126 TRAVELS IN" THE EIGHTIES. 



horses, were all noisy proceedings. The horses are 

 ' rounded-iip, ? and each man catches the horse he 

 intends riding first, at a very early hour, and this is 

 the occasion for much noise and ' language.' There 

 were a hundred and twenty horses for the use of ten 

 ' boys/ only one of whom was a boy in the actual 

 sense of that term. My friend, the King, had mainly 

 come out, as one of a board of directors, to write a 

 report on the prospects of the cattle business generally 

 and of a local company in Wyoming Territory in 

 particular, and was, therefore, amassing information. 



Within a mile of us lay one of those extraordinary 

 natural bad-land ' formations which are so common 

 in Dakota and eastern Montana, known as Bates' s 

 Hole, which I visited alone on my Mexican mustang, 

 Pete. This remarkable place used in the early winter 

 to swarm with large game, which were easily far 

 too easily killed, and constituted a standing attrac- 

 tion to scores of hunters who were glad of the oppor- 

 tunity of laying in a supply of meat so easily. 



I need hardly say that at present, owing to the 

 hide-hunters and indiscriminate slaughterers, game 

 of any sort, always excepting antelope, has become 

 exceedingly scarce. The ground, as though in proof 

 of their former profusion, was littered in every direc- 

 tion round the edge of this depression with the shed 

 horns of elk or wapiti. Picture a deep valley or chasm, 

 with a tolerably flat bottom, that appears to have 

 sunk or subsided a thousand feet below the surround- 

 ing country, fifty miles in length and fifteen in width. 



