THE AMERICAN BISONS. 189 
fifty animals, making all due allowance for waste, would have been ample 
for the amount of pemmican and dried meat saved from them. The rest, he 
says, was wasted; “and this,” he adds, “is only a fair example of the manner 
in which the plain business is carried on under the present system. Scarcely 
one third in number of the animals killed are turned to account.” * 
Dr. Hayden, in 1861, says that as near as he could determine, about one 
hundred thousand robes were then annually made by the Indians of the 
Upper Missouri country.t. Dr. Hayden also states that at this period the 
bulls outnumbered the cows ten to one; which personal experience led 
me to think was a fair estimate of the proportion of the sexes in 1871 on 
the plains of Kansas. 
Through the kindness of EH. T. Bowen, Esq., General Superintendent of the 
Kansas Pacific Railway, I have obtained a statement of the “estimated ship- 
ments of buffalo products over the Kansas Pacific Railway during the year 
1871.” This estimate, carefully prepared by the Auditor of the Company, 
is as follows: Dry hides, three hundred and forty-one thousand, one hundred 
and fifty-one (341,151) pounds, estimated at twenty-five pounds per hide, 
and thus representing thirteen thousand six hundred and forty-six (13,646) 
buffaloes; eleven hundred and sixty-one thousand four hundred and nine- 
teen (1,161,419) pounds of meat, estimated at two hundred pounds per sad- 
dle, and thus representing five thousand eight hundred and seven (5,807) 
buffaloes. No return is here made of the large amount of salted and cured 
meat also sent to Eastern markets. The somewhat less than six thousand 
“saddles” represented by the above statement must, it appears to me, be far 
below the actual number, as one hunter informed me that he had himself 
alone killed over three thousand buffaloes a year for several years, and I 
met other persons who claimed to have each killed an equal number. 
These statistics would alone indicate a slaughter of at least twenty thousand 
buffaloes along the line of the Kansas Pacific Railway during the year 1871, 
to which must be added other thousands killed by travellers and amateur 
hunters, and by the officers and soldiers stationed at the different military 
posts in the same region. 
I have been unable to obtain statistics of the shipment of buffalo products 
over this road since 1871, as such information, writes the present Superin- 
tendent of the road, is not in available shape, and to obtain it would 
* Ross (Alexander), The Red River Settlement; its Rise, Progress, and Present State, pp. 242-265. 
t Trans. Am. Phil. Soc., New Series, Vol. XII, p. 151. 
