3896 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
plains depend, the year round, solely upon the slaughter of 
buffalo for food, covering, and in a great measure, implements, 
and then put this together, with the consideration that 
probably not more than one out of twenty of the animals 
slain is consumed, beyond the mere hide or hump, by these 
thriftless and wasteful people, some estimate may be formed 
of the aggregate increase necessary to keep up a supply for 
the demand in this one quarter. 
The inroads of our own race upon them, though great, . 
are as yet comparatively insignificant. We are merely 
guided by the utilities, and have slaughtered them rather 
as objects of necessary food, than of commercial interchange 
and profit. The wealth and dignity of the Indian warrior, 
on the other hand, is nearly proportioned to the number of 
buffalo robes he can afford to dispose of to the traders, and 
therefore this article is to him the representative of value. 
Hence he follows upon the track of the migratory herd, and 
when undisturbed, continues to slay them with the sole and 
improvident reference to the value of the skins at the 
nearest trading post; while the object of food, amidst its 
reeking abundance, is merely an incidental one. As it may 
chance he merely cuts out some tit bit from the individual 
slain, or leaves it, after stripping the skin, to the wolves who 
follow faithfully in the wake of their sure purveyor. 
The extent to which this reckless massacre is, and has 
been habitually carried by the prairie Indians, can hardly 
be computed; yet we have the strange and significant fact 
that they have among them no tradition even of an appreciable 
diminution in the numbers of the buffalo thus wantonly 
slaughtered by them from remotest periods, which antedate 
the first appearance of the white man upon their plains with his 
sulphurous and panic-spreading engines of destruction. From 
this ominous event the tribes date those fatal refluxes in 
the stated periods and courses of migration of the herds, 
which have been attended by most disastrous famines among 
