Excerpt from Louisiana Conservationist, Vol. 39: March/April, 1987 Fifty years ago, that's the way things were heading. These native American animals, and many others, were hanging on only in the most isolated places, their numbers and ranges drastically reduced after 300 years during which American settlers had harvested timber, drained marshes, and plowed and fenced the plains without much thought for the effects on wildlife. Many birds and animals had been decimated by years of uncontrolled hunting to supply commercial markets with fur and feathers, meat, and oil. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.