Note 18 — THE ASIATIC STEPPES AND THEIR FAUNA.
Margaret R. Thomson translation
[Note 18] p. 97.—The Buffalo.
The American bison or buffalo (Bos americanus) is now practically exterminated.
Two sentences from An Introduction to the Study of Mammals, by Sir W. H. Flower and Mr. R. Lydekker (London, 1891), put the case in a nutshell.
“The multitudes in which the American bison formerly existed are almost incredible; the prairies being absolutely black with them as far as the eye could reach, the numbers in the herds being reckoned by millions.”
With the completion of the Kansas Branch of the Pacific Railway in 1871, the extraordinarily careless and ruthless slaughter began. In less than ten years bison-shooting ceased to be profitable.
And now, “A herd of some two hundred wild individuals derived from the northern herd is preserved in the Yellowstone National Park; and it is believed that some five hundred of the race, known as Wood-Bison, exist in British territory; but with these exceptions this magnificent species is exterminated”.
A vivid account of the buffalo’s habits and of its rapid tragic extermination will be found in Mr. Grinell’s essay “In Buffalo Days” in American Big-Game Hunting (Boone and Crockett Club), edited by Th. Roosevelt and G. B. Grinell, Edinburgh, 1893.
See also Hornaday, The Extirpation of the American Bison, 1889, and a monograph by J. A. Allen, “The American Bisons, Living and Extinct”: Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, vol. iv., 1876.