In 1882 there were, so it is estimated by men who were in the country, no fewer than five thousand white hunters and skinners on the northern range.  Lieut.  J. M. T. Partello declares that “a cordon of camps, from the Upper Missouri, where it bends to the west, stretched toward the setting sun as far as the dividing line of Idaho, completely blocking in the great ranges of the Milk River, the Musselshell, Yellowstone, and the Marias, and rendering it impossible for scarcely a single bison to escape through the chain of sentinel camps to the Canadian northwest.  Hunters of Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado drove the poor hunted animals north, directly into the muzzles of the thousands of repeaters ready to receive them. * * * Only a few short years ago, as late as 1883, a herd of about seventy-five thousand crossed the Yellowstone River a few miles south of here [Fort Keogh], scores of Indians, pot-hunters, and white butchers on their heels, bound for the Canadian dominions, where they hoped to find a haven of safety.  Alas! not five thousand of that mighty mass ever lived to reach the British border line.”

It is difficult to say (at least to the satisfaction of old hunters) which were the most famous hunting grounds on the northern range.  Lieutenant Partello states that when he hunted in the great triangle bounded by the three rivers, Missouri, Musselshell, and Yellowstone, it contained, to the best of his knowledge and belief, two hundred and fifty thousand buffaloes.  Unquestionably that region yielded an immense number of buffalo robes, and since the slaughter thousands of tons of bones have been gathered up there.  Another favorite locality was the country lying between the Powder River and the Little Missouri, particularly the valleys of Beaver and O’Fallon Creeks.  Thither went scores of “outfits” and hundreds of hunters and skinners from the Northern Pacific Railway towns from Miles City to Glendive.  The hunters from the towns between Glendive and Bismarck mostly went south to Cedar Creek and the Grand and Moreau Rivers.  But this territory was also the hunting ground of the Sioux Indians from the great reservation farther south.

Thousands upon thousands of buffaloes were killed on the Milk and Marias Rivers, in the Judith Basin, and in northern Wyoming.

The method of slaughter has already been fully described under the head of “the still-hunt,” and need not be recapitulated.  It is some gratification to know that the shocking and criminal wastefulness which was so marked a feature of the southern butchery was almost wholly unknown in the north.  Robes were worth from $1.50 to $3.50, according to size and quality, and were removed and preserved with great care.  Every one hundred robes marketed represented not more than one hundred and ten dead buffaloes, and even this small percentage of loss was due to the escape of wounded animals which afterward died and were devoured by the wolves.  After the skin was taken off the hunter or skinner stretched it carefully upon the ground, inside uppermost, cut his initials in the adherent subcutaneous muscle, and left it until the season for hauling in the robes, which was always done in the early spring, immediately following the hunt.