The American Wilderness 23 



endurance, surrounded by the desolation of vast 

 solitudes, and menaced by the most merciless of 

 foes. Hunting was followed not only as a sport, 

 but also as the only means of keeping the posts 

 and the expeditionary trains in meat. Many of the 

 officers became equally proficient as marksmen and 

 hunters. The three most famous Indian fighters 

 since the Civil War, Generals Custer, Miles, and 

 Crook, were all keen and successful followers of 

 the chase. 



Of American big game the bison, almost always 

 known as the buffalo, was the largest and most im- 

 portant to man. When the first white settlers landed 

 in Virginia the bison ranged east of the Alleghanies 

 almost to the sea-coast, westward to the dry deserts 

 lying beyond the Rocky Mountains, northward 

 to the Great Slave Lake and southward to Chihua- 

 hua. It was a beast of the forests and mountains, 

 in the Alleghanies no less than in the Rockies; 

 but its true home was on the prairies and the 

 high plains. Across these it roamed, hither and 

 thither, in herds of enormous, of incredible magni- 

 tude; herds so large that they covered the waving 

 grass land for hundreds of square leagues, and 

 when on the march occupied days and days in 

 passing a given point. But the seething myriads of 

 shaggy-maned wild cattle vanished with remarkable 

 and melancholy rapidity before the inroads of the 

 white hunters, and the steady march of the oncom- 



