Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. 117 



edge of this little opening, cut off the hind quarters and took them 

 into camp for food and left the forequarters out there for bear 

 bait. The next morning early he went out and set up the 

 camera by the remains of the deer, stuck down some brush 

 around it to conceal himself, laid down and read a book nearly 

 all day, hoping a bear might smell the fresh meat and come to 

 . it. Along toward sundown he was rewarded for his patience by 

 hearing a suspicious noise away back in the woods. Soon he 

 saw a bear advancing toward the open. It came very cautiously, 

 but it had smelled the fresh meat and wanted some of it. Finally 

 it came within thirty feet of the camera. It entered that magic 

 circle on which the lens was focused. The man pressed the bulb; 

 the bear heard the click of the shuttle, turned and went back 

 into the woods; but the man tells me he would not give that 

 negative for the skins of any dozen bears that he might have 

 killed and spread out on his floors at home. 



You have all heard and read many times the story of the 

 passing of the buffalo, and I need not take much of your time 

 to repeat it. You have perhaps read of places where the 

 slaughter had been so great that a man could have walked a 

 mile and stepped on buffalo bones at every step. You may 

 have thought this an exaggeration, but here is a picture of a 

 slaughter yard which covered several square miles, where a man 

 could have walked five miles and stepped on buffalo bones all 

 the way. This tragic slaughter was made possible by sending 

 out parties of mounted hunters every morning to round up 

 bunches of buffalo and drive them into this valley, in order that 

 the killing might be done near the camps. 



In 1873 a party of Flathead Indians, who live in the Flat- 

 head valley of Northern Central Montana, came over into the 

 eastern part of that territory to hunt buffalo, as had been their 

 custom for perhaps hundreds of years. They found this time, 

 as in previous years, the usual vast herds of buffalo. The 

 plains were black with them as far as the eye could see, but the 

 Indians found this time, for the first time in their lives, hun- 

 dreds of white men hunting these great beasts. A railway had 

 just been built into the buffalo country, and an army of butchers 

 had gone out there to kill off these magnificent creatures for 

 their skins. The Indians saw the puffs of smoke raising from 

 behind bunches of sagebrush in every direction. They saw the 

 great beasts staggering about and falling. They saw. the red- 

 handed butchers following up the gunners, skinning the dead 



