50 SAND STREAMS. 



Thus, Colonel Dodge, gives an account oi an ac- 

 cident of this kind, by which two of his soldiers lost 

 their lives. It seems they were fishing with a seine- 

 net in the South Platte river, at a place where the water 

 was apparently only two or three feet deep ; when sud- 

 denly three of the men furthest out from the bank went 

 down. "One of them," the Colonel tells us, "was 

 caught by a comrade and saved; but the others were 

 never seen again, in life or in death. The sand never 

 gives up its dead." Moreover, as Colonel Dodge 

 explains, "a man caught in these moving sand waves 

 seems to lose even the power of struggling." * The 

 destruction of wild animals in the same way, while 

 attempting to cross these streams, has often been very 

 great. Indeed, "as late as 1867, 2000 buffalo perished 

 in the quicksands of the Platte river," as we were told 

 on the authority of the well-known zoologist Mr. "W. 

 B. Tegetmeier, in a recent article " On the Extermina- 

 tion of the Bison. " f These catastrophes to buffalo 

 were common in former days; and Sir George Simp- 

 son, Governor of the Hudson Bay Company, as well 

 as other well-known travellers, have left accounts of 

 cases where enormous numbers of these animals, 

 sometimes amounting to many thousands, perished in 

 this way, either by getting caught in quicksands, or 

 mired under such circumstances that escape was impos- 

 sible. As we know, animals frequently get mired in 

 boggy places, even on English farms, notwithstanding 

 the care that is taken to drain, or fence off, unsafe 

 spots, and would perish but for man's assistance; but 



* The Hunting Grounds of the Great West, by Colonel Richard 

 J. Dodge, U.S.A., 1877, p. 25. 



$ See this article in Illustrated London News of June n, 1892. 



