396 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



plains depend, the year round, solely upon the slaughter of 

 buffalo for food, covering, and in a great measure, implements, 

 and then put this together, with the consideration that 

 probably not more than one out of twenty of the animals 

 slain is consumed, beyond the mere hide or hump, by these 

 thriftless and wasteful people, some estimate may be formed 

 of the aggregate increase necessary to keep up a supply for 

 the demand in this one quarter. 



The inroads of our own race upon them, though great, 

 are as yet comparatively insignificant. We are merely 

 guided by the utilities, and have slaughtered them rather 

 as objects of necessary food, than of commercial interchange 

 and profit. The wealth and dignity of the Indian warrior, 

 on the other hand, is nearly proportioned to the number of 

 buffalo robes he can afford to dispose of to the traders, and 

 therefore this article is to him the representative of value. 

 Hence he follows upon the track of the migratory herd, and 

 when undisturbed, continues to slay them with the sole and 

 improvident reference to the value of the skins at the 

 nearest trading post; while the object of food, amidst its 

 reeking abundance, is merely an incidental one. As it may 

 chance he merely cuts out some tit bit from the individual 

 slain, or leaves it, after stripping the skin, to the wolves who 

 follow faithfully in the wake of their sure purveyor. 



The extent to which this reckless massacre is, and has 

 been habitually carried by the prairie Indians, can hardly 

 be computed ; yet we have the strange and significant fact 

 that they have among them no tradition even of an appreciable 

 diminution in the numbers of the buffalo thus wantonly 

 slaughtered by them from remotest periods, which antedate 

 the first appearance of the white man upon their plains with his 

 sulphurous and panic-spreading engines of destruction. From 

 this ominous event the tribes date those fatal refluxes in 

 the stated periods and courses of migration of the herds, 

 which have been attended by most disastrous famines among 



