We’ve all seen it. The image of a desert or “badlands”-type landscape in the American Southwest or other Wild West or pioneer-related location. Among the cacti, sand, dry soil, etc. one or more cow (or perhaps buffalo) skulls, and more rarely, complete skeletons, are lying on the ground as a reminder of how barren this area is. This image is often seen in comics/caricatures/cartoons. But how much of a basis in reality does it have? Was it really more common to see the skulls or skeletons of cows (that had presumably escaped from ranches or hadn’t survived a cattle drive) or of buffalos in the deserts/on the plains in the time of the Old West than it is to see the bones of other animals elsewhere, or is this just a stereotype that was created by the media?
What I do know is that (horridly), in the 1870s or thereabout, a staggering number of buffalo were killed by order of the US government, in order to make Native Americans, to whom the beasts were a source of food/materials, more dependent on the government. I don’t know if something similar wasn’t done in Canada, but I’ve seen old photos, I think from both countries, of enormous piles of buffalo bones; I may have read in a history textbook in school that these bones were then turned into fertilizer (though again, I don’t remember if the bones of the buffalo from the Canadian image from my textbook were killed deliberately - which is likely given their sheer number - or were found dead on the plains). Could these macabre images that largely or wholly resulted from human-driven killings have inspired the trope of the skull of a bovine that had died naturally lying in the desert or a similar environment in the Wild West?
Maybe on the plains, but not in the desert. Bison don’t live in the desert, while cows live wherever people take them. That’s the point: a dead cow implies that things aren’t going great for its owners.
It happened often in my old job. I’d be roaming around the wide expanse of the mud flats of the Great Salt Lake on an ATV for work, and we’d come across a few. I didn’t stop to ID whether it was cow, horse, ox, etc (not that I was ever an expert in veterinary forensics).
My teams did come across human remains once. That got a call to Range Control with coordinates.
Tripler
Lots of things died in the mud flats. Lots.
I thought the “cow skull in the desert” was a sign the water was not drinkable. Too alkaline or something. The cows would drink it anyway for lack of an alternative and then die from it.
Could the pile of buffalo bones have been from this place?
Another source of this trope could be the stories we’ve all seen about pioneers traveling West through the plains via covered Conestoga wagon-trains. The picture here is from a modern-day re-enactment:
These wagons were typically pulled by oxen, which are hardier and more drought-resistant than horses. But they didn’t all survive the trek to California or wherever they were headed. So there would be oxen skeletons along the established wagon trails.
(ETA: The people didn’t all survive the trip either, but you don’t see their skeletons laying by the side of the trail. Those tended to get buried.)
Drive around enough out here and you are bound to see a “cow skull” or two lying around. Stores sell them as “western” decorations and some people put them in their yard, along with half buried wagon wheels. So if it was originally a fictional trope it has become a self-fulfilling reality.
On a tangentially related note, I grew up in the country, and frequently when trudging across farmland would stumble upon a random skull of an animal, be it sheep, horse, or cow. Not in an offal pit, but just left where it had perished, often under trees where the tractor wouldn’t reach.
Another chiming in to say yes, you find random dead cattle skulls/skeletons/etc in the dry, dusty prairies even nowadays. If a cow dies on the cattle ranches up 'round here, it generally just decomposes where it lies (unless it needs to be dragged out of the road or something).
I’ve seen tons of cow skulls/skeletons in the desert. And plenty live cattle, they’re free-grazed. “Desert” in this context means an arid area, not sand and cacti.
Western Pennsylvania is hardly the desert, but we do find deer skulls in the woods from time to time. As the carcass decomposes, chunks of meat from the fore and hind quarters are dragged off by scavengers, leaving the skull alone at some point.
A few years ago, our dog Loki returned from a brief walk in the woods with a fawn forelimb. I took her trophy away from here, but fifteen minutes later she had it again. When I took it away and put it in the barn garbage can I realized it was a second trophy.
Yeah, a ton of the western US is desert, and cattle is a major agricultural industry in those areas. Here’s map of BLM grazing land. Much of that land is desert or close to it.
My dog found the pile where deer hunters put the viscera and unwanted parts. He brought a head home, “Hey, this guy is really bad off. You need to do something!”
People make decorations for their homes with those cattle skulls, so it must be true!
Another trope similar to the cattle skull thing is the whole saguaro cactus thing for any dryland. They only naturally grow in one area of the northern Sonoran desert in AZ and parts of CA. Like this brand-name (saguaro do not naturally grow within a few hundred miles of El Paso):
Seems pretty legit to me. I have often seen cattle skulls around southern Alberta rangelands. Much of this is pretty dry land but not quite semi arid even (despite what many Calgarians seem to think, the climate is humid continental).
Definitely see Akali pools, can’t remember if I have seen skulls beside them. Lots of bones bother recent and fossils, in the badlands.
As far as the pictures of bison bone piles, I am pretty sure those have a lot more to do with the big hunts during settlement of the west than traditional hunts at the Buffalo jump.
I saw three deer skulls today while cruising timber. I’ve found moose, cattle, elk, bear, wolf, coyote and many others. Unless it’s exceptionally cool/interesting I don’t stop for more than a second. Today, one of the deer skulls was from a young buck and had tiny little spikes. I pulled them apart and the skull broke where it fuses. It was interesting to me, seeing how the plates fused together and how the buck was growing a set of antlers while the fuse wasn’t 100% complete.
I would say that bones would last a lot longer in arid areas. The supply would be smaller but the staying power would be decades.
