eighty years they formed one of the most distinctive and characteristic
features of existence on the great plains. Their numbers were
countless--incredible. In vast herds of hundreds of thousands of
individuals, they roamed from the Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande
and westward to the Rocky Mountains. They furnished all the means of
livelihood to the tribes of Horse Indians, and to the curious population
of French Metis, or Half-breeds, on the Red River, as well as to those
dauntless and archtypical wanderers, the white hunters and trappers.
Their numbers slowly diminished, but the decrease was very gradual until
after the Civil War. They were not destroyed by the settlers, but by the
railways and the skin hunters.

After the ending of the Civil War, the work of constructing
trans-continental railway lines was pushed forward with the utmost
vigor. These supplied cheap and indispensable, but hitherto wholly
lacking, means of transportation to the hunters; and at the same time
the demand for buffalo robes and hides became very great, while the
enormous numbers of the beasts, and the comparative ease with which they
were slaughtered, attracted throngs of adventurers. The result was such
a slaughter of big game as the world had never before seen; never before
were so many large animals of one species destroyed in so short a time.
Several million buffaloes were slain. In fifteen years from the time
the destruction fairly began the great herds were exterminated. In
all probability there are not now, all told, five hundred head of
wild buffaloes on the American continent; and no herd of a hundred
individuals has been in existence since 1884.

The first great break followed the building of the Union Pacific
Railway. All the buffaloes of the middle region were then destroyed, and
the others were split into two vast sets of herds, the northern and the