302 Life-histories of Northern Animals 



incompatible with any degree of possession by white men and 

 with the higher productivity of the soil. Therefore, he had to 

 go. He may still exist in small herds in our parks and forest 

 reserves. He may even achieve success as a domestic animal, 

 filling the gaps where the old-time cattle fail. But the Buffalo 

 of the wild Plains is gone forever; and we who see those times 

 in the glamour of romance can only bow the head and sadly 

 say, " It had to be. He served his time, but now his time is 

 past." 



But he leaves behind him a lasting monument. Who that 

 knows the West has not seen the game-trail grow into an 

 Indian trail; the Indian trail into a pack-trail; the pack- 

 trail into a white man's road, that in turn is the pilot of the iron 

 horse ? The reason is simple — it is the easiest and shortest 

 way through the hills that can be selected by long experience 

 and thorough knowledge of the country. This idea, proclaimed 

 by Hamlin Garland years ago, has been worked out for the 

 Buffalo by A. B. Hulbert in his "Historic Highways of 

 America."^* He points out that the Buffalo first planned the 

 route through the Alleghanies by which the white man entered 

 and possessed the Mississippi Valley. 



" It is very wonderful [he says] that the Buffalo's instinct 

 should have found the very best courses across a continent upon 

 whose thousand rivers such great black forests were thickly 

 strung. Yet it did, and the tripod of the white man has proven 

 it, and human intercourse will move constantly on paths first 

 marked by the Buffalo. It is interesting that he found the 

 strategic passageways through the mountains; it is also inter- 

 esting that the Buffalo marked out the most practical paths 

 between the heads of our rivers, paths that are closely followed 

 to-day by the Pennsylvania, Baltimore and Ohio, Chesapeake 

 and Ohio, Cleveland Terminal and Valley, Wabash, and other 

 great railroads. 



"A rare instance of this: The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad 

 between Grafton and Parkersburg (W. Va.) has followed the 



^ Prospectus to Hist. Highways Amer., Vol. I, Part II. Paths of the Gr Game 

 Animals, 1902. 



