Of three acres
in front on the river and one in depth, and great part of it removed,
though the trees were in large quantities, and some of them as thick
as the body of a man.
Yet so great have been the ravages of man among these gentle creatures,
that elk are now very rarely found in the region, and the buffalo
have almost utterly disappeared from the face of the earth.
Just after the opening of the Northern Pacific Railway, in 1883,
a band of sixty buffaloes were heard of, far to the southward
of Bismarck, and a party was organized to hunt them.
The BOLD hunters afterwards boasted that they killed every one
of this little band of survivors of their race.
The men were now (in the middle of May) greatly troubled with boils,
abscesses, and inflamed eyes, caused by the poison of the alkali
that covered much of the ground and corrupted the water.
Here is an entry in the journal of May 11: -
"About five in the afternoon one of our men [Bratton], who had been
afflicted with boils and suffered to walk on shore, came running to
the boats with loud cries, and every symptom of terror and distress.
For some time after we had taken him on board he was so much out
of breath as to be unable to describe the cause of his anxiety;
but he at length told us that about a mile and a half below he had
shot a brown bear, which immediately turned and was in close pursuit
of him; but the bear being badly wounded could not overtake him.
Captain Lewis, with seven men, immediately went in search of him;
having found his track they followed him by the blood for a mile,
found him concealed in some thick brushwood, and shot him with two
balls through the skull.
