The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches, by
Theodore Roosevelt

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Title: Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches

Author: Theodore Roosevelt

Release Date: April 6, 2006 [EBook #3337]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUNTING THE GRISLY ***

Produced by Dagny; John Bickers

HUNTING THE GRISLY AND OTHER SKETCHES

by Theodore Roosevelt

PREPARER'S NOTE

This text was prepared from a 1902 edition, published by G. P.
Putnam's Sons, New York and London. It was originally published in
1893. It is part II of "The Wilderness Hunter."

An Account of the Big Game of the United

States and its Chase with Horse

Hound, and Rifle

CHAPTER I.--THE BISON OR AMERICAN BUFFALO.

When we became a nation in 1776, the buffaloes, the first animals
to vanish when the wilderness is settled, roved to the crests of the
mountains which mark the western boundaries of Pennsylvania, Virginia,
and the Carolinas. They were plentiful in what are now the States of
Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. But by the beginning of the present
century they had been driven beyond the Mississippi; and for the next
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