statistics that in the thirteen years from 1868 to 1881
"in Kansas alone there was paid out _two millions 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 carcases 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."--_The Old Santa Fe
Trail, by Col. Henry Inman p. 203._

The author further says, "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
detained 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."

Horace Greeley crossed the plains in 1859 in a stage
coach, and as stated in his published letters, he saw a
herd of buffalo that he estimated to contain over five
millions.]

While in their midst we not only had fresh meat at every meal, but we
cut the flesh in strips and tied it to the wagons to dry and thus
provided a small supply of "jerked" meat. In the dry, pure air of this
region, though in the heat of August, fresh meat did not spoil but
simply dried up, if cut in moderate sized pieces. This was also found to
be the case with fresh beef in the mountains. We felt relieved and
heartily glad when the last drove of buffalo was left behind.
Familiarity with them, as with the Indians, destroyed all the poetry and
romance about them. They were not a thing of beauty. An old buffalo bull
with broken horns and numerous scars from a hundred fights, with woolly
head and shaggy mane, his last year's coat half shed and half hanging
from his sides in ragged patches and strips flying in the breeze, the
whole covered over with dirt and patches of dried mud, presented a
picture that was supremely ugly.

On the journey from St. Joe to Kearney we found, along the water courses
and ravines, enough of dry wood and dead trees to supply us plentifully
with fuel for cooking and occasionally to light up the camp in the
evening. To make sure of never being entirely out of wood, a small
supply was carried along on the wagons. Along the Platte there was
practically n