the throat and cheeks being left on the hide; but in skinning old bulls, on whose heads the skin was very thick and tough, the whole head was left unskinned, to save labor and time.  The skin of the neck was severed in a circle around the neck, just behind the ears.  It is these huge heads of bushy brown hair, looking, at a little distance, quite black, in sharp contrast with the ghastly whiteness of the perfect skeletons behind them, which gives such a weird and ghostly appearance to the lifeless prairies of Montana where the bone-gatherer has not yet done his perfect work.  The skulls of the cows and young buffaloes are as clean and bare as if they had been carefully macerated, and bleached by a skilled osteologist.

[Illustration:  FIG. 1.  A DEAD BULL.  From a photograph by L. A. Huffman.]

[Illustration:  FIG. 2.  BUFFALO SKINNERS AT WORK.  From a photograph by L. A. Huffman.]

The opening cuts having been made, the broad-pointed “skinning-knife” was duly sharpened, and with it the operator fell to work to detach the skin from the body in the shortest possible time.  The tail was always skinned and left on the hide.  As soon as the skin was taken off it was spread out on a clean, smooth, and level spot of ground, and stretched to its fullest extent, inside uppermost.  On the northern range, very few skins were “pegged out,” i. e., stretched thoroughly and held by means of wooden pegs driven through the edges of the skin into the earth.  It was practiced to a limited extent on the southern range during the latter part of the great slaughter, when buffaloes were scarce and time abundant.  Ordinarily, however, there was no time for pegging, nor were pegs available on the range to do the work with.  A warm skin stretched on the curly buffalo-grass, hair side down, sticks to the ground of itself until it has ample time to harden.  On the northern range the skinner always cut the initials of his outfit in the thin subcutaneous muscle which was always found adhering to the skin on each side, and which made a permanent and very plain mark of ownership.

In the south, the traders who bought buffalo robes on the range sometimes rigged up a rude press, with four upright posts and a huge lever, in which robes that had been folded into a convenient size were pressed into bales, like bales of cotton.  These could be transported by wagon much more economically than could loose robes.  An illustration of this process is given in an article by Theodore R. Davis, entitled “The Buffalo Range,” in Harper’s Magazine for January, 1869, Vol. xxxviii, p. 163.  The author describes the process as follows: 

“As the robes are secured, the trader has them arranged in lots of ten each, with but little regard for quality other than some care that particularly fine robes do not go too many in one lot.  These piles are then pressed into a compact bale by means of a rudely constructed affair composed of saplings and a chain.”