The Earth as Modified by Human Action eBook

habits, and sufficiently multiplied in numbers, to form really large herds, is the bison, or, as he is commonly called in America, the buffalo; and this animal is confined to the prairie region of the Mississippi basin, a small part of British America, and Northern Mexico.  The engineers sent out to survey railroad routes to the Pacific estimated the number of a single herd of bisons seen within the last fifteen years on the great plains near the Upper Missouri, at not less than 200,000, and yet the range occupied by this animal is now very much smaller in area than it was when the whites first established themselves on the prairies. [Footnote:  “About five miles from camp we ascended to the top of a high hill, and for a great distance ahead every square mile seemed to have a herd of buffalo upon it.  Their number was variously estimated by the members of the party; by some as high as half a million.  I do not think it any exaggeration to set it down at 200,000.”  Steven’s Narrative and Final Report.  Reports of Explorations and Surveys for Railroad to Pacific, vol xii, book i., 1860.

The next day the party fell in with a “buffalo trail,” where at least 100,000 were thought to have crossed a slough.

As late as 1868, Sheridan’s party estimated the number of bisons seen by them in a single day at 200,000.—­Sheridan’s Troopers on the Border, 1868, p. 41.] But it must be remarked that the American buffalo is a migratory animal, and that, at the season of his annual journeys, the whole stock of a vast extent of pasture-ground is collected into a single army, which is seen at or very near any one point only for a few days during the entire season.  Hence there is risk of great error in estimating the numbers of the bison in a given district from the magnitude of the herds seen at or about the same time at a single place of observation; and, upon the whole, it is neither proved nor probable that the bison was ever, at any one time, as numerous in North America as the domestic bovine species is at present.  The elk, the moose, the musk ox, the caribou, and the smaller quadrupeds popularly embraced under the general name of deer, though sufficient for the wants of a sparse savage population, were never numerically very abundant, and the carnivora which fed upon them were still less so.  It is almost needless to add that the Rocky Mountain sheep and goat must always have been very rare.

Summing up the whole, then, it is evident that the wild quadrupeds of North America, even when most numerous, were few compared with their domestic successors, that they required a much less supply of vegetable food, and consequently were far less important as geographical elements than the many millions of hoofed and horned cattle now fed by civilized man on the same continent.

EXTIRPATION OF WILD QUADRUPEDS.