520 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1887. 



Territories enacted laws vaguely and feebly intended to provide some 

 sort of protection to the fast-disappearing animals. One of the first 

 was the game law of Colorado, passed in 1872, which declared that the 

 killers of game should not leave any flesh to spoil. The western game 

 laws of those clays amounted to about as much as they do now; prac- 

 tically nothing at all. I have never been able to learn of a single in- 

 stance, save in the Yellowstone Park, wherein a western hunter was 

 prevented by so simple and innocuous a thing as a game law from kill- 

 ing game. Laws were enacted, but they were always left to enforce 

 themselves. The idea of the frontiersman (the average, at least) has 

 always been to kill as much game as possible before some other fellow 

 gets a chance at it, and before it is all Icilled oj} ! So he goes at the game, 

 and as a general thing kills all he can while it lasts, and with it feeds 

 himself and family, his dogs, and even his hogs, to repletion. I knew 

 one Montana man north of Miles City who killed for his own use twenty- 

 six, black- tail deer in one season, and had so much more venison than 

 he could consume or give away that a great pile of carcasses lay in his 

 yard until spring and spoiled. 



During the existence of the buffalo it was declared by many an im- 

 possibility to stop or prevent the slaughter. Such an accusation of 

 weakness and imbecility on the part of the General Government is an 

 insult to our strength and resources. The protection of game is now 

 and always has been simply a question of money. A proper code of 

 game laws and a reasonable number of salaried game-wardens, sworn 

 to enforce them and punish all offenses against them, would have af- 

 forded the buffalo as much protection as would have been necessary to 

 his continual existence. To be sure, many buffaloes would have been 

 killed on the sly in spite of laws to the contrary, but it was wholesale 

 slaughter that wrought the extermination, and that could easily have 

 been prevented. A tax of 50 cents each on buffalo robes would have 

 maintained a sufficient number of game-wardens to have reasonably 

 regulated the killing, and maintained for an indefinite period a bounti- 

 ful source of supply of food, and also raiment for both the white man 

 of the plains and the Indian. By judicious management the buffalo 

 could have been made to yield an annual revenue equal to that we now 

 receive from the fur-seals — $100,000 per year. 



During the two great periods of slaughter — 1870-'75 and 1880-'84 — the 

 principal killing grounds were as well known as the stock-yards of 

 Chicago. Had proper laws been enacted, and had either the general 

 or territorial governments entered with determination upon the task of 

 restricting the killing of buffaloes to proper limits, their enforcement 

 would have been, in the main, as simple and easy as the collection of 

 taxes. Of course the solitary hunter in a remote locality would have 

 bowled over his half dozen buffaloes in secure defiance of the law; but 

 such desultory killing could not have made much impression on the 

 great mass for many years. The business-like, wholesale slaughter, 



