On the Trail of the Buffalo


"On the Trail of the Buffalo", also known as "The Buffalo Skinners" or "The Hills of Mexico", is a traditional American folk song in the western music genre. It tells the story of an 1873 buffalo hunt on the southern plains. According to Fannie Eckstorm, 1873 is correct, as the year that professional buffalo hunters from Dodge City first entered the northern part of the Texas panhandle. It is thought to be based on the song Canaday-I-O.
According to extensive research carried out by Jürgen Kloss in 2010–2012, this song is one of the many variants of John B Freeman's "The Buffalo Song".

"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 1910. The song tells of crew of men hired in Jacksboro, Texas to go buffalo hunting north of the Pease River :
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 last verse ends with:

"Boggus Creek"

Another early variant called "Boggus Creek", collected by W.P. Webb, was first published in 1923. Webb considered it a variant to "The Buffalo Skinners" In "Boggus Creek" a group of cowboys are hired at the now abandoned cowtown at Fort Griffin, Texas, to work cattle in New Mexico:
In this variant, no one is killed but the song ends the same way, except instead of warning others about the "range of the buffalo" it says:

Recordings

Cultural references

The song is quoted by Fermilab News, in an article describing the nuclear research facility's herd of American bison.