164 : THE AMERICAN BISONS. 
in security. When the Pawnees were finally overthrown and forced on to a 
reservation, the Sioux poured into this country, just suited to their tastes, 
and, finding buffalo very plenteous and a ready sale for their robes, made 
such a furious onslaught upon the poor beasts that in a few years scarce a 
buffalo could be found in the extensive tract of country south of the 
Cheyenne and north and east of the North Platte River. This area, in 
which the buffalo had thus become practically extinct, jommed on the south- 
west the Laramie Plains country, and there resulted a broad east-and-west 
belt from the Missouri to Montana, which contained no buffalo.” * 
I learn from General F. H. Bradley (U. 8. Infantry) that in 1868, when 
Forts Smith, Reno, and other military posts in the Black Hills region were 
abandoned, buffaloes were very abundant in all the so-called Big Horn coun- 
try, and that in one day they killed fifty tons of meat for garrison use. 
During the period of the government surveys for a railroad route from the 
Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, during 1853 to 1856, buffaloes were 
met with in great abundance on the southern tributaries of the Missouri, 
between the Great Falls of the Missouri and the mouth of the Yellowstone. 
In passing from Fort Benton southeast to the Musselshell River, Lieutenant 
Mullan reports meeting with three lean old bulls on Arrow River, large 
herds on the head of the Judith River, between the Girdle and Judith 
Mountains, and a considerable number along the Musselshell.t 
In 1871 no buffaloes occurred in Eastern Wyoming south of the Black 
Hills, and they had also already been long extinct over the Laramie Plains, 
and in the valley of the North Platte in Western Wyoming, which region 
they probably have not regularly frequented since they were dispersed, about 
1849 — 50, by the great overland emigration to California. I was informed 
that none then existed in the territory south of the Sweetwater Mountains 
and the Black Hills. Frémont, in 1842, constantly met with large herds as 
far west as the Laramie River, but none were seen on the North Platte above 
the junction of the Laramie until he reached the mouth of the Sweet Water, 
the grasshoppers arid the dry weather having destroyed the grass over the 
Laramie Plains. An explanation of their final disappearance from the Lar- 
amie Plains has been offered by Colonel Richard I. Dodge, which is ‘at least 
probable. He says that according to hunters’ traditions the Laramie Plains 
were visited in the winter of 1844-45 “by a most extraordinary snow- 
* Chicago Inter-Ocean, August 5, 1875. 
} Pacific R. R. Rep. of Expl. and Surveys, Vol. XI, pt. i, p. 59. 
aceite, Weenies 
