Note 1 — Front matter
Reading edition
The estimate was probably not an exaggeration.
In a late work it is stated on the authority of railroad statistics that in the thirteen years from 1868 to 1881 "in Kansas alone there was paid out two millions five hundred thousand dollars for their bones gathered on the prairies to be utilized by the various carbon works of the country, principally in St. Louis. It required about one hundred carcases to make one ton of bones, the price paid averaging eight dollars a ton; so the above quoted enormous sum represented the skeletons of over thirty-one millions of buffalo."—The Old Santa Fe Trail, by Col. Henry Inman p. 203.
The author further says, "In the autumn of 1868 I rode with Generals Sheridan, Custer, Sully and others for three consecutive days through one continuous herd, which must have contained millions. In the spring of 1869 the train on the Kansas Pacific railroad was detained at a point between Forts Harker and Hays from nine o'clock in the morning until five in the afternoon in consequence of the passage of an immense herd of buffalo across the track."
Horace Greeley crossed the plains in 1859 in a stage coach, and as stated in his published letters, he saw a herd of buffalo that he estimated to contain over five millions.