Biological Papers. 115 



THE PRAIRIE-DOG SITUATION IN KANSAS. 



By Theo. H. Scheffer, Kansas State Agricultural College. 



'' piME was when the prairie-dog had things pretty much his 

 ^ own way on the plains, at least so far as interference by man 

 was concerned. His kind was then known from the Rio Grande 

 almost to the South Fork of the Saskatchewan and from the sun- 

 rise slope of the Rockies to the grassy prairies of eastern Kansas, 

 Oklahoma, and the Dakotas. The prairie-dog has always been a 

 denizen of the short-grass country, loving sunshine and dry at- 

 mosphere. Not even the luxuriant grasses of the better-watered 

 prairies have been able to lure him farther east than about to the 

 ninety-eighth meridian. 



Over much of this range the villages of the prairie-dog have 

 been common enough in the pioneer days of the history of the 

 West. Lieutenant Pike first describes these towns and their in- 

 habitants as he found them on the Arkansas, near the present site 

 of Larned, in 1806. The journals of the Lewis and Clark expedi- 

 tion of about the same date contain notes and descriptions relat- 

 ing to the "petit chien^' living in villages on the flats along the 

 then unnamed streams of the region now included in South 

 Dakota. Captain Marcy, in his report on the " Exploration of the 

 Red River of Louisiana," speaks of traveling for an entire day 

 through one prairie-dog town somewhere near the Wichita moun- 

 tains in Texas or Oklahoma. He estimated the population of this 

 village as being greater than that of any city on the globe inhab- 

 ited by human beings. 



It remained for C. H. Merriam, of the U. S. Biological Survey, 

 to present some careful estimates and figures relating to the prairie- 

 dog in the Year Book of 1901. According to this report, villages 

 twenty to thirty miles in length were not rare, and one in Texas 

 was known to be spread over an area of 25,000 square miles. From 

 a very conservative estimate, based on actual count on limited 

 areas, the population of this community must have been at least 

 400,000,000. The largest prairie-dog community in Kansas ex- 

 tended almost continuously for about 125 miles along the Smoky 

 Hill river and its tributaries in southern Trego, Gove, Logan and 

 Wallace counties, and in the northern parts of the counties ad- 

 joining these on the south. 



As long as free range for cattle existed in western Kansas little 



