Ruminant manure played an unexpectedly vital role in the American settlement of the Plains.
In a landscape nearly devoid of wood or coal, dried dung—buffalo chips and cow chips—became essential.
They provided heat and fuel for cooking.
They served as medicinal agents for everything from snakebite and sunburn to hiccups and severed limbs.
Travelers—Native and European alike—built cairns of buffalo chips as landmarks.
Soldiers in tents, families in sod houses, elders in tipis all appreciated one critical detail:
buffalo chips didn’t throw sparks.
No sparks meant no smoldering blankets. No fires in the night.
Safer, if slightly aromatic.
One early settler said,
“Don’t feel sorry for us cooking with cow chips. They had their advantages—didn’t need to use pepper.”
At some point—possibly in a Tom Robbins novel I can’t quite recall—someone joked that buffalo chip smoke didn’t just cook your food.
It changed your thinking.
Forget the taste of burned pancakes.
Suddenly, the thought emerged:
“Go West.”
And west they went—burning buffalo chips until there were no more.
Only the Pacific.
Funny thought. At the time.
Then I remembered the Cat Lady theories.
Toxoplasmosis.
A parasitic disease caused by Toxoplasma gondii.
Usually symptomless in adults—except that it’s suspected of tinkering with brain function.
Increased risk-taking.
Autoimmune complications.
Schizophrenia.
Jaroslav Flegr, the Czech biologist, suggests the parasite manipulates its host—nudging behavior toward fatal outcomes.
So that, ideally, a cat eats the host, and the parasite completes its sexual cycle.
Nature is precise.
And deeply weird.
It nags at the back of my mind.
What if it’s true?
What if buffalo chip smoke altered brain chemistry, not just digestion?
What if copper smelting fumes whispered to the early metallurgists,
“Try this other ore. Melt this. Hammer that.”
Bronze. Iron. Steel.
Progress, by way of combustion.
It would explain a lot.
Of course—
it’s the height of lunacy to think that mere smoke can alter the way the brain thinks.
A Work Progressing 