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 west- 

 ern 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 pres- 

 ent century they had been driven beyond the 

 Mississippi ; and for the next eighty years they 

 formed one of the most distinctive and char- 

 acteristic features of existence on the great 

 plains. Their numbers were countless in- 

 credible. In vast herds of hundreds of thou- 

 sands of individuals, they roamed from the 

 Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande and west- 

 ward to the Rocky Mountains. They fur- 

 nished all the means of livelihood to the tribes 

 of Horse Indians, and to the curious popu- 



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