3 o 4 HOOFED ANIMALS 



supplied him with warm robes wherewith to defy the frosts 

 of winter ; and gave him the flexible, yet almost impene- 

 trable, shields with which he could ward off the arrows, 

 spears, and even the bullets of his enemies. It is true that 

 the red man, being only a few steps beyond the absolute 

 savage, had no idea of preserving a creature so invaluable 

 to himself, and that he destroyed it wherever he could find 

 it. He organised hunting parties and killed thousands of 

 Bisons annually merely for their skins or for the most deli- 

 cate parts of the meat, leaving the rest to the beasts and the 

 birds. 



The destruction of a large number of Bisons at the 

 same time was always facilitated by their strange lack of 

 perception of danger. Once a herd stampeded, nothing 

 could turn aside the compact mass of plunging beasts, 

 galloping with the head close to the ground and the tail 

 high up in the air not even a yawning precipice or a bog 

 that was a trap for pounding feet. The fate of the leaders 

 was no warning to those in the rear. The Indians, by 

 means of a cordon, often drove a whole herd to destruction, 

 not using one-tenth part of the dead, but leaving the 

 carcasses to decay. The herds always moved southwards 

 from two to four hundred miles as winter approached, 

 and during these migrations their numbers would be sadly 

 depleted by quicksands, bogs, river-fords, or treacherous ice. 



No quadrupeds of any size ever congregated in such 

 immense numbers as the American Bison. To find a 

 parallel one must go to the Rodents ; but a swarm of 

 lemmings or hamsters is a very different matter to a 

 multitude of ponderous animals such as the Bison. It 

 was no mere figure of speech to say that the prairies 

 were blackened with Bisons. Only as far back as the 

 early seventies a train on the Kansas Pacific Railway 

 passed through a herd for a distance of over a hundred 

 miles. It was the construction of the transcontinental 

 railways that finally spelt almost total extinction of the 

 Bison. The white man ought to have checked the Indian 

 and imposed limits upon the destruction of so important 

 an animal ; but he outrivalled the savage in the work of 

 extermination. In 1872-74 no less than four millions and 



