178 - THE AMERICAN BISONS. 
This, too, is aside from those killed in “wanton cruelty, miscalled sport, and 
for food for the frontier residents.” 
Another report of about the same date, referring to a locality about»one 
hundred miles southeast of Fort Dodge, says: “Thousands upon thousands 
of buffalo hides are being brought here [Wichita, Kansas] by hunters. In 
places whole acres of ground are covered with their hides, spread out, with 
their fleshy side up, to dry. It is estimated that there are, south of the Ar- 
kansas and west of Wichita, from one to two thousand men shooting buffalo 
for their hides alone.” * Another account} states that during the season of 
1872-73 not less than two hundred thousand buffaloes were killed in Kansas 
merely for their hides.¢ It is also stated that in 1874, on “the south fork of 
the Republican, upon one spot, were to be counted six thousand five hundred 
carcasses of buffaloes, from which the hides only had been stripped. The meat 
was not touched, but left to rot on the plains. At a short distance hundreds 
more of carcasses were discovered, and, in fact, the whole plains were dotted 
with the putrefying remains of buffaloes. It was estimated that there were 
at least two thousand hunters encamped along the plains hunting the buffalo. 
One party of sixteen stated that they had killed twenty-eight hundred dur- 
ing the past summer, the hides only being utilized.” The same account says 
that the extent of the slaughter of the buffalo for their hides was so great 
that the market for them became elutted to such an extent that. whereas a 
few years before they were worth three dollars apiece at the railroad stations, 
skins of bulls would now bring only a dollar, and those of cows and calves 
sixty and forty cents respectively.§ While on the plains in 1871, I had an 
opportunity of witnessing some of the evidences of the wholesale slaughter 
of buffaloes for their hides, as practised at that.time along the line of the 
Kansas Pacific Railway in Northwestern Kansas, where sometimes several 
scores and even hundreds of decaying carcasses, from which nothing but the 
hides had been taken, could be seen from a single point of view. During 
the season of 1871 meat and hides representing over twenty thousand indi- 
viduals were shipped over the Kansas Pacific Railway. 
Mr. W.N. Byers, editor of the “Rocky Mountain News,’ in referring to this 
wholesale slaughter (in the letter previously quoted), characterizes it as 
* Wichita (Kansas) Eagle. 
+ Forest and Stream, Oct. 15, 1373. 
+ General M. C. Meigs in his MS. notes says that one hundred and eighty thousand hides are reported 
to have passed over the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa I’é road alone in a single season. 
§ Baird’s Annual Record of Science and Industry for 1874, p. 304. 
