Of all the quadrupeds known to inhabit the earth, no one species ever marshaled such innumerable armies as that of the American bison. As late as 1871, it was estimated that south of the Union Pacific Railroad line there were between three and four million head. As soon as the road entered the territory the destruction began, and by the reports of the Smithsonian Institution, the miserable “pot-hunters” in 1872 killed over a million and a quarter; and during the first three years after the road was completed this band of thieves and murderers slaughtered over three millions of these valuable animals, taking the hides of some and tongues of others, but leaving untouched where they fell more than half of this immense number. As American game the bison exists no more. The only few remaining out of captivity are at Yellowstone Park.
It is to be regretted that the policy of the government in regard to the natural wealth of the “public domain” has ever shown such a lack of wisdom, forethought, and power as to permit the immediate exhaustion leaving nothing for the legitimate heirs. And it seems singular that such a well known and immense storehouse of national wealth, as that of the buffalo, the annuity of which supported more than thirty thousand natives of the country, should have been left unprotected against those who have destroyed the forests and killed the cattle on a thousand hills.
Governor Isaac I. Stevens, in his report of estimates of the Pacific Railroad in 1854 to Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, says: “The supplies of meat for all the laborers on this line east of the mountains ... will be furnished from the plains. The inexhaustible herds of buffalo will supply amply the whole force till the road is completed.”
Camp Red River Hunters.
There were at that time twenty-seven known tribes of Indians west of the Missouri river, of which the greater part subsisted by hunting the buffalo; and he says of the hunters from Mouse river valley to the Red river of the North: “They make two hunts each year, leaving a portion of their numbers at home to take care of their houses and farms: One from the middle of June to the middle of August, when they make ‘pemican’ and dry meat, and prepare the skins of buffalo for lodges and moccasins; and again from the middle of September to the middle of November, when, besides the pemican and dried meat, the skin is dried into robes.
“I estimate that four months each year two thousand hunters, three thousand women and children, and eighteen hundred carts are on the plains; and estimating the load of a cart at eight hundred pounds, and allowing three hundred carts for luggage, that twelve hundred tons of meat, skins, and furs is their product of the chase.[19]
“These people are simple-hearted, honest, and industrious, and would make good citizens. Each year they carry off to the settlements at Pembina at least two million five hundred thousand pounds of buffalo meat, dried, or in the shape of pemican.” Large tribes, as the Gros Ventres, Bloods, Piegans, and others, had hunted and feasted for ages without diminishing the number or strength of “the inexhaustible herds of buffalo,” described by Governor Stevens in 1854.
This source of subsistence to a numerous and poor people, and immense wealth to the nation, was wantonly destroyed by the “pot-hunter,” who is in no way related to the “squirrel hunter,” but stands in about the same relation to the sportsman as does the “missing link” to the species he disgraces. He is a destructive animal, and it is as useless to hope any species of game, beast or bird, will ever exist in numbers too great for this wily loafer to destroy, as it is to expect legal enactments and penalties will ever prevent him doing evil.