necessary to deduct about two-third from the grand total, which would
leave 4,000,000 as our estimate of the actual number of buffaloes in
this great herd, which I believe is more likely to be below the truth
than above it.

No wonder that the men of the West of those days, both white and red,
thought it would be impossible to exterminate such a mighty multitude.
The Indians of some tribes believed that the buffaloes issued from the
earth continually, and that the supply was necessarily inexhaustible.
And yet, in four short years the southern herd was almost totally
annihilated.

With such a lesson before our eyes, confirmed in every detail by living
testimony, who will dare to say that there will be an elk, moose,
caribou, mountain sheep, mountain goat, antelope, or black-tail deer
left alive in the United States in a wild state fifty years from this
date, ay, or even twenty-five?

Mr. William Blackmore contributes the following testimony to the
abundance of buffalo in Kansas:[24]

[Note 24: Plains of the Great West, p. xvi.]

"In the autumn of 1868, whilst crossing the plains on the Kansas Pacific
Railroad, for a distance of upwards of 120 miles, between Ellsworth and
Sheridan, we passed through an almost unbroken herd of buffalo. The
plains were blackened with them, and more than once the train had to
stop to allow unusually large herds to pass. * * * In 1872, whilst on a
scout for about a hundred miles south of Fort Dodge to the Indian
Territory, we were never out of sight of buffalo."