"Range of the Buffalo," Plains Folk #476 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

About a year ago I was getting ready to leave for New Zealand and was stockpiling some columns to be published while I was gone. I almost wrote a column then about the folksong, "Range of the Buffalo," or "Buffalo Skinners."

This is the ballad of a fellow who signed on as skinner with a buffalo hunting outfit on the southern plains. The boss, named Crego, treated the crew shabbily and cheated them out of their pay. So they shot him, went home, and "left old Crego's bones to bleach on the range of the buffalo." Wonderful song--you may remember Merle Haggard singing it during his cameo appearance in the television mini-series, Centennial.

I'm sure glad I didn't write that column. I was going to draw on the research of Nebraska's Roger Welsch. Roger has published an article, "A 'Buffalo Skinners' Family Tree," in which he traces the ancestry of the song back to earlier ballads in North America, especially the lumberjack songs, "Michigan I O" and "Canada I O." The common theme in all of them is that hard-working men were being done dirty by their bosses. To add to this, I had learned from a fellow in British Columbia that these working-man songs were related somehow to certain songs of farm laborers in England.

Now none of that seems pertinent. By accident I have discovered just where the ballad, "Buffalo Skinners," came from. Unlikely as it seems, this American classic came from the South Pacific--from New Zealand.

In 1836 a ship left Chatham, England, carrying a load of colonists (not convicts) for Australia. This was a historic voyage, for these people founded the colony of South Australia. The vessel then continued across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand, where the crew was put ashore to work. They cut a load of kauri pine (kauri are mammoth New Zealand pine trees) for spars to carry back to England.

The 2nd Master, or second in command, of the ship was one T.F. Cheesman, who kept a diary of the voyage. Into this diary he pasted a printed broadside ballad, which he later said was both composed and printed on board ship. He did not say that he wrote it.

I have read Cheesman's diary, which his son donated to the Turnbull Library of New Zealand, and examined the broadside. The name of the ship was the Buffalo. The title of the ballad is "The Voyage of the Buffalo." It begins,

Come all you jolly seamen bold, and listen to my song,

I'd have you pay attention, and I'll not detain you long,

Concerning of a voyage to New Zealand we did go,

For to cut some lofty spars, to load the Buffalo.

The sailors in this ballad, unlike the buffalo skinners in the later song, were content with their officers. They worked hard, but had a good time ashore in New Zealand, and then headed home for England where "pretty girls abound."

I have no idea how this English sailor's song of New Zealand got to the North American plains, but all the evidence of language says that it is the direct ancestor of our ballad. This flat country sure is a cosmopolitan place, isn't it?

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