Charles Jesse Jones (1844-1919)

Abstract

On 12 June 1879, 53-year-old Charles Jesse ("Buffalo)" Jones left Garden City, Kansas, for the Far North to what nobody had done: capture a muskox and bring it back alive to "civilization". Jones was already internationally famous as "The Savior of the American Bison". ... At Fort Smith on the Slave River he was invited by Indians to a council. "The muskox is sacred to us", they warned. "If you take muskox away, it will offend the Great Spirit. All our game will leave!". ... He wanted muskoxen for study and use as well as display. He might even hybridize them with cattle. He advised the Indians to domesticate and propagate muskox as ordained by the Great Spirit in the White Man's Bible; then they would never starve. The Chippewas, Crees, and Slaves who comprised the council left planning how to thwart Jones. [The Indians cut the throats of the five muskoxen calves that Jones was able to capture.] Undismayed, he returned home via the Mackenzie River and Yukon gold camps, inspecting an island in the Bering Sea with a view to establishing a breeding farm for silver foxes. ... In 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt named him first game warden of the newly created Yellowstone Park. Poachers were decimating the park's wildlife. Roosevelt wanted someone who could stop them; Jones did. Soon he introduced Zane Grey to the West by taking him on a trip to lasso lions in Arizona. Grey, impressed, decided to make the West the subject of his writing and to pattern his heroes on Jones. ... The New York Times for 2 October 1919 said: "Charles Jesse Jones, known throughout America as 'Buffalo Jones', famous cowboy and big game hunter and friend of the late former President Theodore Roosevelt, died today". The lengthy obituary failed to say that Jones was the first, great and highly original preserver-user of North American wildlife.