12 The Wilderness Hunter. 



or their numbers so thinned that it no longer paid to fol- 

 low them. The last formidable Indian war had been 

 brought to a successful close. The flood of the incoming 

 whites had risen over the land ; tongues of settlement 

 reached from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, and 

 from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. The frontier 

 had come to an end ; it had vanished. With it vanished 

 also the old race of wilderness hunters, the men who spent 

 all their days in the lonely wilds, and who killed game as 

 their sole means of livelihood. Great stretches of wilder- 

 ness still remain in the Rocky Mountains, and here and 

 there in the plains country, exactly as much smaller tracts 

 of wild land are to be found in the Alleghanies and 

 northern New York and New England ; and on these 

 tracts occasional hunters and trappers still linger ; but as 

 a distinctive class, with a peculiar and important position 

 in American life, they no longer exist. 



There were other men beside the professional hunters, 

 who lived on the borders of the wilderness, and followed 

 hunting, not only as a pastime, but also as yielding an 

 important portion of their subsistence. The frontier 

 farmers were all hunters. In the eastern backwoods, and 

 in certain places in the west, as in Oregon, these adven- 

 turous tillers of the soil were the pioneers among the 

 actual settlers ; in the Rockies their places were taken by 

 the miners, and on the great plains by the ranchmen and 

 cowboys, the men who lived in the saddle, guarding their 

 branded herds of horses and horned stock. Almost all 

 of the miners and cowboys were obliged on occasions to 

 turn hunters. 



