LET US GO AFIELD 



shot for sport and sport ends soon where one must 

 stop when a ton of meat falls before one well-placed 

 bullet. The straggling settler on the edge of things 

 kept meat for his winter supply, but he could not 

 help killing "just one more" and he left it lying 

 where it fell. A man on Plum Creek, near Great 

 Bend, Kansas, long made a living by supplying food 

 to westbound wagon trains and he sold nothing but 

 buffalo tongues. The rest rotted. 



The Indian did not waste ; the white man did noth- 

 ing but waste. The measure of his destruction is 

 colossal. A pile of buffalo bones higher than any 

 house in town and some hundreds of yards in length 

 lay waiting shipment in one Kansas town in the 

 seventies. Out of this one station there was once 

 billed a trainload of cars loaded with sacked tips of 

 buffalo horns alone. This was part, and only part, 

 of the flotsam of the southern range after the skin- 

 hunters had left it. There is no measuring of these 

 figures. 



The result of it all was that we took the fight all 

 out of Brother Indian. Left without a living, he 

 became pacifico, like prisoners of old Spain, before 

 he became incommunicado on the reservations. 

 Then we finished our railroads and followed them 

 with farms, many of which were bought with the 

 price of buffalo hides or buffalo bones. 



128 



