24 THE WILDERNESS HUNTER, 



with ever increasing rapidity, buffalo robes 

 became of great value. The hunters forth- 

 with turned their attention mainly to the 

 chase of the great clumsy beasts, slaughtering 

 them by hundreds of thousands for their 

 hides ; sometimes killing them on horseback, 

 but more often on foot, by still-hunting, with 

 the heavy long-range Sharp's rifle. Through- 

 out the fifteen years during which this slaugh- 

 ter lasted, a succession of desperate wars was 

 waged with the banded tribes of the Horse 

 Indians. All the time, in unending succes- 

 sion, long trains of big white-topped wagons 

 crept slowly westward across the prairies, 

 marking the steady oncoming of the frontier 

 settlers. 



By the close of 1883 the last buffalo herd 

 was destroyed. The beaver were trapped out 

 of all the streams, or their numbers so thinned 

 that it no longer paid to follow them. The 

 last formidable Indian war had been brought 

 to a successful close. The flood of the in- 

 coming 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 hun- 

 ters, the men who spent all their days in the 

 lonely wilds, and who killed game as their 

 sole means of livelihood. Great stretches of 

 wilderness still remain in the Rocky Moun- 

 tains, 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 



