An excerpt from Railroads in the Days of Steam, which recalls how railroad development was perilous for buffalo herds:

“When the first railroads crossed the Mississippi River, the Great Plains were covered from Texas to Canada with vast herds of bison, or American buffalo. 

In the late 1860s and early 1870s, it seemed that everyone who followed the Union Pacific, the Kansas Pacific, and the Santa Fe railroads into the Prairie country wanted the buffalo killed off. Soldiers said they could not tame the hostile Prairie Indians as long as they could depend on the buffalo herds for food. Cattlemen wanted to run longhorns on the big natural pasture occupied by the buffalo.

Professional buffalo hunters were at work on the Plains in the years just after the Civil War providing meat for railroad construction camps and selling a few buffalo robes. But the slaughter of the buffalo did not begin in earnest until 1871, when word came of a market for buffalo hides in England.

A good hunter could shoot one hundred or more buffalo in the morning, then he would call his skinning crew to come up with the wagons. Hides were staked out on the prairie to dry. A well-cured hide was worth from $2.75 to $4, and many hunters earned more than $100 a day.

Passengers on the early trains could see large herds of buffalo, deer and antelope grazing calmly beside the tracks. They would open the car windows and shoot at the herds as the train sped along.”