I 



THE BUFFALO OR BISON 119 



dians vied with the white hunters in destroying them. 

 Far more buffalo were destroyed than could possibly be 

 utilized, but this could not long continue. No longer did 

 the prairies thunder with the sound of thousands of gallop- 

 ing hoofs. The great herds were driven farther and farther 

 afield. Indians who formerly merely cut out the tongues 

 of their victims, if they took any part of the carcass at all, 

 now ahnost starved for want of food. In 1857 the Plains 

 Crees, inhabiting the country around the headwaters of the 

 Qu'Appelle River, decided that, on account of the rapid de- 

 struction of the buffalo by white men and half-breeds, 

 they would not permit them to travel in their country, or 

 travel through it except for the purpose of trading for their 

 dried meat, pemmican, or robes. In the following year the 

 Crees reported that between the North and the South Sas- 

 katchewan Rivers buffalo were very scarce. Hind's expedi- 

 tion in 1859 saw only one buffalo between Winnipeg and 

 Sandhill Lake, at the head of the Qu'Appelle near the South 

 Saskatchewan, where they encountered the first herd. 



Catlin has given some idea of the enormous numbers that 

 were killed during the first half of the nineteenth century. 

 In 1832 he stated that 150,000 to 200,000 robes were mar- 

 keted annually, which meant a slaughter of 2,000,000, or 

 perhaps 3,000,000 buffalo. So great was the destruction 

 that he prophesied its extermination within eight or ten 

 years ! Fremont about the same time also bore witness to 

 the appalling destruction. 



The death-knell was struck when the construction of the 

 L^nion Pacific Railway was begun at Omaha, in 1865. 

 Previous to the advent of the first transcontinental railway 

 the difficulties of marketing the results of the slaughter 

 served as a slight check on the rate of extermination, for, 

 although they were being killed out at a rate greatly in ex- 

 cess of their natural increase, they would have existed for 

 some years longer than the coming of the railroads and ad- 



