THE EXTERMINATION OF THE AMERICAN BISON. 435 



seal of Alaska, of which about 100,000 are killed annually for their 

 skins, yield an auuual revenue to the Government of $100,000, and add 

 $000,000 more to the actual wealth of the United States. It pays to 

 protect those seals, and we mean to protect them against all comers 

 who seek their unrestricted slaughter, no matter whether the poachers 

 be American, English, Russian, or Canadian. It would be folly to do 

 otherwise, and if those who would exterminate the far seal by shooting 

 them in the water will not desist for the telling, then they must by 

 the compelling. 



The fur seal is a good investment for the United States, and their 

 number is not diminishing. As the buffalo herds existed in 1870, 

 500,000 head of bulls, young and old, could have been killed every year 

 for a score of years without sensibly diminishing the size of the herds. 

 At a low estimate these could easily have been made to yield various 

 products worth $5 each, as follows : Robe, $2.50 ; tongue, 25 cents ; meat 

 of hind-quarters, $2; bones, horns, and hoofs, 25 cents; total, $5. 

 And the amount annually added to the wealth of the United States 

 would have been $2,500,000. 



On all the robes taken for the market, say, 200,000, the Government 

 could have collected a tax of 50 cents each, which would have yielded 

 a sum doubly sufficient to have maintained a force of mounted police 

 fully competent to enforce the laws regulating the slaughter. Had a 

 contract for the protection of the buffalo been offered at $50,000 per 

 annum, ay, or even half that sum, an army of competent men would 

 have competed for it every year, and it could have been carried out 

 to the letter. But, as yet, the American people have not learned to 

 spend money for the protection of valuable game ; and by the time they 

 do learn it, there will be no game to protect. 



Even despite the enormous waste of raw material that ensued in the 

 utilization of the buffalo product, the total cash value of all the material 

 derived from this source, if it could only be reckoned up, would certainly 

 amount to many millions of dollars — perhaps twenty millions, all told. 

 This estimate may, to some, seem high, but when we stop to consider 

 that in eight years, from 1876 to 1884, a single firm, that of Messrs. J. & 

 A. Boskowitz, 105 Greene street, New York, paid out the enormous 

 sum of $923,070 (nearly one million) for robes and hides, and that in a 

 single year (1882) another firm, that of Joseph Ullman, 165 Mercer 

 street, New York, paid out $216,250 for robes and hides, it may not 

 seem so incredible. 



Had there been a deliberate plan for the suppression of all statistics 

 relating to the slaughter of buffalo in the United States, and what it 

 yielded, the result could not have been more complete barrenness than 

 exists to-day in regard to this subject. There is only one railway com- 

 pany which kept its books in such a manner as to show the kind and 

 quantity of its business at that time. Excepting this, nothing is known 

 definitely. 



