384 BUFFALO LAND. 



Once, during our stay in Kansas, we were directed 

 by a hunter to a spot where he had seen portions of 

 an immense skeleton, and there found one vertebra 

 only remaining of a mastodon. It afterward trans- 

 pired that, shortly before our trip, some Indians had 

 passed Fort Dodge with the large bones lashed on 

 their ponies, taking them to a medicine-lodge on the 

 Arkansas, to be ground up into good medicine. They 

 stated that the bones belonged to one of the big buf- 

 faloes which roamed over the plains during the times 

 of their fathers. At that period, the Happy Hunt- 

 ing Ground was on earth, but was afterward re- 

 moved beyond the clouds by the Great Spirit, to 

 punish his children for bad conduct. 



Many reasons, besides dim traditions, exist for the 

 belief that those mysterious nations whose paths we 

 have been able to trace from the Atlantic west, and 

 from the Pacific east, pushed inward until they met 

 in the middle of the continent. The numerous 

 mounds in the Western States, with the curious 

 weapons and vessels which they contain, show that 

 the nations then existing, and migrating toward the 

 interior, were not only powerful but essentially un- 

 like our modern Indians. To instance but one illus- 

 tration of this, there are near Titusville, Pa., ancient 

 oil wells, which bear unmistakable evidences of hav- 

 ing been dug and worked by the mound-builders. 

 Thus they speculated in oil, which of itself is a token 

 of high civilization. 



Coming east from the Pacific coast, we find exist- 

 ing on the very edge of the desolate interior ex- 

 tensive ruins of ancient cities, of whose builders even 



