~ 176 THE AMERICAN BISONS. 
other tributaries of the Arkansas, they were as numerous when these parts 
i were first visited by the early explorers as they have ever been since, and 
that subsequent travellers have always found them in immense numbers at 
all these points, the plains there literally swarming with them. 
q In this connection two questions naturally arise, especially in the minds 
of those not fully conversant with the subject: Have the buffalo really 
' ‘decreased to the extent these statements imply? or have they simply been 
i driven in by the “encroachments of civilization” and concentrated upon a 
smaller area? Nota few otherwise intelligent persons, on visiting Western 
Kansas or Northern Texas and ‘seeing the herds which there recently liter- 
ally blackened the plains, at once adopt the latter hypothesis, and proclaim 
| that this vast amount of talk about the decrease of the buffalo is all “non- 
( -sense”; that they are just as numerous as ever, and are not at all decreas- 
q ing; that the extermination of the wolves and the Indians more than com- 
pensates for the slaughter made by the professional hunters and by the 
numerous sporting parties from the East.* The hunters often adopt the 
same theory, from the most evident reason of self-interest, fearing that some 
; restrictions, which will act unfavorably upon their business, may be placed 
upon the wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter now carried on; yet the 
more candid are willing to admit that, at the present rate of destruction, the 
i buffalo can last but a few years longer. That such is the truth is evident on 
a moment’s reflection, when one has a full knowledge of the facts. Less 
than fifty years ago the buffaloes swarmed in as great— or certainly in very 
nearly as great —numbers as at the present time, not only over the regions 
they now frequent, but at the same time over the Laramie Plains, over much 
of the Green River Plateau, over the head-waters of the Colorado and 
Columbia Rivers, over the plains of the Yellowstone, and especially over the 
vast plains of the Red River of the North and the Grand Coteau de Mis- 
souri; throughout all of which region they have been gradually extermt- 
. nated, leaving nothing to mark their former presence but their rapidly crum- 
bling skeletal remains and their well-worn trails. Over much of this region 
* In General Meigs’s MS. notes on the buffalo, already quoted, he says: “It is a question whether the 
buffalo west of the Mississippi have diminished or increased in numbers to this time,” and quotes General : 
7 Sheridan’s opinion in confirmation of this view. He says: “General Sheridan, the year after the Grand | 
Duke of Russia hunted with him on the Kansas Pacific, told me that he thought there were probably more 
buffalo that year than there had ever been before. THe had travelled through seventy miles of buffalo. He i 
thought the killing by strychnine of wolves for the hides had saved many buffalo-calves, and the hostilities 
with Indians had prevented them from hunting as freely as usual for some years.” A 
