292 Life-histories of Northern Animals 



breeding and vigorous in her twenty-ninth year. Colonel 

 Jones says:'^ "The natural Hfe of the Buffalo is much longer 

 than is that of the domestic cattle. I frequently saw animals 

 so old their horns had decayed and dropped off, which indicated 

 that they live to a patriarchal age. I saw a Buffalo cow in the 

 Zoological Garden in Paris which was thirty-one years old, 

 and I am sure I have seen wild ones from ten to fifteen years 

 older." And since the cow begins to breed at three years and 

 has a calf each spring (or every other spring) for about thirty 

 years, the diminution of the Buffalo as a wild race cannot be, 

 as some have claimed, due to infecundity. 



EXTERMi- The extermination of the Buffalo has been so fully and 

 admirably treated by Dr. W. T. Hornaday in his volume of that 

 name (1889), that I can do little more than condense his account, 

 acknowledge my indebtedness, and add a few later facts. 



About the beginning of the nineteenth century the Buffalo 

 were cleared out of all the country east of the Mississippi. 



In 1832, according to Catlin,^'' 150,000 to 200,000 robes 

 were marketed each year, which meant a slaughter of 2,000,000 

 or perhaps 3,000,000 Buffalo by the Indians. The destruction 

 was already so great that Catlin prophesied the extinction of the 

 Buffalo "within eight or ten years." The drain was obviously 

 more than the natural increase, and already the vast herds 

 were shrinking visibly. About 1 834 or 1 835 they began to dimin- 

 ish very rapidly on the western slope of the Rockies, as Fremont 

 records. But the eastern slope was the great Buffalo range. 

 Concerning these two areas this famous explorer writes:^' 



"The extraordinary abundance of the Buffalo on the east 

 side of the Rocky Mountains, and their extraordinary diminu- 

 tion, will be made clearly evident from the following statement: 

 At any time between the years 1824 and 1836 a traveller might 

 start from any given point south or north in the Rocky Moun- 

 tain range, journeying by the most direct route to the Missouri 

 River, and during the whole distance his road would be always 



^8 Buff. Jones's Advt., 1890, pp. 235-6. ^°N. A. Indians, Vol. I, p. 263. 



" Expl. Exped., 1845, PP- i44~S- 



