Those countless numbers of buffalo that passed through our area came to their end either through killing by hide skinners, sporting slaughter where they were shot from moving trains, or just plain old natural attrition. Their carcasses left to lay on the prairie, their skeletons soon bleached in the hot sun after scavenging birds and animals had picked them clean.
When settlers appeared, they had no opportunity to earn much income from their homesteads the first year and could earn a few dollars by collecting bones and selling them for around $8 per ton. In the WPA files found in the state historical society, we know a market for bones existed in Ransom County. Mrs. Alice Beard reported that “about 1888, bone collectors gathered many loads of buffalo bones which were sold in Sheldon and shipped east. There were so many buffalo wallows, and the ground was covered by bones near these.”
