(WEST MONTANA) Laton A Huffman A landscape of slaughtered b

Sale 2687 - Lot 240

Price Realized: $ 562

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Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900

(WEST--MONTANA.) Laton A. Huffman. A landscape of slaughtered bison known as "Five Minutes Work." Contact print, 4¾ x 4 inches, uncaptioned; minor wear. Montana, [1882]

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This haunting image is also variously titled "The Last of the Buffalos," "Killing Cows and Spikes on the Snow near Cohagen," or "A Killing of Cows and Spikes in the Smoky Butte Region, North Montana." Young male bison were known as spikes.

The photographer later recalled: "This picture shows the killing of nine cows and spikes and my old flaxey saddle horse and the 45 by 120 Reliable Sharps gun. The original negative was taken in the Smokey Butte country in 1882, near the end of the great tragedy, the extermination of the American bison by red men and white, which was then nearing its culmination, between the Missouri and the Yellowstone. . . . Nine animals are shown. The killing was scattered over a mile of rough breaks, and numbered a total of forty cows and young bulls in all. What an awful waste it was!"--quoted in Brown & Felton, "Huffman: The Frontier Years," pages 70 and 253. Also published in Jennifer R. Henneman, "Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 155.