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Show 2 4 cups of coffee to warm them against the chill, the two rangers mounted and rode out to patrol the boundaries in the southeast corner of the park. No hunting is allowed in Yellowstone, but occasional hunters do stray inside park borders. Usually it's by mistake, which is very different than it was in the old days vihen the park was being devastated by tresspassers. Although Yellowstone was declared a protected area in 1872, it vias protected in name only. No money had been appropriated by Congress for a park staff. Even though hostile Indians were still a threat, white game poachers and trophy hunters trespassed to shoot buffalo, elk, bighorn sheep, and anything else that moved. Lumbermen cut trees and hauled away logs by the wagonload. Miners searched for gold, while trappers did a thriving business in furs. The pillage grew so wanton that the Secretary of the Interior (national parks are administered by the Interior Department) asked the Secretary of the Army for help. In 1886 a division of the United States Cavalry arrived to patrol Yellowstone, But the park vias vast, and illegal hunters took their chances on evading the soldiers. By the end of the nineteenth century, the 60 million bison which had once roamed the west had been slaughtered almost to extinction. Their rarity made them all the more valuable to trophy hunters who wanted a massive buffalo head mounted on the walls of their homes. In 1894 a single poacher killed eighty buffalo in Yellowstone before he vias caught by a Cavalry trooper. That vias estimated to be one-fourth of the total number of bison then surviving in the United States. |