The senseless slaughter of this magnificent creature by thousands of hunters, frontiersmen, Bills and Dicks, and others between 1850 and 1880, soon brought about the near extinction of the species. A few were saved by Messrs. Allard and Conrad of Montana, the Canadian Government, our own Government, Colonel W. A. Jones (Buffalo Jones) and others. The late Senator Corbin secured a number of animals and shipped them to New Hampshire where a tract of several thousand acres was set aside as a park. All of these herds increased, and at the present time in the United States and Canada there must be nearly, if not quite, 1500 head. Thus the species is preserved. The Government had great difficulty in preventing poachers in Yellowstone Park from slaughtering the animals, and in the early nineties there were very few animals left alive. Public opinion has been aroused to the necessity of preserving this typically American animal, and it is now certain that the species will not become extinct. Buffalo Bill, not content with his records of “big killings”, took numbers of bison East during the ’80’s. Of these, twenty fine specimens died of pleuro-pneumonia while his show was at Madison Square Garden, New York City, during the winter of 1886–’87. The last survivors of this magnificent creature were hauled about the country and exhibited before gaping crowds. At Newark, Ohio, in the early ’80’s, when a boy I attended Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West Show”. I shall ever remember my sensations when witnessing the “grand buffalo hunt”. Three or four poor, old, scarred bison were driven into the fair-ground enclosure by some whooping cow-punchers. Buffalo Bill himself dashed up alongside the lumbering animals and from a Winchester repeater discharged numerous “blanks” into the already powder-burned sides of the helpless creatures. The crowd roared with appreciation, and as the cow-punchers pursued, and rounded up the hapless bison before the grandstand, Buffalo Bill reined in his steed, and spurring the horse (so he would prance), bowed right and left. Professor Hornady’s report, together with other information, indicates that enough buffalo were carted about the East to have formed a very respectable herd—had they been permitted to remain in some favored spot in the buffalo country. The killing of the buffalo furnished employment for the type of men who usually flock to any frontier. There was more or less excitement in the chase, the animals were absolutely defenseless, the hides and meat could be sold. But for the hostility of the Plains tribes, the buffalo would long ago have disappeared. But when the Sioux, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Omaha and others saw that the Whites would destroy their means of sustenance, they inaugurated a campaign of hostility throughout the Great Plains and the Upper Missouri country, against the Whites.