THE EXTERMINATION OF THE AMERICAN BISON. 501 



loaded with tliera. Meat was very cheap in those days; fine, tender 

 buffalo steak selling from 1 to 2 cents per pound. * * * The busi- 

 ness was quite profitable for a time, but a sudden drop in the price of 

 hides brought them down as low as 25 and 50 cents each. * * * It 

 was a very common thing in those days for people living in Wichita to 

 start out in the morning and return by evening with a wagon load of 

 buffalo meat." 



Unquestionably a great many thousand buffaloes were killed annu- 

 ally by the settlers of Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, .New Mexico, and Colo- 

 rado, and the mountain Indians living west of the great range. The 

 number so slain can only be guessed at, for there is absolutely no data 

 on which to found an estimate. ' Judging merely from the number of 

 people within reach of the range, it may safely be estimated that the 

 total number of buffaloes slaughtered annually to satisfy the wants of 

 this heterogeneous element could not have been less than fifty thousand, 

 and probably was a much higher number. This, for the three years, 

 would make one hundred and fifty thousand, and the grand total would 

 therefore be about as follows : 



The slaughter of the southern herd. 



Killed by " professional " white hunters in 1872, 1873, and 1874 3,158, 730 



Killed by Indians, same period 390,000 



Killed by set tiers and mountain Indians 150, 000 



Total slaughter in three years 3, 698, 730 



These figures seem incredible, but unfortunately there is not the 

 slightest reason for believing they are too high. There are many men 

 now living who declare that during the great slaughter they each killed 

 from twenty-five hundred to three thousand buffaloes every year. 

 With thousands of hunters on the range, and such possibilities of 

 slaughter before each, it is, after all, no wonder that an average of 

 nearly a million and a quarter of buffaloes fell each year during that 

 bloody period. 



By the close of the hunting season of 1875 the great southern herd 

 had ceased to exist. As a body, it had been utterly annihilated. The 

 main body of the survivors, numbering about ten thousand head, fled 

 southwest, and dispersed through that great tract of wild, desolate, 

 and inhospitable country stretching southward from the Cimarron 

 country across the u Public Land Strip," the Pan-handle of Texas, and 

 the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plain, to the Pecos Eiver. -A few small 

 bands of stragglers maintained a precarious existence for a few years 

 longer on the headwaters of the Eepublican River and in southwestern 

 Nebraska, near Ogalalla, where calves were caught alive as late as 1885. 

 Wild buffaloes were seen in southwestern Kansas for the last time in 

 1886, and the two or three score of individuals still living in the Can- 

 adian River country of the Texas Pan-handle are the last wild sur- 

 vivors of the great Southern herd. 



