My Native Land - The United States: its Wonders, its Beauties, and its People; - with Descriptive Notes, Character Sketches, Folk Lore, Traditions, - Legends and History, for the Amusement of the Old and the - Instruction of the Young by James Cox
page 67 of 334 (20%)
page 67 of 334 (20%)
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and made saddles, boats, lassoes and shoes from them. Folded up, they
used them as beds, and wore them around their shoulders as a protection against the winter's cold. Spoons and other utensils for the household could be made from their hoofs and horns, and their bones were shaped into all kinds of arms and weapons. The life and existence of the prairie Indian depended almost entirely upon that of the buffalo. There is no doubt that the Indians killed many buffaloes, but while the damage may have been great, there was not much of a reduction noticeable in their numbers, for the buffalo cow is an enormous breeder. Conditions were changed, however, when the white man arrived with his rifle, settled down on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, and began to drive the aborigines of the American continent further and further West. With this crowding back of the Indians began that also of the buffalo, and the destruction of the latter was far more rapid than that of the former. It was about the middle of the Seventeenth Century when the first English colonists climbed the summits of the Allegheny Mountains. Enormous herds of buffalo grazed then in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, and in the famous blue grass regions of Kentucky. How fast the buffaloes became exterminated may best be illustrated by the fact that, at the beginning of the present century, the bison had entirely disappeared from the eastern banks of the Mississippi. A few isolated herds could be found in Kentucky in 1792. In 1814 the animal had disappeared in Indiana and Illinois. When the white settlers crossed the Mississippi, to seek connection with the territories on the Pacific coast, the buffalo dominion, once so vast, decreased from year to year, and finally it was split in two and divided into a northern and southern strip. The cause of this division was the |
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