In March, 1886, the writer received a severe shock, as if by a blow on the head from a well-directed mallet.  He awoke, dazed and stunned, to a sudden realization of the fact that the buffalo hide hunters of the United States had practically finished their work.  The bison millions were not only "going", but gone!  In the East "the public" at large seemed to be totally ignorant of that fact.

Coincident with this discovery, the writer--then for four years chief taxidermist of the United States National Museum, and engrossed in work on foreign mammals -- also awoke to the fact that the American people's own official museum was absolutely destitute of good bison specimens of every kind.

The case was so serious that the writer prepared and handed to Professor Spencer F. Baird and Doctor G. Brown Goode a formal letter setting forth the gruesome facts mentioned above.  However, a belief was expressed that there were, even then, somewhere in the West, some unkilled bands of bison from which specimens might be taken before the last of them were swept away.

Professor Baird at once sent for me and said:

"I am greatly shocked and disturbed by your letter.  The situation as you describe it is most serious.  I dislike to be the means of killing any of those last bison, but since it is now utterly impossible to prevent their destruction, we simply must take a large series of specimens, both for our own museum, and for other museums that sooner or later surely will want good specimens of wild bison.  You must go West as soon as possible, find out definitely where specimens can be obtained, and collect--if it is not too late--at least twenty skins of males, females and young, ten or fifteen skeletons, and pick up about fifty skulls.  The Smithsonian will meet the expenses, and I will ask the Secretary of War to help us all that he can, from the nearest Army post.

To all of us the idea of killing a score or more of the last survivors of the bison millions was exceedingly unpleasant; but we believed that our refraining from collecting the specimens we imperatively needed would not prolong the existence of the bison species by a single day.  Subsequent events proved the absolute correctness of that belief.  The three bison remnants then alive in Montana, Colorado and Texas all were utterly exterminated by hide hunters, reckless cowboys and poachers, by the end of 1887.

And furthermore...At that time there was not the slightest reason for either the belief or the hope that the bison species could or would be brought back and save to the world by breeding in captivity.  Then, in 1886, there were in all the world fewer than 800 bison alive, of which about 550 were in the far north near Great Slave Lake, and known of by only a few persons.

If the reader of 1925 now should feel doubtful about the ethical propriety of our last buffalo hunt, and the killing that we had to do in order that our National Museum might secure a few good wild skins out of the wreck of the millions, let him feel assured that our task was by no means a pleasant one, and at the same time remember that the author has made some atonement to Bison americanus by the efforts that he has put forth since 1889 for the saving and the restoration of that species.

Never since Juan Cabeza de Vaca killed the first American bison on the Texas plains did any man ever set forth bison hunting with a heart as heavy, or as much oppressed by doubt, as that carried westward by the writer in May, 1886.  When our spring expedition to discover bison was ready to start, Capt. C.E. Bendire, U.S.A. retired, came to my laboratory and in his most aggressive military manner said:

"Well, I hear that you are going to Montana to hunt buffalo, and I would like to bet you a hundred dollars that you don't find even one wild buffalo."  It was like a final shower bath of ice cold water.  I was too scared and apprehensive to make a suitable reply, except that Doctor Merrill's information seemed to be good, and that I would certainly do my best to get what I was going after, even if I had to go to Canada.

In May, 1886, therefore, we set out on our voyage of discovery, greeted at every step by the cheerful assurance - "The buffalo are all gone; and you can't get any anywhere."  Wondering whether we would find our game in Montana, Texas, or the British Possessions, we decided to try Montana first, and to the great astonishment of the natives, as well as ourselves, were lucky enough, thanks to Doctor J.C. Merrill, to go straight to a tract of country which, ever since 1883, had furnished safe hiding, feeding and breeding grounds for about seventy-five head.

The people of Miles City and also the army officers at Fort Keogh were all totally ignorant of the existence of those animals, and but for the information that came to me from Stillwater, one hundred and eight-seven miles farther west, I might never have heard of them at all.  When we reached Miles City on the 10th of May, the good people of that place were so sure there were no buffalo anywhere in that part of Montana, they almost talked us out of going any farther in that direction.  When in the very depths of uncertainty luck came to our rescue.  We met a big-hearted ranchman from the Little Dry--Mr. Henry R. Phillips of the well-known LU-bar Ranch--and in a quiet but mightily convincing way, he said:

"There certainly are a few buffalo in the bad-lands west of our range, for one of our men killed a cow on Sand Creek on the 6th of this month; and about thirty-five head have been seen.  If you go up there and hunt them, and stick to it, you're almost sure to get some in the end."

That settled it.  We begged Mr. Phillips to "accept the assurance of our profound consideration," as the diplomats say, and immediately pulled across the treacherous Yellowstone for the headwaters of Little Dry Creek.  Through the kindness of the Secretary of War we were furnished by the quartermaster of Fort Keogh with field transportation, camp equipage, and a small escort, and no matter how hard Lieutenant Thompson may have thought we were going on a wild-goose chase, he was an officer and a gentleman, and therefore could not say it, at least in our hearing.

With our great ark of a six-mule wagon loaded to the wagon bows, we toiled slowly northward through the bad-lands up the Sunday Creek trail.  We were thirty-five mils from Miles City when we saw our first antelope, and forty when we came to the first bleaching bones of a buffalo.  The former had been exterminated up to that point, and the buffalo bones all picked up and sold for fertilizer.  While in camp at the water hole at the Red Buttes, a benighted teamster was guided to us by the light of the lantern that shone on the coyote I was skinning.  The wayfarer proved to be an ex-buffalo hunter, now a humble gatherer of buffalo bones, operating along the Missouri River.  He said that he and his brother had several wagons in the business, and the year before they shipped by the river steamers about two hundred tons of crushed bones at eighteen dollars per ton.

From the Red Buttes onward you could see where the millions had gone.  This was once a famous buffalo range, and now the bleaching skeletons lay scattered thickly all along the trail.  Like ghastly monuments of slaughter, these ugly excrescences stood out in bold relief on the smooth, hard surface of the prairie, from the huge bull skeletons lying close beside the wagon trail to those far back in the bad-lands, where they were merely dark specks in the distance.  They lay precisely as they fell four years before, except that the flesh was no longer upon them.  The head stretched far forward, as if for its last gasp, and the legs lay helplessly upon the turf with precisely the same curves as when they moved for the last time.  The powerful effect of the strong, parching winds and the intense dry head of summer had literally stripped the flesh from the bones, but the skeletons lay precisely as they fell.  The bones were still held together by a few dried-up ligaments, but were bleached as white as snow.  Sometimes we found immense skeletons that were absolutely perfect, even to the tiny carpal and tarsal bones, the size of a hazelnut.  Of these dry skeletons, we selected eight of the finest and largest.

Beyond the Red Buttes, we were seldom out of sight of bleaching skeletons, and often forty or fifty were in sight at one time.  The skinners always left the heads of the bulls unskinned, and the thick hide had dried down upon the skulls harder than the bone itself, holding the tangled masses of the shaggy frontlet firmly in place until it bleached brown in the sunshine and was finally worn away by wind and weather.  Many of these heads were so perfectly preserved, and with their thick masses of wavy brown hair were so fresh looking, that the slaughter of the millions was brought right down to the present, and seemed to have been the work of yesterday.  We could ensure the sight of the bones reasonably well, for we expected it; but these great hairy heads made us feel our loss most keenly.  At first it was impossible to look at one without a sight, and each group of skeletons brought back the old thought, "what a pity!"

But there was no time to waste on sentiment.  We wanted buffalo, and like the small boy and the groundhog, we'd "got to get him."  Our six-mule team dragged its slow length from the Yellowstone up the Sunday Creek trail to the top of the big divide between the Yellowstone and the Missouri, and down the north side until we reached Little Dry Creek.  Twelve miles up the Creek we came to the LU-bar Ranch, and eight miles beyond it we went into permanent camp, on the edge of the supposed buffalo country.  We sent our team back to the fort, and my old friend George Hedley and I began to hunt buffalo.

In that immense country, so bare and inhospitable, so broken up into bad-lands, and so beset by buttes of all sizes and shapes, it seemed like an utterly hopeless undertaking.  There were more than a thousand square miles of country to hunt over, and it was merely claimed that there were forty-five head of buffalo in it, somewhere, provided they had not gone elsewhere.  We were forced to admit that if we ever found our game it would be as much by chance as by systematic hunting.  Some of the natives said we "might ride six months without ever seeing buffalo, let alone killing any!"

I assert once more that I was born lucky instead of rich.  If you don't believe it now, in two minutes more you will.

Just two days after we went into permanent camp and began to hunt, something happened that none of us had ever dared think could, by any concatenation of circumstances, happen to us at all.  We caught a buffalo bull alive!

I would like to change the subject just here, and leave your imagination struggling with a mighty (and mangy) old bison of the olden time, with lassos whizzing through the perturbed atmosphere, horses bracing back on their haunches, ropes singing like Aeolian harps, and chunks of mother earth flying heavenward from the heated hoofs of the terrible bull.  But I can't do it.  I cannot tell a lie - at least now without being found out in it; so the truth must prevail.  It was only a poor little bull calf, less than a month old - a young thing that couldn't leave his mother; but she was able to leave him, and although it was by no means a cold day, he got left.  His mother and her friends coolly ran away and left him in the bad-lands to shift for himself or die if he preferred.  We found him in a barren hollow between two high buttes, as lonesome looking a waif as ever was left to the mercies of a cold world.

When he saw us riding toward him, he started to run, but he was weak, and before he had gone a hundred yards we were up with him.  We sprang off and undertook to catch him in our arms, but he pluckily butted first one of us and then another; then he butted the mule Private Moran was riding, and was no generally lively that the cowboy who completed our party, Irvin Boyd, had to throw his rope over him, and haul him in.  He struggled and kicked as much as he was able, but the poor little fellow was so thin and so weak with hard running after his mother, that he was easily tied.

To all of us he was a genuine curiosity.  Instead of being dusty brown, like most buffaloes over a year old, he was a perfect blonde.  His thick, wavy coat was of a uniform bright sandy color, and "Sandy" be became from that moment.  Although we had not bargained for any live buffalo, the capture of such a prize called for our best efforts in prolonging its life.

The first difficulty was to get the little fellow to camp without injury.  We tried to lead him, but he was so backward about coming forward he would not lead at all.  As for driving him, one could as easily have driven a German chancellor.  Losing patience at last, George Hedley gathered the little bull up in his arms and started to carry him to our camp, across hill and hollow, a mile and a half!

The pluckiness of this maneuver astonished the little buff.  As his carrier strode manfully through the sagebrush, surprise gave way to passive admiration, and his struggles ceased.  But the calf had the best of it, and at the end of a hundred yards, George threw up his contract, and called for his horse.  With the blankets that were tied behind our saddles, he fixed up a very ingenious pad in the seat of his saddle, and laid the calf across it, with a pair of legs dangling on each side.  In this way, he and Private Moran carried the calf to camp, while Boyd and I hastened on to look for the other buffaloes that had so lately been in those hills.

The calf reached camp in good condition, and from that time on was perfectly tame.  It refused to drink condensed milk, so the next day we sent it down to the ranch where Mr. Phillips's milch cow nourished it one moment and tried to kick its brains out the next.  It came very near dying, and would have succeeded by for careful treatment.  Partly by good luck and partly by good management, we actually got the little beast safely to Miles City on our return and took it on to Washington, alive and in excellent health.  With an abundant supply of good food, over two gallons of good milk per day, it grew rapidly, and soon became quite fat.

In order that the little buffalo might brow to be a very big one, we sent him to a farm near Washington to fatten on fresh milk and blue grass.  He at voraciously and grew rapidly, but as has been the case with many other distinguished foreigners, life in Washington proved too rich for his blood.

About the middle of July he ate a great quantity of damp clover, and before anyone found it out, he was dead.  Of course we preserved his skin with great care, and mounted it, so that, even though we lost our live buffalo of great size (to be), we have for our group of mounted specimens a red-haired calf.  At the time of his death his age was three months, the height at the shoulders was two feet nine inches, and his weight was one hundred and twenty-one pounds.

Our field work in May and June of 1886 was really an Exploration for Buffalo, in fact as well as in name, and as such was a complete success.  Besides the catching of the calf, we got two old bulls; but, as we had feared, they had begun to shed their winter pelage, and consequently their skins were unfit to mount.  Their bodies and hindquarters were as bare as a turtle's back, but their heads and shoulders were well haired.  After taking their heads and complete skeletons, we resolved to hasten home at once and return in the fall to collect the specimens we desired.  Just as we were hauling in the skeletons, a cowboy came galloping up to our wagon to say that there was a bunch of eight buffalo within a mile and a half of us, and if we cared, we could easily kill some of them.  In declining this offer we begged the cowboys of that country to leave those buffalo unkilled until fall, when we would return.

From what we saw and heard, we felt well assured the buffalo then known to be on the high ground around the headwaters of the Big and Little Dry, the two Porcupine Creeks, and Sand Creek would neither be exterminated nor driven out of the country before September.  Accordingly, the 24th of that month saw me back in Miles City again, this time accompanied only by W. Harvey Brown, a scientific senior of the University of Kansas.