BEAVER—THEIR WAYS Lhe | 
ful hunter was honored and feted to the end of his days. 
In commercial value a white buffalo robe was worth one 
hundred ponies in those days and its possessor rated 
as high in his tribe asa Vanderbilt or Hetty Green does 
to Yankee land,in these days of fast pace and high pres- 
sure way of showing distance from the less fortunate. 
The early French traders claimed another wonder 
near the White Buffalo Butte. This was a petrified 
buffalo said to be in a quagmire and now invizsible but 
its location was well known to the early traders and 
trappers who had lived with the Mandan Indians, In 
the writer’s trapping days he frequently visited this 
creek for its otter but found no sign as to the petrified 
buff. The principal stream that meandered through the 
square topped buttes that have been the wonder to the 
successive peoples who have claimed them as their own. 
Hereabout, besides the wandering bands of buffalo that 
formerly found shelter here,it was a congenial home for 
the elk, antelope and black taildeer. The stream, also, 
was noted as the playground of a peculiar family of 
otters with their fur coats interspersed with black and 
white and known as the ‘‘spotted otter.” 
However, in or about the year 1880 nearly all the 
wild game had disappeared save a straggling deer now 
and then coming up from the Missouri bottoms or an 
occasional grouse that had emigrated from other parts. 
The first permanent settlers found that the game had 
been destroyed but wished it were not so. Measures 
were taken to discourage the hunter and trapper be- 
ginning with the owners of, land in warning off the wan- 
ton tresspasser. Some time during the summer of 
1900 an old beaver seer—judging from his sign—came 
