Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 September 1892 — BISON U THE OLD DATS. [ARTICLE]

BISON U THE OLD DATS.

Have Disappeared as Completely as the Buffalo from Karopo. Scribner's. Once an inhabitant of ttiis continent from the Arctic slope to Mexico and from Virginia to Oregon, and, within the memory of men yet young, roaming the plains in such numbers that it seemed it could never be exterminated, the bison has now disappeared os utterly as has the buffalo from Europe. The early explorers were much astonished by the multitudinous herds vrhioh they net with, the regularity of their movements, and the deep roads which they made in traveling from place to place. Many of the earlier references are to territory eat t of the Mississipi, but even within the last tifteeu years bison were to be seen on the western plains in numbers so great that an entirely sober and truthful account seems like s f»bl%. Describing the number of bison in a certain region, an Indian once said to me. in the expressive sign language of which all old frotiersmen have some knowledge, “The country was one robe."

Much has been written about their enonnoifs abundance in the old days, but 1 have never read anything that I thought an exaggeration of their numbers as I have seen them. Only one who bus actually spent months in traveling among them in those old days can credit the stories told about them. Once, in the country between the I Platte stud Republican rivers, I saw | a closely massed herd or bison so vast that I dure not hazard a guess as to its numbers; and in later years SPilPsr