20 The Wilderness Hunter 



United States troops in their campaigns against the 

 tribes with which they happened to be at war. 



Soon after the Civil War the life of these hunters, 

 taken as a class, entered on its final stage. The 

 Pacific Coast was already fairly well settled, and 

 there were few mining camps in the Rockies; but 

 most of this Rocky Mountain region, and the 

 entire stretch of plains country proper, the vast belt 

 of level or rolling grass land lying between the Rio 

 Grande and the Saskatchewan, still remained pri- 

 meval wilderness, inhabited only by roving hunters 

 and formidable tribes of Indian nomads, and by the 

 huge herds of game on which they preyed. Beaver 

 swarmed in the streams and yielded a rich harvest 

 to the trapper ; but trapping was no longer the main- 

 stay of the adventurous plainsmen. Foremost 

 among the beasts of the chase, on account of 

 its numbers, its size, and its economic importance, 

 was the bison or American buffalo; its innumerable 

 multitudes darkened the limitless prairies. As the 

 transcontinental railroads were pushed toward com- 

 pletion, and the tide of settlement rolled onward 

 with ever-increasing rapidity, buffalo robes became 

 of great value. The hunters forthwith turned their 

 attention mainly to the chase of the great clumsy 

 beasts, slaughtering them by hundreds of thousands 

 for their hides; sometimes killing them on horse- 

 back, but more often on foot, by still-hunting, with 

 the heavy long range Sharp's rifle. Throughout the 



