378 BIG GAME SHOOTING 
The price of all the blood shed by the skin-hunters may 
be summed up briefly as 2 dollars 75 cents each for ‘leather 
hides ’—i.e. hides of old bulls all the year round and young 
beasts during the summer season—and 3°50 cents for ‘robe 
hides.’ 
My informant told me that if it would pay him he thought 
_ that he could still find buffalo on the northern tributaries of 
the Saskatchewan, east of the Rockies, as some friends of his, 
trapping ‘away back’ in 1886, had seen plenty of them, though 
the difficulty of bringing the robes out had prevented their — 
shooting any. 3 
The last buffalo killed by a white man to my own certain : 
. knowledge was shot by Mr. Warburton Pike far away to the 
North, near the Great Slave Lake, when out after musk ox.! 
Some idea of the number of the buffaloes in early days ~ 
may be gathered from the well-attested fact that the pioneer 
settlers often drove through the herds for days and days with 
buffalo in sight all round them all day long, as well as from the 
statistics collected by Colonel Dodge, in his ‘Plains of the 
Great West.’ That author states that, from information fur- — 
nished to him by the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway @ 
Company, he concludes that not less than a million and a half 
were killed in the States from 1872 to 1874. Ee 
Colonel Dodge mentions a mountain buffalo as a variety of 4 
the common buffalo, and Mr. J. E. Harting, in some remarks 
published originally in the ‘ Field,’ alludes to a beast of the — 
same class, which he calls ‘ Zacateca.’ 
The Zacatecas, of which specimens were exhibited at the — 
American Exhibition of 1887, inhabit the mountainous regions § 
of Northern Mexico ; they are smaller than the buffalo, are q 
hornless, and have tails more like the tails of yaks than like — 
those of the common buffalo, who by the way is, properly aq 
speaking, a bison (Bos americanus). I have taken the liberty 4 
of calling him a buffalo because i in his native haunts he Rs - 
avenge aT 
1 Cf. W. Pike’s Barren Grounds of Northern Canada, 
