128 CONSERVATION OF CANADIAN WILD LIFE 



as he could make out from careful inquiry, never been seen 

 many miles north of these low points. 



The attitude of the Indians towards the buffalo is indi- 

 cated by the evidence of Inspector H. A. Conroy of the De- 

 partment of Indian Affairs before the Senate committee 

 in 1907. He says: ''You do not require to enforce the law 

 to protect the buffalo. The Indians will not kill them. 

 They want to preserve them as much as any one else. The 

 Indians think if the buffalo are gone they will have nothing 

 left. The Wood Crees are benefiting by the errors of the 

 Indians south of the Saskatchewan. They know that the 

 buffalo are all gone south of them and they want to protect 

 the wood buffalo." Sergeant R. W. MacLeod of the 

 R. N. W. M. Police, reporting on his long patrol from 

 Fort Vermilion to the mouth of the Hay River on Great 

 Slave Lake, in December, 1910, corroborated Mr. Conroy's 

 statement. He states: "The Indians I met were famihar 

 with the regulations for the protection of the buffalo and 

 protested strongly against a white man being permitted to 

 kill any. The Indians told me the western range of the buf- 

 falo is thirty-five to forty miles east of Buffalo Lake and 

 there is certainly no feed for them in any part of the coun- 

 try I passed over." 



In 1911 the Department of the Interior appointed Mr. 

 G. A. MuUoy to investigate the condition and protection 

 of the buffalo herds, and to obtain information in regard to 

 them under the supervision of Mr. A. J. Bell, government 

 agent at Fort Smith. 



Mr. Mulloy, who resigned in 1913, submitted several re- 

 ports, the most comprehensive of which is contained in the 

 report of the director of forestry for the year 1914 (Appen- 

 dix No. 8, pp. 129-133). This report gives a good account 

 of the regions occupied by the buffalo and their habits. In 

 a letter of December 2, 1916, Mr. R. H. Campbell, director 

 of forestry, under whose jurisdiction the supervision of these 



