od of only thirteen years, during which time they were
indiscriminately slaughtered for their hides. In Kansas alone there was
paid out, between the dates specified, two million five hundred thousand
dollars for their bones gathered on the prairies, to be utilized by
the various carbon works of the country, principally in St. Louis. It
required about one hundred carcasses to make one ton of bones, the price
paid averaging eight dollars a ton; so the above-quoted enormous sum
represented the skeletons of over thirty-one millions of buffalo.[42]
These figures may appear preposterous to readers not familiar with the
great plains a third of a century ago; but to those who have seen the
prairie black from horizon to horizon with the shaggy monsters, they
are not so. In the autumn of 1868 I rode with Generals Sheridan, Custer,
Sully, and others, for three consecutive days, through one continuous
herd, which must have contained millions. In the spring of 1869 the
train on the Kansas Pacific Railroad was delayed at a point between
Forts Harker and Hays, from nine o'clock in the morning until five
in the afternoon, in consequence of the passage of an immense herd of
buffalo across the track. On each side of us, and to the west as far as
we could see, our vision was only limited by the extended horizon of the
flat prairie, and the whole vast area was black with the surging mass of
affrighted buffaloes as they rushed onward to the south.

In 1868 the Union Pacific Railroad and its branch in Kansas was nearly
completed across the plains to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains,
the western limit of the buffalo range, and that year witnessed the
beginning of the wholesale and wanton slaughter of the great ruminants,
which ended only with their practical extinction seventeen years
afterward. The causes of this hecatomb of animals on the great plains
were the incursion of regular hunters into the region, for the hides of
the buffalo, and the crowds of tourists who crossed the continent for
the mere pleasure and novelty of the trip. The latter class heartlessly
killed for the excitement of the new experience as they rode along in
the cars at a low rate of speed, often never touching a particle of the
flesh of their victims, or possessing themselves of a single robe. The
former, numbering hundreds of old frontiersmen, all expert shots, with
thousands of novices, the pioneer settlers on the public domain, just
opened under the various land