Game: Demise of Game

By the early nineteenth century, game and fowl were dwindling east of the Mississippi. The buffalo were already gone, and bears disappeared from New England in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, bear survived only in the southern and western areas of the United States, where the human population was small. Vast herds of buffalo continued to roam the Great Plains, but during the nineteenth century hunters and sportsmen slaughtered them in huge numbers. By 1891 only 540 buffalo were known to have survived.