490 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1887. 



encountered. Although the species was not totally extinct on the 

 Qu'Appelle at that time, it was practically so. 



2. The country of the Sioux. — The next territory completely depopulated 

 of buffaloes by systematic hunting was very nearly the entire southern 

 half of Dakota, southwestern Minnesota, and northern Nebraska as 

 far as the North Platte. This vast region, once the favorite range for 

 hundreds of thousands of buffaloes, had for many years been the favor- 

 ite hunting ground of the Sioux Indians of the Missouri, the Pawnees, 

 Omahas, and all other tribes of that region. The settlement of Iowa 

 and Minnesota presently forced into this region the entire body of 

 Mississippi Sioux from the country west of Prairie du Chien and around 

 Fort Snelling, and materially hastened the extermination of all the 

 game animals which were ouce so abundant there. It is absolutely 

 certain that if the Indians had. been uninfluenced by the white traders, 

 or, in other words, had not been induced to take and prepare a large 

 number of robes every year for the market, the species would have 

 survived very much longer than it did. But the demand quickly 

 proved to be far greater than the supply. The Indians, of course, found 

 it necessary to slaughter annually a great number of buffaloes for their 

 own wants — for meat, robes, leather, teepees, etc. When it came to 

 supplementing this necessary slaughter by an additional fifty thousand 

 or more every year for marketable robes, it is no wonder that the im- 

 provident savages soon found, when too late, that the supply of buffaloes 

 was not inexhaustible. Naturally enough, they attributed their dis- 

 appearance to the white man, who was therefore a robber, and a pro- 

 per subject for the scalping-knife. Apparently it never occurred to 

 the minds of the Sioux that they themselves were equally to blame; 

 it was always the paleface who killed the buffaloes; and it was always 

 Sioux buffaloes that they killed. The Sioux seemed to feel that they 

 held a chattel mortgage on all the buffaloes north of the Platte, and it 

 required more than one pitched battle to convince them otherwise. 



Up to the time when the great Sioux Reservation was established in 

 Dakota (1875-'77), when 33,739 square miles of country, or nearly the 

 whole southwest quarter of the Territory, was set aside for the exclu- 

 sive occupancy of the Sioux, buffaloes were very numerous throughout 

 that entire region. East of the Missouri River, which is the eastern 

 boundary of the Sioux Reservation, from Bismarck all the way down, the 

 species was practically extinct as early as 1870. But at the time when 

 it became unlawful for white hunters to enter the territory of the Sioux 

 nation there were tens of thousands of buffaloes upon it, and their 

 subsequent slaughter is chargable to the Indians alone, save as to 

 those which migrated into the hunting grounds of the whites. 



3. Western railways, and their part in the extermination of the buffalo. — 

 The building of a railroad means the speedy extermination of all the 

 big game along its Hue. In its eagerness to attract the public and 



