i6o Reminiscences of 



The building of the Union Pacific Railroad settled 

 the question of annual migration. It had been the 

 habit for unknown centuries of the buffalo to annually 

 migrate back and forth over an immense grazing field 

 eighteen hundred miles in extent, from the fertile 

 lands of Texas to the inclement regions of British Co- 

 lumbia. Once their field of grazing extended from the 

 Atlantic Coast to the heights of the Pacific Sierras, 

 covering more than three quarters of the country, ex- 

 cepting Alaska. The extension of settlements from the 

 East gradually circumscribed their circuit, but nothing 

 more sudden or deadly ever paused their feet or dis- 

 tracted their sight than those glittering bands of end- 

 less steel across their way. 



Even between the great arms of the Mississippi and 

 Missouri rivers they long held sway, and seventy years 

 ago, when Catlin, the Indian painter, rested at Fort 

 Omaha — ^which George Francis Train some years ago 

 said was the geographical centre of the Union from 

 east to west, now removed to San Francisco by the out- 

 stretching Aleutian Islands, — ^he said the buflfalo were 

 so plentiful that a band of Pawnee Indians, invited by 

 the officers at Fort Omaha, went out and two days 

 after brought in a thousand buff'alo tongues for a 

 barrel of whisky. This whisky, i. e., alcohol, was prob- 

 ably seven eighths water from the muddy Missouri, 

 adapted with hot compounds by the kind considera- 

 tion of the traders to the uncultured Indian taste. 

 And yet, at one blow, the steel rail appearing, said to 

 the stupid and uncomprehending buffalo. Stay, you 

 cannot go around, and in a few years you and your 

 kind of countless numbers, which have so long held the 

 country in vantage, from before history began, shall 



