MONAECHS IN EXILE 81 



could no more count them than you could drops of 

 water in a hurry." 



" Well, so it was with the Buffaloes ; there were 

 never any large fourfoots on earth to equal them in 

 numbers, and even in my day we have true records of 

 a single herd, of no less than 4,000,000 head. A friend 

 of mine once, riding on a train, passed for more than 

 one hundred miles through a single herd. It was dan- 

 gerous, I can tell you, for the trains, and they often 

 had to stop to let the Buffaloes pass by. At this time 

 the Buffaloes were then in two great herds, the north- 

 ern and the southern. Then these began to melt away 

 as great snowballs do in the sun. Railroads meant an 

 easy way to reach the Buffaloes, an easy way to trans- 

 port the skins ; for it was the skin more than the 

 meat that was desired. The engine whistle sounded 

 the exile of this monarch, and for ten years his kingdom, 

 shrinking and shifting, was a battlefield strewn with 

 skinned carcasses. Next, the horns were gathered, and 

 finally the bleached bones themselves were carried 

 away to be ground into fertilizer, and thus make the 

 obliteration complete. 



" During a few years more there were stragglers here 

 and there, and, in 1890, when I was going westward 

 from the Black Hills in Wyoming, I shot the beast 

 whose head and skin we have here now. I said, ' I 

 will take this eastward when I have a home again, that 

 my grandchildren may believe that such beasts lived, 

 and that their grandfather knew them on their native 

 plains, for by that time this king will be in exile.' It 

 has all happened sooner than I thought. 



" Now a few, a mere handful, twenty-four perhaps in 



