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176 



THE AMEEICA¥ BISONS. 



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other tributaries of the Arkansas^ they were as mimerous when these parts 

 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. ^ 



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 

 driven in by the "^'encroachments of civilization" and concentrated upon a 

 smaller area? Not a 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- 

 ino" ; that the extermination of the wolves and the Indians more than com- 



pensates for the slaughter made by the professional hunters and by the 

 niunerous 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 wiUing to admit that, Ut the present rate of destruction, the 



alo 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 Eiver Plateau, over the head-waters of the Colorado and 

 Columbia Rivers, over the plains of the Yellowstone, and especially over the 



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vast plains of the Red River of the North and the Grand Cotcau de Mis- 

 souri; throughout all of which region they have been gradually extermi- 

 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, lie says : " It is a question whether the 

 buffalo west of the Mississippi have diminished or increased in numbers to this time," and quotes General 

 Sheridan's opinion in confirmation of this view. He says : " General Sheridan, the year after the Grand 

 Duke of Eussia hunted with him on the Kansas Pacific, told me that he thought there were probably more 

 buffalo that year than there liad ever been before. He had travelled through seventy miles of buffalo. He 

 thought the killing by strychnine of wolves for the hides had saved many buffiilo-calves, and the hostilities 

 With Indians had prevented them from hunting as freely as usual for some years-" 



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