THE AMERICAN BISONS. 179 
“simply inhuman and outrageous.” He adds: “The slaughter-ground is 
mainly in Kansas, reaching only into the edge of Colorado. Practised hunt- 
ers follow the herds day after day, and shoot them down by scores. Sixty, 
seventy, eighty or more a day is no unusual number. A good shooter will 
keep five or six ‘skinners’ at work. I heard a young man say within a week 
past that during the winter of 1873-74 he killed over three thousand buf- 
faloes, —in one day eighty-five, in another sixty-four,” ete. 
Another writer thus refers to the same subject: “The butchery still [sum- 
mer of 1875] goes on. Comparatively few buffalo are now killed, for there 
are comparatively few to kill. I was, in October of 1874, on a short trip to 
the buffalo region south of Sidney Barracks. A few buffalo were encountered, 
but there seemed to be more hunters than buffaloes. The country south of 
the South Platte is without water for many miles, and the buffaloes must 
satisfy their thirst at the river. The south bank was lined with hunters. 
Every approach of the buffaloes to water was met by rifle bullets, and one or 
more bit the dust. Care was taken not to permit the others to drink, for 
then they would not return. Tortured with thirst, the poor brutes approach 
again and again, always to be met by bullets, always to lose some of their 
number. But for the favoring protection of night the race would before 
now have been exterminated. In places favorable to such action, as the 
south bank of the Platte, a herd of buffalo has, by shooting at it by day and 
by lighting fires and firing guns at night, been kept from water for four 
days, or until it has been entirely destroyed. In many places the valley 
was offensive from the stench of putrefying carcasses. At the present time 
the southern buffalo can hardly be said to have a range. The term expresses 
a voluntary act, while the unfortunate animals have no volition left. They 
are driven from one water-hole to meet death at another. No sooner do 
they stop to feed than the sharp crack of a rifle warns them to change posi- 
.tion. Every drink of water, every mouthful of grass, is at the expense of 
life, and the miserable animals, continually harassed, are driven into locali- 
ties far from their natural haunts, — anywhere to avoid the unceasing pur- 
suit. A few, probably some thousands, still linger about their beloved pas- 
tures in the Republican country. A few still hide in the deep caiions of the 
Cimarron country, but the mass of southern buffalo now living are to be 
found far away from the dreaded hunter, on a belt of country extending 
southwest across the upper tributaries of the Canadian, across the northern 
end of the Staked Plain to the Pecos River. The difficulty of getting the 
