496 



Arrived at the position, he makes his camp in some hidden ravine or 

 thicket, and makes all ready for work." 



Of course the slaughter was greatest along the lines of the three great 

 railways — the Kansas Pacific, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, and 

 the Union Pacific, about in the order named. It reached its height in 

 the season of 1873. During that year the Atchison, Topeka and Santa 

 Fe Railroad carried out of the buffalo country 251,443 robes, 1,617,600 

 pounds of meat, and 2,743,100 pounds of bones. The end of the south- 

 ern herd was then near at hand. Could the southern buffalo range have 

 been roofed over at that time it would have made one vast charnel- 

 house. Putrifying carcasses, many of them with the hide still on, lay 

 thickly scattered over thousands of square miles of the level prairie, 

 poisoning the air and water and offending the sight. The remaining 

 herds had become mere scattered bands, harried and driven hither and 

 thither by the hunters, who now swarmed almost as thickly as the 

 buffaloes. A cordon of camps was established along the Arkansas 

 River, the South Platte, the Republican, and the few other streams that 

 contained water, and when the thirsty animals came to drink they were 

 attacked and driven away, and with the most fiendish persistency kept 

 from slaking their thirst, so that they would again be compelled to seek 

 the river and come within range of the deadly breech-loaders. Colonel 

 Dodge declares that in places favorable to such warfare, as the south 

 bank of the Platte, a herd of buffalo has, by shooting at it by day and 

 by lighting fires and firing guns at night, been kept from water until it 

 has been entirely destroyed. In the autumn of 1873, when Mr. William 

 Blackmore traveled for some 30 or 40 miles along the north bank of 

 the Arkansas River to the east of Fort Dodge, " there was a continu- 

 ous line of putrescent carcasses, so that the air was rendered pestilential 

 and offensive to the last degree. The hunters had formed a line of 

 camps along the banks of the river, and had shot down the buffalo, night 

 and morning, as they came to drink. In order to give an idea of the 

 number of these carcasses, it is only necessary to mention that I counted 

 sixty-seven on one spot not covering 4 acres." 



White hunters were not allowed to hunt in the Indian Territory, but 

 the southern boundary of the State of Kansas was picketed by them, 

 and a herd no sooner crossed the line going north than it was destroyed. 

 Every water-hole was guarded by a camp of hunters, and whenever a 

 thirsty herd approached, it was promptly met by rifle-bullets. 



During this entire period the slaughter of buffaloes was universal. 

 The man who desired buffalo meat for food almost invariably killed 

 five times as many animals as he could utilize, and after cutting from 

 each victim its very choicest parts — the tongue alone, possibly, or per- 

 haps the hump and hind quarters, one or the other, or both — fully four- 

 fifths of the really edible portion of the carcass would be left to the 

 wolves. It was no uncommou thing for a man to bring in two barrels 

 of salted buffalo tongues, without another pound of meat or a solitary 



