"The Buffalo Skinners", also known as "The Hills of Mexico" is a traditional American folk song. It tells the story of an 1873 buffalo hunt on the southern plains. 1873 is the year that professional buffalo hunters from Dodge City first entered the northern part of the Texas panhandle. The song was documented in print in John Lomax's Cowboy Songs, and Other Frontier Ballads in 1918. Versions of this song have been recorded by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliot and others. It is estimated that before 1800 there were more than 60,000,000 bison on the American and Canadian plains. By 1900 they had been hunted almost to extinction and the number is estimated to be around 300. The number in the 1870's was somewhere around 5,000,000. The bison were hunted for the skins. The carcases were left to rot and the bones were later collected for fertilizer. The working conditions described here are similar to the situation in "John Johanna", also in this section.