280 BIG GAME OF NORTH AMERICA. 



siistaiu him amid the fatigues of his cold and harassing 

 march. 



The Leatherstockings of the American frontier, in their 

 far westward wanderings; the Mormon enthusiast, in his 

 search for the latter-day Zion yet to be established on the 

 shore of the lonely inland sea, and the swarms of gold- 

 hunters hurrying to take j^ossession of the new-found 

 El Dorado of the Pacific, all hailed with delight the first 

 glimpse of the shaggy herds; while the band of explorei-s 

 under Fremont, gaining at length the freedom and plenty 

 of the Buffalo-range, when Carson had killed for them a 

 Buffalo cow the fat of which was two inches thick, made a 

 great feast, and until long into the night held high carni- 

 val in honor of reaching the land of plenty, where gaunt 

 hunger no longer crowded for a front seat by the hunter' s 

 camjo-fire. 



Nowhere else on the earth had so large a game animal 

 been distributed in such vast numbers over the face of a 

 continent. In the language of an old hunter, the plains 

 were "one vast robe!" And surely never, in all the rec- 

 ords of our planet, was chronicled another such a story of 

 multitudinous slaughter, of any part of the brute creation, 

 as is contained in that of the extermination of the Amer- 

 ican Buffalo. They have vanished from the face of advanc- 

 ing civilization as mist-clouds vanish before the rising sun. 

 A little handful of their number, wisely protected by the 

 fostering care of the United States Government, yet find an 

 insecure retreat among the mountain fastnesses of the Yel- 

 lowstone National Park; yet the mighty herds which but 

 a few short years ago swarmed innumerable upon the great 

 plains are to-day extinct. Their bleaching bones have long 

 since been gathered for fertilizers, and the furious rain- 

 storms of the i)lains are fast obliterating all traces of their 

 old wallows. 



Yet the American Bison was a hardy animal, and, until 

 the coming of the European, was more than a match for 

 Wolves, Bears, and for the myriads of Indians who fed 

 ui^on him. The color of the Buffalo was a dark brown, verg- 



