DEPLETION OF WILD LIFE 305 



of our game, a new evaluation of the wild life as a 

 resource of vast economic importance, the enactment 

 of legislation to save the remnant, the provision of 

 refuges for harboring it these successive phases of 

 our big-game history followed one another so rapid- 

 ly and in a period so recent and so short as to fall 

 within the term of a life-time. As an explorer in 

 the West in the early seventies, a man hunting in the 

 game regions for successive seasons, and as one who 

 has been personally interested and actively engaged 

 in game protection, I myself have witnessed the 

 whole course of these changing conditions." 



The building of the Union Pacific and Kansas 

 Railroads which began in 1872 gave a tremendous 

 impetus to wild life destruction in the West. Hired 

 hunters supplied construction camps with meat, and 

 when a bill to protect western game, probably the 

 very first, was entered in Congress, it was opposed 

 by army officers of high rank who declared that buf- 

 falo ought to be destroyed because when they had 

 become exterminated the Indians then at war with 

 the United States would be without means of subsis- 

 tence and would be obliged to come into the agencies 

 for food and so would be under control of the troops. 



The destruction of the buffalo was practically 

 completed in 1883. "Most of us then," continues 

 Grinnell, "deemed it a mercenary and wanton 

 butchery. We now know that it was a necessary 

 part of the development of the country. The buffalo 

 having been destroyed, their place was taken by 



