The over-abundance of buffalo, in addition to the warlike Indians, was an obstacle to be overcome before the settler could establish frontier homes.  When the transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific, was completed in 1869 and it became possible to ship hides from the Great Plains to eastern markets for a profit, the tremendous slaughter of buffalo in 1870's and 1880's began.

It was in 1875 that young H. C. Justin, later known as "Uncle Charlie," and two companions came to the Wilbarger County areas as buffalo hunters.  It was free country, and they considered a general area extending from about where e Harrold is not located to  vicinity of the Crowell area in Foard County as their hunting ground.  Their headquarters camp was on Paradise Creek not far from the Eagle Spring (Vernon) site.  Buffalo hunting for Charlie Justin, a deputy U S Marshall of later years who also served as city and county official in Vernon, proved to be a life of hardships with little or not remuneration's.  He spent the winter of 1876 - 1876 in this area hunting without profit.

He and his companions killed hundreds of buffalo only to have the hides washed away or ruined by a flood. The winter was distinctly devoid of profit, although the price of $1.25 a hide had been promised.  Add to the loss of the entire winter's stock of hides days of walking barefooted over the prairie and horses being stolen - and the idea of the work being glamorous disappears.

It has been noted that in the Streit settlement in the western part of the county there is a spot of ground on which at one time great piles of buffalo hides where stacked to be hauled to market.  Rains set in and rotted the hides before they could be moved out.  For years nothing would grow on that land.

Hunting camps often numbered about four men, with two as hunters and two as cooks and skinners.  Once in a while a skinner was allowed to try his hand at shooting.  When a heard was found, the killers would set up their guns in a "stand"  as close as possible and downwind of the herd.  When a stand was impossible, the hunt progressed on a trail and shoot form, the hunter following a wandering band of buffalo, shooting at intervals as the opportunity presented itself.  The buffalo on the outskirts of the herd were shot first.  A day's killing would run from 30 to 40 buffalo, according to Justin.  Another report was that a good hunter would kill as many as 100 buffalo in an hour or two, and from one to two thousand a season.

After skinning, the hides were pegged down to dry and later stacked. Hides where hauled first in wagons pulled by oxen to the railroad, and later replacement of the oxen by horses or mules speeded up the freighting time.

For several years after the early settler came, the gathering and freighting of buffalo bones was a thriving business.  Bones were freighted to Gainesville where they brought $20 to $25 per ton.  From the railroad terminus transportation companies would carry settlers to their destination in what was know as the "buffalo wagon" and on the return trip would carry loads of bones to be shipped east for fertilizer.

H.J. Farnham, another man who later made his home in Wilbarger County, also hunted buffalo in this country as early as October 1877.  It was in September of that year when Farnham left Denison, Texas, in the company of W. R. McCarty and W. E. Perciville.  On October 5, they camped on Paradise Creek after they had visited Brown Ranch on Beaver Creek.  They saw their first buffalo and crossed Pease River at Antelope Springs.  Farnham made his first kill that day.

In 1876, before Farnham was here, G. W. Benton and his buffalo hunting associates were in this area.  One of his companions who had grown up on a farm in Kentucky, apparently looked beyond the opportunity at hand with keen perception of the future of the county.  Benton told the story in an article published by him 14 years later in his first issue of The Vernon Monthly Review in 1890.

"In the winter and spring of 1876 the writer had a buffalo hunter companion by the name of Briggs, a Kentuckian by birth and raised to manhood upon a farm in Bluegrass state, and who, though and enthusiastic hunter and an expert manipulator of Sharp's big .44, never departed from his raising, but continually talked of farming and expressed his belief that northwest Texas would at some time become a great agricultural section.  He never seemed to tire of examining the soil and discussing its fertile qualities, and often declared his intention of selecting a piece of land on which he would settle when hunting was done - when the buffalo had gone, to await the advent of civilization and "the man with the hoe."  In the spring when we were camped on one of the tributaries of Pease River, in the western portion of the territory with which this sketch has to do, he undertook a practical experiment by spading up a small patch of ground, fencing it with poles and planting there such seeds as he had at hand, i.e., corn and oats from our stock of horse feed and navy beans from our larder.  The spring was an early, and seasonable one, and 'Briggs' crop, as we called it, did splendidly and looked as well up to the first of May as any of the same sort it has since been our lot to behold, but none of us had a chance to see it mature; the buffalo left that section and with them the hunters.  Briggs met the tragic end that befell so many of the brave and generous, though rash and impulsive frontiersmen and never established himself, as was his desire, as one of the first farmers in northwest Texas, but if his spirit could wander back to the old hunting grounds it would find on the very spot, perhaps where 'Brigs" crop was planted fourteen years ago, or in close proximity to it, a field of wheat unexcelled by any to be found throughout the wide expanse of the American continent."