Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 January 1875 — The Buffalo’s Future. [ARTICLE]

The Buffalo’s Future.

It will not be many years before he will be abut up in a cage in which he cannot turn round. His nose will be decorated with a ring; and, perchance on the spot over which millions of his ancestors have roamed, some garrulous showman will poke him through the bars and describe him to a gaping crowd as a rare and curious beast, along with the hippopotamus and the kangaroo. Buffalo and Indian against locomotive and landgrant carpet-bagger is an unequal contest “ Lo" can be made to accept the situation; and in process of time his predilection for rings hirsute may be changed to affection for rings official. Buffalo is impervious to the blandishments of red blankets, breech-loaders and bad whisky. He will not be coaxed into civilization. Continued persecution has soured his disposition. He will not even yield respectable leather. He is poor eating; he has nothing to tempt the greed of the world save his stringy beef, his bones and his hair, but these suffice. The white man follows his path and exterminates him, in order that coats may be buttoned, kniveshandled, hair combed, soil fertilized and shins protected from wintry blasts. Bison is the founder of two new industries; the first is bone picking. The bone-picker sallies forth from a frontier town in a wagon. He scours the prairies for a cargo. If he comes on the ghastly relics of an Indian scrimmage, that is clear gain, for the osseous remains of the red citizen help to complete his load. An Indian skull is worth a dollar and a quarter for combs, and an Indian thigh bone makes lovely knife-handles. The bone-picker refuses the fragments of women and children. His is an uncouth sort of respect, which, in the one case, is more potent than his cupidity. A party of individuals thus engaged is called an “outfit.” The number of ‘ outfits” annually sent forth indicates a business already extended to an extraordinary degree. A Tribune correspondent says that the books of.-the Atchison, ropeka-& Santa Fe Railroad show a daily shipment of from ten to twenty tons of bones. Middlemen do the shipping, and purchase the bone-picker's cargo as fast as it is gathered, paying, at the railway station, $5 per ton. The price fluctuates, however, and furnishes the local population with tl< excitement of a small stock exchange, “ bulls” (in skeleton) of course predominating. The greater portion of the bones, after their reception in the East, is ground into fertilizer. The balance serves the usual industrial employment of the material for buttons, combs, etc. Partly from the fact that hunting is out of the bone-picker’s line, and partly because he can find plenty of skeletons scattered about the prairies, the buffalo is not slaughtered directly for his bones. They are. an incidental and minor profit —a kind of utilization of otherwise waste material. The bison carries his death warrant in his shaggy skin. The quest of that fleece is the business of the “hide-hunter.” Hido-hunting is another new industry ; one not to be longlived, for it exists through decimating its own supplies. When a party of aristocratic Britons come over to try their new breech-load-ers on the buflalo (afterward to go home and howl about the awful and useless slaughter of the monarch of the prairies by the grasping Yankees), its path’of destruction is generally thickly strewn. My lord plants a bullet in a brute for sport. Skin he needs not, and bones are hardly an object; so he leaves the animal as it fell. The -hide-hunter is on the trail, however, and the skin is speedily stripped off, packed, and the march continued in the tracks of the sportsmen as long as the game lasts. He does not .disdain to follow in the wake of th s e Indian parties who seek the meat alone for winter's use; and when these means fail he projects small raids among the herds and slaughters on his own account, leaving the meat to decay or selling it for a trivial sum. The estimated shipments of the result of the hide-hunters' labors over the railroad above-named and the Kansas lines are placed at 125,000 skins. That number of buffaloes are exterminated in a twelve-month. These hides are dressed, rolled ana sent . East, there recleansed and dried, and put on the market. The hide-hunter gets about as much for his g<x>ds as the farmer for the hides of ordinary cattle. Strange as it may appear, although the meat is coarse and, except when young, poorly flavored, it is the staple ol'an immense trade. During the cold weather, from November until April, it is esti mated that some two million pounds are shipped to all parts of the country. It costs, in Kansas, from fifty to eighty dollars per ton, in bulk, and’ retails for from six to eight cents per pound. It Is very nutritious, however, and, when jerked or dried in the sun, not unpalatable.. The Indians eat it thus prepared, and make a delectable dish by the addition of a sauce of crushed grasshoppers. Bos Americanu* yields up his life with the consoling conviction that he is not to be wasted. As long as there is anything to be made out of him nobody wi’ll desert him. If there is anything in him to utilize beside flesh, hair and bones somebody will, after it is found.be eager to grab and found another new industry on its employment. Nearly absent throughout Kansas, there is no refuge for him in either Colorado or the Indian Territory. The locomotive of advancing civilization crowds him westward. Butting against fate, he was long ago found useless, and now he runs away where once he used to meet his pursuers with lowered head. He is doomed to extinction. His flesh will be eaten, his hide worn out, and id future ages the labors of the present bone-pickers will, perhaps, prevent even the most indefatigable Marsh or Hayden of the period from reconstructing his ugly personal appearance from his fossilized bones. — Scientific American.