72 GAME ANIMALS OF NORTH AMERICA. 



Smoky Hill Road in Kansas and Colorado. The discussion at 

 that time, resulted in the adoption of some measures to protect tlie 

 buffalo, though it is to be hoped that ere long still more stringent 

 laws may be enacted and enforced. But we have just now to 

 speak of a country distant from the railroads, out, of the way of 

 the average tourist, and far from the haunts even of the gendeman 

 sportsman ; we refer to the territory lying between the Little 

 Missouri and the main divide of the Rocky Mountains, north of 

 the Union Pacific Railroad. It is in this region that the most 

 abundant supplies of wild game are to be found, and it is here 

 that these animals are slaughtered for. their hides alone, by the 

 professional hunter. 



Buffalo, elk, mule deer and antelope suffer most, and in the 

 order in which they are here mentioned. They are destroyed 

 without regard to season ; the hides only are taken and the 

 meat left to feed the wolves, or to rot when the spring opens. 

 We know directly of thirty-four cow elk killed out of a band of 

 forty, about the middle of one April, by one man. The snows 

 were deep, and the butcher followed the poor animals until all 

 but six were slain. Each of these animals; if allowed to live, 

 would have produced a calf in a little over a month after the time 

 of its slaughter. Here then were sixty-eight elk killed by one 

 man in a day and a half. It is estimated from reliable informa- 

 tion, that in one recent winter, during the deep snows, over three 

 thousand elk were killed for their hides in the vaUey of the Yel- 

 lowstone, between the mouth of Trail Creek and the Hot 

 Springs. For the territories of Wyoming and Montana, the de- 

 struction must have been twenty times as great. An elk 

 skin is worth from $2.50 to $4, and to secure that pitiful sum 

 this beautiful life is taken, and from three to five hundred 

 pounds of the most delicate meat is left on the ground. 



A buffalo hide is' worth $1.50 in September, $2 in October, 

 and $2.50 in November, and. at those prices njany men can be 

 found to do the work of butchery. For, as many of us know by 

 experience, a man without any pretensions to being a skilful hunt- 

 er can slaughter a dozen or two buffalo in a day wherever they are 

 numerous. Mule deer and antelope are more difficult to kill, but 

 m these'days of breech-loading rifles, a fair shot can kill •several out 



