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Show CHAPTER XXIX. COLOKADO. THE summer of 1874 found me once more engaged in mining oper-ations on a small scale this time in Colorado. The first of June I set out hastily from Saint Louis for the mountains, anticipating great enjoyment in the journey across the plains. But the change in two years had been wonderful; where we saw buffalo in May, 1872, by uncounted thousands, we now looked in vain. Save the grizzled and miserable looking captives in the station corrals^ and rarely a worn out old fellow in some hollow, not a buffalo is now to be seen on the Kan-sas Pacific, where only seven years ago they actually obstructed the track in places. Within the memory of men still living these animals ranged as far east as the Osage in Missouri; once they inhabited nearly all that part of our country east of the Great Basin. Gov. Thomas L. Young, of Ohio, relates that when his party crossed the plains in 1854, they saw a herd in the Platte Valley fourteen miles long and two or three miles wide; and Horace Greeley vouches for herds almost as extensive, which, he says, could only be estimated by millions. Such immense aggregations are only to be accounted for by the tendency of these animals to mass together while crossing streams in their migration. At the old Platte crossing emigrants were often hindered for days by the buffalo moving northward. As late as 1865 their range was three hundred miles wide, and from the Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande. Now they are limited to two small sections: the first includes north-western and western Texas and Indian Territory, with adjacent por-tions of Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado ; the latter a small section of western Dakota and the adjacent region. At present rates only twenty more years are needed for their extermination. Millions have been slaughtered for their hides and tongues alone; millions more in cruel wantonness, miscalled " sport." Other millions died in the severe winter of 1871-' 72, their range in the sheltered valleys being re-stricted; and a year after long trains of box- cars were loaded with their bones, which the poverty- stricken Kansians gathered and shipped eastward. So disappears the noblest of our wild game. |