The Slaughter of Big Game, &c. 29 



of laws protecting human life. But the frontiersman, as one knew 

 him in those days, was not an ordinary personage. 



In his fierce and utterly selfish attack upon Nature, he waged 

 a merciless war the like of which no country has ever seen, for 

 in days of older conquests the scientific means of wreaking destruc- 

 tion in such a wholesale manner were lacking. The finely-sighted 

 Sharp breechloader with which he rolled over in one "stand'' 

 as many as forty or fifty bison in as many minutes, shooting them 

 purposely rather below the heart so that they should not drop in 

 their tracks and thus scare the herd, is as much an invention of 

 our time as is the giant powder (dynamite) cartridge, with which 

 he kills by one explosion literally hundreds of salmon and trout 

 in a single deep pool. A vastly increased network of railways 

 assists him in reaching hunting grounds, which in the olden days 

 would have been far too remote for remunerative "skin hunting," 

 or the less inexcusable market hunting, for, in the latter case at 

 least, part of the venison is consumed by human beings. Even the 

 telegraph wire that reported to him the fluctuations of the fur and 

 hide market was pressed into service, for in the early eighties, 

 when the Northern Pacific was being built through Dacota and 

 Montana, the movements of the " Northern herd," which was 

 practically the last big band of bison in existence, was known from 

 day to day to the gang of market hunters along the railway, who 

 were supplying the contractors with game with which to feed 

 cheaply the four thousand navvies in their employ. When this 

 was happening the cattle ranch business was enjoying its boom, 

 and the Press of the West, as well as individuals, agreed that the 

 bison, if not also the wapiti, doomed anyhow to destruction, could 

 not be slaughtered too quickly, for were not their thousands 

 wasting the bunch grass upon which the more valuable domestic 

 kine, driven in vast herds from distant Texas, were to fatten. As 

 results too late proved, a large portion succumbed to the 

 climate, but this discovery came too late ; the work of annihilation 

 had been accomplished. The same merciless war against Nature 

 was waged by the miner and the prospector : the one, by depositing 



