THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS 69 



herd stampeded across the ice of the Qu Appelle val 

 ley. In some places the ice broke. When the thaw 

 came, a continuous line of drowned buffalo drifted 

 past the fur post for three days. Mr. MacDonell 

 counted up to seven thousand three hundred and 

 sixty: there his patience gave out. And the number 

 of the drowned was only a fringe of the travelling 

 herd. 



To-day where are the buffalo ? A few in the public 

 parks of the United States and Canada. A few of 

 Colonel Bedsons old herd on Lord Strathcona s farm 

 in Manitoba and the rest on a ranch in Texas. The 

 railway more than the pot-hunter was the power that 

 exterminated the buffalo. The railway brought the 

 settlers; and the settlers fenced in the great ranges 

 where the buffalo could have galloped away from all the 

 pot-hunters of earth combined. Without the railway 

 the buffalo could have resisted the hunter as they re 

 sisted Indian hunters from time immemorial ; but when 

 the iron line cut athwart the continent the herds only 

 stampeded from one quarter to rush into the fresh 

 dangers of another. 



Much has been said about man s part in the destruc 

 tion of the buffalo; and too much could not be said 

 against those monomaniacs of slaughter who went into 

 the buffalo-hunt from sheer love of killing, hiring the 

 Indians to drive a herd over an embankment or into 

 soft snow, while the valiant hunters sat in some shel 

 tered spot, picking off the helpless quarry. This was 

 not hunting. It was butchery, which none but hungry 

 savages and white barbarians practised. The plains 

 man who is the true type of the buffalo-runner en 

 tered the lists on a fair field with the odds a hundred 



