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THE AMEPJCA^ BISONS 



189 



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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."* 



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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.! Dr. Hayden also states that at this period the 

 bulls outnumbered the cows ten to one; which personal experience led 



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me to think was a fair estimate of the proportion of the sexes in 1871 on 

 the plains of Kansas. 



Through the kindness of E. 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 Companj?-, 

 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, 



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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- 

 die, 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 mai^kets. The somewhat less than six thousand 



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" 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 



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* Ross (Alexander), The Ked River Settlement; its Rise, Progress, and Present State, pp. 242-265. 

 t Trans. Am. PMl. Soc., New Series, Vol. XTI, p. 151. ' , . , 



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