26 THE WILDERNESS HUNTER. 



at their lonely little posts, facing unending 

 toil and danger with quiet endurance, sur- 

 rounded 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 important 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 

 Chihuahua. 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 enor- 

 mous, of incredible magnitude ; 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 re- 

 markable and melancholy rapidity before the 

 inroads of the white hunters, and the steady 

 march of the oncoming settlers. Now they 

 are on the point of extinction. Two or three 

 hundred are left in that great national game 



