8o GREAT BATTUES OF BUFFALO. 



Colonel Dodge gives full details about the wicked 

 massacres, of which some account has already been 

 given in these pages. * We shall therefore merely 

 mention that what was called " the robe-crop " of 

 the years 1872 73 and 74, is stated by Colonel Dodge 

 to have amounted to the " almost incredible number 

 of nearly 4^ millions, killed in the short space of three 

 years." f No account is taken in this, of the immense 

 numbers killed by whites and Indians, whose skins 

 did not come into the market ; nor of the British trade 

 returns of skins from the Hudson Bay Territory and 

 thus in a few years the buffalo, the finest representative 

 of the large game of America, perished, and as a wild 

 animal is now extinct. 



The American elk, or wapiti (Cermis Strongy- 

 locerus] is the most magnificent of the wild faunae of 

 North America, which still survives the ravages of the 

 professional skin-hunter. We believe it to be abso- 

 lutely the finest animal of the deer tribe in existence. 

 Colonel Dodge mentions one noble stag, which is said 

 to have tt weighed, as it fell, 800 pounds ; whose antlers 

 attached only to the frontal bone, weighed of them- 

 selves 6 1 pounds." 



This splendid species of big game animals; used 

 however rarely to assemble in large numbers, though 

 frequently seen in small herds. In 1847 however, 

 Captain Palliser, a British officer, and a personal ac- 

 quaintance of our own early days mentions that 



" Near the mouth of the Yellowstone, we came in sight 



* See chapter viii., Vol. ii. The Region of the Great Plains. 

 f The Hunting Grounds of the Great West, by Richard Irving 

 Dodge, Lt.-Col. U.S.A., '1877, p. 143. 

 Ibid., p. 155. 



