196 THE AMERICAN BISONS. 
white hunters have turned their attention to their preservation. Thus in 
the above-given returns of the shipment of buffalo products over the 
Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad oceurs the item of eighteen thou- 
sand four hundred and eighty-nine robes in the statement for the year 1874. 
To the Indians of the Plains the buffalo has not only ever been an unfail- 
ing source of food,— whose flesh, Catlin states,* they prefer to that of the 
antelope, deer, or elk, — but has also furnished them, to a great extent, with 
shelter and clothing; the heavier, coarser skins of the bulls being used as 
lodge-coverings, and those of the cows for beds and clothing. 
According to the Jesuit missionaries, the women of the Illinois Indians 
used to employ the hair of the buffalo in making bands, belts, and sacks; 
and these and other tribes used also to make shields of the hides, and 
spoons, ladles, ete., from the horns and bones. Gomara, in speaking of the 
Indians of the Plains, says, “and of their hides they make many things, as 
houses, shooes, apparell, and ropes: of their bones they make bodkins: of 
their simewes and haire, thread: of their dung, fire: and of their calves- 
skinnes, budgets, wherein they drawe and keepe water. To bee short, they 
make so many things of them as they have need of, or as many as suffice 
them in the use of this life.” ¢ 
During the last few years many skins of buffaloes have been taken by the 
white hunters for the purpose of preparing leather from them. At the low- 
est estimate more than a million buffaloes have been sacrificed for this pur- 
pose in Kansas alone during the last five years. I say sacrificed in this con- 
nection advisedly, because the amount realized by the hunters from the sale 
of these hides scarcely brings them a return equal to the wages of an ordi- 
nary laborer in other pursuits. The “buffalo-skinners,” as they are some- 
times derisively termed, practise their ignoble calling mainly during the 
warmer months, when the weather will not permit of the shipment of meat 
to the Eastern markets, and seem to follow the business more from a love 
of the wild, semi-barbarous, out-door life of the plains-hunter than for any 
anticipated profit. 
Generally in hunting buffaloes for their hides only the old bulls are killed, 
which are of little account in a pecuniary point of view for any other pur- 
pose, but some hunters are so reckless of even their own interest as to take 
any animal that comes in their way. Aside from the diminution in the 
* North American Indians, Vol. I, p. 24. 
+ Translation in Hakluyt’s Voyages, Vol. III, p. 456. 
