plains up for farming and colonization. Yellowstone National Park became the only refuge for wild bison, and by the turn of the century, park managers’ estimates range from fifty to 200 bison in the entirety of the Park (and in North America).
This was the climate in which Howell was looking to make some money and the US Army (which was in control of Yellowstone at this point) wanted to protect these last wild bison. During this time, there were no real laws against poaching wildlife. The military could expel people from the park, confiscate goods, and that was about it. The lack of any real authority forced the soldiers to become creative in their punishments. They would expel a poacher from one end of the park, and dump his gear at the other end. The soldiers would commonly just expel the poacher and hold on to his gear. Poachers would get around this by claiming that an expelled poacher had lent them the gear and the Army would be forced to relinquish the gear.
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| Map courtesy of the National Park Service. |
Edgar Howell began his wintry journey from Cooke City, MT to Astringent Creek in Yellowstone’s Pelican Valley where he would basecamp with little worries of being found or prosecuted. A one-way trip of thirty-two miles with 2,000 feet of vertical elevation gain, his route roughly follows the red line on the map. His movements didn’t completely unnoticed as soldiers found his toboggan trail and a broken snowshoe. After an overnight, fierce winter storm, his trail was found passing the Soda Butte Soldier Station. These observations of Howell’s movements to and from Cooke City were reported to Acting Superintendent George Anderson, who was hot to capture Howell.
Superintendent Anderson hatched a plan to capture Poacher Howell. He waited until he knew Howell would be in the Park before sending out a search party. Members of the search party Scout Felix Burgess and Sergeant Troike headed out to Pelican Valley to camp and look for Howell.
Burgess’s words on what happened next:
I expect probably I was pretty lucky. Everything seemed to work in my favor. I got out early and hit the trail not long after daybreak. After I found the cache of heads and the tepee, over on Astringent Creek, in the Pelican Valley, I heard the shooting, six shots. The six shots killed five buffalo. Howell made his killing out in a little valley, and when I saw him he was about 400yds. away from the cover of the timber. I knew sure I had to cross that open space before I could get him sure. I had no rifle, but only an army revolver, .38cal., the new model. You know a revolver isn’t lawfully able to hold the drop on a man as far as a rifle. I wouldn’t have needed to get so close with a rifle before ordering him to throw up his hands. Howell’s rifle was leaning against a dead buffalo, about 15ft. away from him. His hat was sort of flapped down over his eyes, and his head was toward me. He was leaning over, skinning on the head of one of the buffalo. His dog, though I didn’t know it at first, was curled up under the hind leg of the dead buffalo. The wind was so the dog didn’t smell me, or that would have settled it. That was lucky wasn’t it? Howell was going to kill the dog, after I took him, because the dog didn’t bark at me and warn him. I wouldn’t let him kill it. That’s the dog outside – a bob-tailed, curly, sort of half-shepherd. It can get along on a snowshoe trail the best of any dog I ever saw, and it had followed Howell all through the journey, and was his only companion.
I thought I could maybe get across without Howell seeing or hearing me, for the wind was blowing very hard. So I started over from cover, going as fast as I could travel. Right square across the way I found a ditch about 10ft. wide, and you know how hard it is to make a jump with snowshoes [skis, 10-12ft. long] on level ground. I had to try it anyhow, and some way I got over. I ran up to within 15ft. of Howell, between him and his gun, before I called to him to throw up his hands, and that was the first he knew of any one but him being anywhere in that country. He kind of stopped and stood stupid like, and I told him to drop his knife. He did that and then I called Troike, and we got ready to come on over to the hotel [Lake Yellowstone Hotel]. It was so late by the time I found Howell – you see he was a long way from his cache or his camp – that we didn’t stop to open up any of the dead buffalo. We tried to bring in some heads, but we found we couldn’t, so we left them
Howell had been in camp over there for a long time. I only found 6 heads cached. He wrapped them up in gunny sacks and then hoisted them up in the trees so the wolves couldn’t get at them. He had a block and tackle, so that he could run a heavy head up a tree without much trouble. He was fixed for business.
Howell said to me that if he had seen me first, I ‘would never have taken him.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Oh, I’d have gotten on my shoes and run away, of course.’ I don’t know what he meant by that, but he’d have been in bad shape if he had, unless he had taken his rifle along, for I had already found his camp.
Felix Burgess felt that protecting bison was so important, he crossed 400 yards of open terrain with only a pistol to attempt capturing the poacher, while Howell could have easily picked him off at any moment with his buffalo rifle. Burgess’s actions are one of the most selfless acts ever taken in the protection of wildlife, but the story doesn’t end there. Burgess and Troike then had to escort Howell to Fort Yellowstone at Mammoth Hot Springs, a fifty-mile ski.
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| Burgess and Troike at center. Howell on right. Howell's dog at center. Photo courtesy of Montana Historical Society. |
Howell took well to incarceration. For breakfast at the Canyon Hotel, he ate twenty-four pancakes. At the Norris Soldier Station, he attempted to chat up the officers and ate as much food as he could put away. Why would he be worried? There were no real laws to punish poaching in the national park. As he saw it, “he stood to make $2,000, and could only lose $26.75,” in gear. He knew he would be taken to the Fort, and expelled from the Park as a slap on the wrist.
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| Mounted bison heads killed by Howell. Photo courtesy NPS. |
Howell’s encounter at the Norris Station would change the easy life of wildlife poachers. As the soldiers and Howell were leaving the station, they encounter Emerson Hough, a writer for Forest and Stream magazine. He writes up the story of the actions, capture, and lack of punishment of Poacher Howell. Indignation is particularly strong to the fact that Howell showed little regard to what bison he was killing. Nine of the eleven dead bison were hauled to Mammoth as evidence. Two of the nine were bulls, an old one and a yearling (not prized game animals). The other seven were pregnant cows. Less than two weeks after the article is published, HR 6442, the Lacey Act, is introduced in Congress “to protect the birds and animals in Yellowstone National Park and punish crimes in said park.” The bill was introduced by John Lacey of Iowa, who’s personal Yellowstone story included being the victim of a stagecoach robbery in 1887. The Lacey Act became law on May 7, 1894. This law forms the basis for all legislation protecting wildlife throughout the United States.
Those moments during the credits where you find out what some of the characters went on to do.
The bravery and sheer toughness of Felix Burgess cannot be fully comprehended. At the Norris Station, Hough noticed how badly Burgess was limping. On removing his shoes, Hough took in the fact that the two toes next to his big toe were missing and his big toe had a jagged scar. Crow Indians had captured him and taken those toes and attempted a third. The circulation in his foot had never been the same after that. The foot was badly frostbitten and the big toe was removed when he returned to Mammoth Hot Springs.
Edgar Howell is not convicted under the Lacey Act because his actions took place before it was passed. He was found in a barber chair at a park hotel where he was arrested, convicted, and jailed for violating his expulsion from the park. A final note on Edgar Howell, he was briefly hired in 1897 by the same government that jailed him to track down a stagecoach robber.
Most information found in Paul Schullery's "Yellowstone's Ski Pioneers: Peril and Heroism on the Winter Trail"
