n Western Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, and in the famous blue grass regions of
Kentucky. How fast the buffaloes became exterminated may best be
illustrated by the fact that, at the beginning of the present century,
the bison had entirely disappeared from the eastern banks of the
Mississippi. A few isolated herds could be found in Kentucky in 1792. In
1814 the animal had disappeared in Indiana and Illinois. When the white
settlers crossed the Mississippi, to seek connection with the
territories on the Pacific coast, the buffalo dominion, once so vast,
decreased from year to year, and finally it was split in two and divided
into a northern and southern strip. The cause of this division was the
California overland emigration, the route of which followed the Kansas
and Platte Rivers, cutting through the center of the buffalo regions.
These emigrants killed hundreds of thousands of animals, and the
division became still greater after the completion of the Union Pacific
line and the settlement of the adjacent districts.

The buffaloes of the southern strip were the first to be exterminated,
particularly when the building of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe
Railroad facilitated entrance to the southern range.

Aside from the pleasure and excitement from a buffalo hunt, the yield
was a rich one, and troops of hunters swarmed over the Western prairies;
buffalo hunting became an industry which gave employment to thousands of
people. But human avarice knew no bounds, and massacred senselessly the
finest game with which this continent was stocked. The dimensions to
which this industry grew may best be guessed when it is stated that in
1872 more than 100,000 buffaloes were killed near Fort Dodge in three
months. During the summer of 1874, an expedition composed of sixteen
hunters killed 2,800 buffaloes, and during that same season one young
trapper boasted of having killed 3,000 animals. The sight of such a
slaughter scene was gruesome to behold. Colonel Dodge writes of it:
"During the fall of 1873 I rode across the prairie, where a year ago I
had hunted several herds. At the time we enjoyed the aspect of a myriad
of buffaloes, which were grazing peacefully over the prairies. Now we
rode past myriads of decaying cadavers and skeletons, which filled the
air with an insufferable stench. The broad plain which, a year ago, had
teemed with animals, was nothing more than a dead, foul desert."

Mr. Blackmore, another