Louisiana and Aaron Burr 349 



killed many deer and wild turkey and some black 

 bear and beaver, and there was an abundance of 

 breeding water fowl. Here and there were Indian 

 encampments, but not many, for the tribes had gone 

 westward to the great plains of what is now Kansas 

 to hunt the buffalo. Already buffalo and elk were 

 scarce in Missouri, and the party did not begin to 

 find them in any numbers until they reached the 

 neighborhood of what is now southern Nebraska. 



From there onward the game was found in vast 

 herds and the party began to come upon those char- 

 acteristic animals of the Great Plains which were as 

 yet unknown to white men of our race. The buffalo 

 and the elk had once ranged eastward to the Alle- 

 ghanies and were familiar to early wanderers 

 through the wooded wilderness; but in no part of 

 the East had their numbers ever remotely approached 

 the astounding multitudes in which they were found 

 on the Great Plains. The, curious prong-buck or 

 prong-horned antelope was unknown east of the 

 Great Plains; so was the blacktail, or mule deer, 

 which our adventurers began to find here and there 

 as they gradually worked their way northwestward ; 

 so were the coyotes, whose uncanny wailing after 

 nightfall varied the sinister baying of the gray 

 wolves ; so were many of the smaller animals, nota- 

 bly the prairie dogs, whose populous villages awak- 

 ened the lively curiosity of Lewis and Clark. 



In their note-books the two captains faithfully 

 described all these new animals and all the strange 

 sights they saw. They were men with no preten- 



