THE AMERICAN BISONS. 151 



" The trading-posts in the valley of the Arkansas possess a similar history. 

 The earliest, built about 1826, was some twenty miles from the mountains. 

 Others succeeded, one after another, until New Fort Bent, — afterward Fort 

 Bent, now Fort Lyon, — about eighty miles from the mountains, closed the 

 history of these early trading outposts. They were placed so as to be most 

 convenient to the camps of the hunters, to enable the traders to supply the 

 latter with goods and to buy their skins. 



" The present range of the buffalo in Colorado," he says, "is bounded sub- 

 stantially on the west by a line about one hundred miles east of the foot of 

 the mountains, and parallel therewith. The herds are thin on the edge, 

 thickening to the eastward. Small bands occasionally wander ten or twenty 

 miles further west, but the line is quite distinctly marked. In the fall they 

 move gradually but slowly southward, and in late winter and spring return 

 in the same way north ; but the eastern edge of Colorado is really occupied 

 all the winter by herds that come from and return to the north. In summer 

 very few remain upon the Colorado range. I have no idea of the relative 

 movement of individual herds north and south during the year, but there 

 seems to be a regular ebb and floiv once a year. There has been no marked 

 change in the limit of the range westward in the last five years, but the 

 columns have been thinned fearfully, — certainly one half." 



Influence of the Railroads upon the Decrease of the Buffalo. — Three railroads 

 now enter or pass near the range of the Southern Herd. Their influence, 

 though immense in respect to its decrease, seems not to have very greatly 

 affected the extent of its range. The railroads, of course, primarily affect 

 the buffalo by affording to the hunters easy access to its haunts, and by 

 placing the hunters in communication with ready markets for the products 

 of the chase. They also open up the country they traverse to permanent 

 settlement, thus rendering the extirpation of the buffalo from the coun- 

 try bordering these avenues of travel not only speedy but permanent. 

 Although the buffalo has no little fear of these iron highways and their 

 thundering trains, this alone would not, for a long time at least, seriously 

 influence its range ; and the herds have not, except through the thinning 

 of their ranks by the hunters who make these roads the bases of their 

 operations, materially changed their range since the opening of the Union 

 Pacific Railroad in 1869. The buffaloes still range northward to this road 

 between Fort Kearney and the Forks of the Platte, but they appear to have 

 of late rarely passed north of it. At this point the buffalo range is still 



