THE AMERICAN BISONS. 153 
respecting this subject, and dated Fort Dodge, Kansas, July 16, 1875: “In 
regard to the buffalo, I would say that when I first came to this post, in 
1869, the buffaloes ranged in almost countless herds from about where the 
town of Great Bend, on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad, now is, 
to Fort Lyon, Colorado, and from the Platte River to the Red River of Texas. 
Throughout this range you might travel for days and scarcely ever be out 
of sight of buffaloes. This condition remained up to the summer and au- 
tumn of 1873, when the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé was completed to 
this point. Buffalo-hunting for their hides then became quite an industry 
in this neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in this 
vicinity, so that at the present time a buffalo is a rare sight within two hun- 
dred miles of Fort Dodge.” Dr. Tremaine gives the principal range of the 
Southern Herd of buffaloes as being now south of the Kansas line, between 
the North Fork of the Canadian and the Red River of Texas, and from about 
the 100th meridian to the eastern border of New Mexico. “A few small 
herds,” he says, wander northward from the main body as far as the Platte 
country, passing along near the eastern boundary of Colorado. Some are 
also found further to the southward between the Red and Pecos Rivers. 
He speaks of the herds as having become very much restricted in range 
and as very much “thinned out.’ He says: “As regards their present 
numbers, I was told by an officer of cavalry who had scouted last sum- 
mer and winter through the region I have indicated, that during his 
wanderings through this part of the country, which is now considered 
the principal habitat of the Southern Herd, he saw fewer buffaloes than 
he had seen in a trip from Fort Hays to Fort Dodge (eighty-six miles) in 
Tia. 
Recent reports from Kansas and Colorado agree in respect to the enor- 
mous destruction of buffaloes throughout Kansas, incidentally referred to 
above by Dr. Tremaine. While the range seems not to have been as yet 
very materially circumscribed during the last four or five years, the reduc- 
tion in numbers has been immense, and the vast herds existing there five 
years since are now represented by only scattered remnants, so fearfully 
have their ranks been depleted. 
The incessant persecution of the buffalo along the lines of the two great 
Kansas railways has had the effect to crowd them southward and southwest- 
ward into Western Texas. In this Indian-infested region, too remote from 
railroads to render it feasible for the hunter to follow them for their hides 
