The best shot was low down behind the shoulder, about ten inches from the brisket. A ball placed there would penetrate the lungs, and, after a few plunges, the beast would drop and die.
The price of all the blood shed by the skin-hunters may be summed up briefly as 2 dollars 75 cents each for ‘leather hides’—i.e. hides of old bulls all the year round and young beasts during the summer season—and 3.50 cents for ‘robe hides.’
My informant told me that if it would pay him he thought that he could still find buffalo on the northern tributaries of the Saskatchewan, east of the Rockies, as some friends of his, trapping ‘away back’ in 1886, had seen plenty of them, though the difficulty of bringing the robes out had prevented their shooting any.
The last buffalo killed by a white man to my own certain knowledge was shot by Mr. Warburton Pike far away to the North, near the Great Slave Lake, when out after musk ox.[16]
Some idea of the number of the buffaloes in early days may be gathered from the well-attested fact that the pioneer settlers often drove through the herds for days and days with buffalo in sight all round them all day long, as well as from the statistics collected by Colonel Dodge, in his ‘Plains of the Great West.’ That author states that, from information furnished to him by the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fé Railway Company, he concludes that not less than a million and a half were killed in the States from 1872 to 1874.
Colonel Dodge mentions a mountain buffalo as a variety of the common buffalo, and Mr. J. E. Harting, in some remarks published originally in the ‘Field,’ alludes to a beast of the same class, which he calls ‘Zacateca.’
The Zacatecas, of which specimens were exhibited at the American Exhibition of 1887, inhabit the mountainous regions of Northern Mexico; they are smaller than the buffalo, are hornless, and have tails more like the tails of yaks than like those of the common buffalo, who by the way is, properly speaking, a bison (Bos americanus). I have taken the liberty of calling him a buffalo because in his native haunts he has been so called, and as such he will go down to posterity in the legends of those great plains which know him no longer.
The Wood Buffalo and the Mountain Buffalo appear to be almost, if not quite, identical with the common type of B. americanus, from which they differ only in habitat, in the quality of their coat, and in that they are of somewhat smaller size than their kinsmen of the plains.
Colonel Bedson’s herd of buffaloes