Charles “Buffalo” Jones

Charles Jesse ‘Buffalo’ Jones was an American hunter, rancher and conservation-minded showman best known for his efforts to capture, breed and preserve bison when the species had been driven close to extinction. Active across the Great Plains and the Southwest, he combined frontier entrepreneurship with early wildlife-management experiments and later served as the first game warden of Yellowstone National Park.

Jones worked as a rancher, hunter and guide before becoming an outspoken advocate for preserving the shrinking American bison population. He assembled and bred bison herds and later served as the first game warden of Yellowstone National Park. His combination of frontier hunting experience and conservation work made him a distinctive figure in the changing culture of the late nineteenth-century West.

Zane Grey’s The Last of the Plainsmen is built directly from Grey’s 1907 expedition with Charles “Buffalo” Jones and makes the veteran frontiersman, hunter and conservationist the dominant personality of the journey through Arizona. Jones’s attempts to capture rather than simply kill wildlife allow Grey to present him as a survivor of the old frontier who is also responding to the disappearance of the animals that had defined it. Raiders of Spanish Peaks uses Jones more briefly within Grey’s fictional West, drawing on the same public image of the hard-travelled plainsman. The contrast between the two books is useful: one mythologises a real expedition almost as it happens, while the other carries Jones’s already established frontier persona into conventional western fiction.