68 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 



is the sheerest nonsense. From Hearne, two hundred 

 years ago, to Mr. Tyrrel or Mr. Whitney in the Barren 

 Lands in 1894- 96, no mention is ever made of a cari 

 bou herd exceeding ten thousand. Few herds of one 

 thousand have ever been seen. 



What are the facts regarding the buffalo? 



In the thirties, when the American Fur Company 

 was in the heyday of its power, there were sent from St. 

 Louis alone in a single year one hundred thousand 

 robes. The company bought only the perfect robes. 

 The hunter usually kept an ample supply for his own 

 needs; so that for every robe bought by the company, 

 three times as many were taken from the plains. St. 

 Louis was only one port of shipment. Equal quanti 

 ties of robes were being sent from Mackinaw, Detroit, 

 Montreal, and Hudson Bay. A million would not cover 

 the number of robes sent east each year in the thirties 

 and forties. In 1868 Inman, Sheridan, and Ouster 

 rode continuously for three days through one herd in 

 the Arkansas region. In 1869 trains on the Kansas 

 Pacific were held from nine in the morning till six at 

 night to permit the passage of one herd across the 

 tracks. Army officers related that in 1862 a herd moved 

 north from the Arkansas to the Yellowstone that cov 

 ered an area of seventy by thirty miles. Catlin and 

 Inman and army men and employees of the fur compa 

 nies considered a drove of one hundred thousand buffalo 

 a common sight along the line of the Santa Fe trail. 

 Inman computes that from St. Louis alone the bones 

 of thirty-one million buffalo were shipped between 

 1868 and 1881. Northward the testimony is the same. 

 John MacDonell, a partner of the North-West Com 

 pany, tells how at the beginning of the last century a 



