Champion Buffalo Hunter

Book excerpt: The Champion Buffalo Hunter is the fascinating memoir of one of the most legendary frontiersmen of the early West, “Yellowstone Vic” Smith. Born Victor Grant Smith in 1850, he lived a colorful life across the American frontier from the 1870s to 1890s. A classic frontiersman, he was a trapper, dispatch rider, scout, trick shot—and, yes, buffalo hunter extraordinaire. Discovered in Harvard University’s Houghton Library in 1990, this remarkable autobiography—which Smith wrote in the third person—is comparable to Andrew Garcia’s Tough Trip through Paradise, but, notes the editor, “without the melodrama.” Written in a matter-of-fact, often humorous style, it will engage and entertain all those interested in the lives and times of the men who wandered the West, following the great herds and settling only long enough for the snows to melt. This new edition includes a revised and updated foreword by Jeanette Prodgers based on new research into the life of Yellowstone Vic.