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THE AMERICAN BISONS. 115 
only in small numbers; while their eastern limit does not appear to extend 
beyond the longitude of Carlton House, or to the eastward of the 106th 
meridian. They have thus, within the last thirty years, become extermi- 
nated over more than half of the more fertile portion of the region north of 
the United States formerly occupied by them, including the whole of the 
vast prairie region drained by the Assinniboine and Qu’appelle Rivers, and 
are now confined principally to the arid plains between the two forks of the 
Saskatchewan, where, as Professor Dawson believes, they cannot survive for 
many years longer. Their numbers and the extent of their range north of 
the North Saskatchewan I have at present no means of determining, but it 
seems probable that their range has here also become greatly restricted since 
the time of Richardson and Franklin’s visits to this region. © 
GENERAL REMARKS RESPECTING THE RAPID DIMINUTION OF THE BurFALo, 
AND ITS EVIDENT Destiny oF spEEDY ToTaL ExtTerMINATION. 
Tt thus appears that the buffalo has become so reduced in numbers, and so 
circumscribed in its range, that, instead of roaming over nearly half of the 
continent, as formerly, it is restricted to two small widely separated areas, 
the southern of which embraces portions of Texas, Colorado, and Kansas, 
scarcely exceeding in area the smaller of these States, while the northern em- 
braces only the larger portion of the Territory of Montana and an adjoining 
area to the northward of nearly equal extent. Even as late as the beginning 
of the present century the buffalo occupied the whole of the region between 
the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, and extended from the Rio Grande 
on the south to Great Slave Lake on the north, and also over a considerable 
area west of the Rocky Mountains, or through thirty-five degrees of latitude 
and about twenty degrees of longitude. This immense habitat of almost a 
third of the continent has been reduced in three fourths of a century to a 
region not larger in the aggregate than the present Territories of Dakota 
and Montana. Over a large part of the former vast region they inhabited 
they were as numerous as they now are in Western Kansas or Northern 
Texas, and ranged at different seasons over the whole. Particular portions 
of this area have ever formed their favorite places of resort, where they were 
sure to be found at almost any season of the year. There is, for instance, 
abundant historie evidence that over the plains of Kansas, especially near 
the forks of the Platte, along the Republican, the Pawnee, the Canadian, and 
