Bear and the Bison. 169 



The chase of the bison, I must confess, when once the novelty 

 had worn off, had but little attraction for me. When old De Bry, 

 300 years ago, adorned the early American explorers' books with 

 his quaint portraits of the Vacca indica, as he called his grotesque 

 dachshund-like bison with elephantine legs and with an eagle 

 perched on its hump, it was considered a semi-domestic species of 

 cattle."* This impression it also left upon my mind, and I did not 

 add half a dozen victims to the appalling slaughter committed all 

 over the West. Of this wholesale destruction many a man spoke 

 with proud satisfaction, though not all the stories of wholesale 

 slaughter are as well authenticated as Buffalo Bill's notorious bag 

 of 5000 in less than eighteen months when he hunted for the 

 Kansas Pacific Railway Construction Company. 



There were, however, degrees in the wantonness of slaughter. 

 It has always seemed to me that the worst of all were the tourists 

 and pistol-flourishing cowboys, who emptied their Winchesters or 

 Colts at a retreating herd " for the fun of the thing," without even 

 taking the trouble to go a step out of their way to put wounded 

 beasts out of their misery. 



What vast quantities still existed a quarter of a century ago 

 hardly needs telling. Colonel Henry Inman, late Assistant 

 Quartermaster of the U.S. Army, tells us in his interesting "The 

 Old Santa Fe Trail," that in Kansas alone, between 1868 1881, 

 2,5oo,ooodol. were paid out for buffalo bones gathered on the 

 plains and used by the carbon companies. The price paid averaged 

 8dol. per ton of bones, so that according to his calculation the 

 above sum represented the skeletons of over 31,000,000 buffalo. 

 As Colonel Inman is particular in stating that he carefully gathered 

 his figures from the railway companies who transported the bones, 



* In a work published 1613 it is stated that the adventurers in Virginia 

 discovered a " slow kind of cattell as bigge as kine with goode mcate." In the 

 " New English Canaan," 1637, are described " greate heards of well growne 

 cones " that live about Lake Champlain. Cortez is supposed to have been the 

 first European who saw a bison (in 1521), when he was shown a specimen in a 

 kind of menagerie in Mexico. Coronado, twenty years later, was the first to see 

 the vast herds. 



