CHAIR

ca. 1886

X1927.01.01

Chicago's Tobey Furniture Company began incorporating steer horns into their furniture in the mid-1870s, and companies across the nation followed suit. This chair, donated to the Montana Historical Society by David Hilger in 1927, offers a Montana take on the trend, using buffalo instead of cattle horns. While the exact date of the chair's manufacture is uncertain, its horns came from buffalo Hilger shot between 1881 and1886. Hilger hunted them from horseback, using a carbine Winchester, and estimated that he killed as many as eighteen buffalo in one "stand," and around 300 buffalo in total. He ate the meat from his kills and sold their hides for five dollars apiece. Hilger was one of the last sportsmen to hunt buffalo in the Judith Basin, and by 1884, most of Montana's bison herds were gone. Hilger's chair reminds us of the evocative, symbolic power bison have for many Montanans, native and non-native alike.