HUNTING THE GRISLY. 



CHAPTER I. 



THE BISON OR AMERICAN BUFFALO. 



WHEN we became a nation, in 1776, the 

 buffaloes, the first animals to vanish 

 when the wilderness is settled, roved to the 

 crests of the mountains which mark the 

 western boundaries of Pennsylvania, Virginia, 

 and the Carolinas. They were plentiful in 

 what are now the States of Ohio, Kentucky, 

 and Tennessee. But by the beginning of the 

 present century they had been driven beyond 

 the Mississippi ; and for the next eighty years 

 they formed one of the most distinctive and 

 characteristic features of existence on the 

 great plains. Their numbers were countless 

 incredible. In vast herds of hundreds of 

 thousands of individuals, they roamed from 

 the Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande and 

 westward to the Rocky Mountains. They 

 furnished all the means of livelihood to the 

 tribes of Horse Indians, and to the curious 



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