Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1893 — East Herd of Wild Buffalo. [ARTICLE]

East Herd of Wild Buffalo.

Hunters in Colorado are bent upon the extinction of the last herd of buffalo that inhabit the parks high in the Rocky mountains. There were only about twenty-five of the animals, and thirteen of these are believed to have been killed. Officers are hunting the hunters now and, catching them, will endeavor to bull the actual price of buffalo skins to a point absolutely beyond precedent. It is hoped by the San Francisco Examiner that their quest may be successful. Indeed, news that the monarch of the fleeing bison had turned upon his foes and horned a few of them into penitence or into the hereafter would fail to create a wave of sorrow.

There is something little short of pathos in the way the buffalo have been effaced. But a few years ago, roaming in countless thousands, they were killed for the lust of slaughter, for mere wantonness. How so scant a remnant survives that at one time it was believed not a solitary individual remained. Belonging to the plains, the buffalo was forced by this cruelty and greed of civilized man to seek other pastures. Such as did not whiten with their hones the old grazing grounds wandered away from their natural environment to the fastnesses of the mountains, far from all the haunts of human kind. There they have lived precariously, but it seems they are not allowed to exist even in exile. Man, who preaches gentleness and practices brutality, intends to chase them higher than

the timber line, to escape the otuiet only to die of starvation. On behalf of the buffalo, now almost tradition, it is proper that the persona who are trailing the final representatives of the race through the canyons of Colorado should be denounced, not Hlooe as mercenary and unworthy sportsmen, but contemptible vandals