THE EXTERMINATION OF THE AMERICAN BISON. 487 



succeeding generations to regard us as being possessed of the leading 

 characteristics of the savage and the beast of prey — cruelty and greed. 

 We will be likened to the blood-thirsty tiger of the Indian jungle, who 

 slaughters a dozen bullocks at once when he knows he can eat only one. 



In one respect, at least, the white men who engaged in the systematic 

 slaughter of the bison were savages just as much as the Piegan Indians, 

 who would drive a whole herd over a precipice to secure a week's rations 

 of meat for a single village. The men who killed buffaloes for their 

 tongues arid those who shot them from the railway trains for sport were 

 murderers. In no way does civilized man so quickly revert to his former 

 state as when he is alone with the beasts of the field. Give him a gun 

 and something which he may kill without getting himself in trouble, 

 and, presto! he is instantly a savage again, finding exquisite delight in 

 bloodshed, slaughter, and death, if not for gain, then solely for the joy 

 and happiness of it. There is no kind of warfare against game animals 

 too unfair, too disreputable, or too mean for white men to engage in if 

 they can oldy do so with safety to their own precious carcasses. They 

 will shoot buffalo and antelope from running railway trains, drive deer 

 into water with hounds and cut their throats in cold blood, kill does 

 with fawns a week old, kill fawns by the score for their spotted skins, 

 slaughter deer, moose, and caribou in the snow at a pitiful disadvan- 

 tage, just as the wolves do; exterminate the wild ducks on the whole 

 Atlantic seaboard with punt guns for the metropolitan markets; kill 

 off the Rocky Mountain goats for hides worth only 50 cents apiece, de- 

 stroy wagon loads of trout with dynamite, and so on to the end of the 

 chapter. 



Perhaps the most gigantic task ever undertaken on this continent 

 in the line of game-slaughter was the extermination of the bison in the 

 great pasture region by the hide-hunters. Probably the brilliant ra- 

 pidity and success with which that lofty undertaking was accom- 

 plished was a matter of surprise even to those who participated in it. 

 The story of the slaughter is by no means a long one. 



The period of systematic slaughter of the bison naturally begins with 

 the first organized efforts in that direction, in a business-like, whole- 

 sale way. Although the species had been steadily driven westward for 

 a hundred years by the advancing settlements, and had during all that 

 time been hunted for the meat and robes it yielded, its extermination 

 did not begin in earnest until 1820, or thereabouts. As before stated, 

 various persons had previous to that time made buffalo killing a busi- 

 ness iu order to sell their skins, but such instances were very excep- 

 tional. By that- time the bison was totally extinct in all the region 

 lying east of the Mississippi River except a portion of Wisconsin, 

 where it survived until about 1830. In 1S20 the first organized buffalo 

 hunting expedition on a grand scale was made from the Red River set- 

 tlement, Manitoba, in which five hundred and forty carts proceeded to 

 the range. Previous to that time the buffaloes were found near enough 



