

'«^^4-r>^ V ^-l-^^ .- \-»— j-n rt yi\-^.-K_*_- y-*^ ^- --*■^^ 



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178 



THE AMERICAN' EISONS, 



^j miscs 



called sport, and 



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ThiS; too^ is aside from those killed in ^^ wanton cruel tj 

 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 or 

 for their hides alone."* Another accountf states that during the season of 

 1872-73 not less than f/tvo hundred thousand bufFaloes were killed in Kansas 

 merely for their hides. J It is also stated that in 1874, on "the south fork of 



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the Eepublican, upon one spot, Avere to be counted six thousand five hundred 



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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 buffiilo. 

 One party of sixteen stated that they had killed twenty-eight hundred dur- 

 ing the past summer, the hides only 

 that the extent of the slaughter of 



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being utilized." The same account says 

 e buffalo for their hides was so great 

 that the market for them became glutted 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. § AVhile 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 





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* Wichita (Kansas) Eagle. 

 f Forest and Stream^ Oct. 15, 18 73. 



X 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 Fe road alone in a single season. 

 § Baird's Annual Record o£ Science and Industry for 1874, p. 304. 



