Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 March 1887 — A Rather Odd Business. [ARTICLE]

A Rather Odd Business.

The buffalo is fast becoming extinct, and such surviving members of his race as are loft in the great Northwest have become wary and elusive. It will never again be possible for the enterprising “skin-strippers” to sweep down upon enormous herds of these noble, ungainly creatures and slaughter them by the score, leaving their shin-denud-ed carcasses to rot upon the plains or furnish food for the wplves or coyotes. Realizing this fact, the “skin-strippers” have either taken up a new and less exciting occupation, and are now known as “bone-hunters,” or have abandoned the buffalo industry altogether. Tho "outfit” of the bone-hunter is a familiar spectacle in the Territory of Montana and in other portions of the West where the slaughter of buffaloes by the wholesale has been of comparatively recent date. •“ That the gathering of buffalo bones is a recognized industry is easily proved by the following figures: During the season of 1883-4 there were shipped East over the line of the Northern Pacific Railroad alone 7,850 tons, or nearly 800 cars, of bones. These bones were brought to various points on the line of the railroad by the bone-hunt-ers, and were then Bold to the agents of the consumers. They were at that time worth about $24 a ton at tho market, and paid the railroad company on an average a little over $0 a ton in freight charges. They are used chiefly by sugar refineries, bone-black establishments, and carbon works, the Detroit carbon works being one of the largest places of consumption in the country. They are also used extensively at* Bt. Louis and at Philadelphia.— Harper's Weekly.