392 WILD ANIMALS. 



children, becomes the order of the day. The United States have had 

 this fact instilled into them by several Indian wars ; and Canada in 

 the olden days, and even lately in the Riel rebellion, has also been 

 taught a lesson. That the lot of the Indian is a hard one, and is 

 made still harder through, the rapacity and villany of certain 

 oflScials with whom they have to deal, is beyond question, but the un- 

 limited slaughter caused by the absence of Government protection, 

 and consequent annihilation of the buffalo, has enforced a problem 

 on the colonists of the new world that taxes the efforts of the 

 wisest statesmen to solve satisfactorily. But in this instance, 

 time is all that is required, for the race of the red man, the 

 inhabitant of the American wilderness, is a doomed one. 



Captain Butler,^ in describing these native Indians whose 

 homes have been upon the wild, treeless, ocean-like prairies from 

 time immemorial, and whose extinction is now probably close at 

 at hand, writes : — 



"Back, since ages at whose birth we can only guess, but 

 which in all human probability go deeper into the past than the 

 reign of Arab in Yemen, or Kirghis in Turkestan, the wild red 

 man has roamed these wastes : back into that dark night which 

 hangs for ever over all we know or shall know of early 

 America. ' The time before the white man came : ' what a 

 measureless eternity lies hidden under the words ! This prairie 

 was here when the stones of the pyramid were unhewn, and 

 the site of Babylon was a river meadow — here as it is to-day, 

 treeless, desolate, and storm-swept. But when and whence 

 came the wild denizens of the waste ? Who shall say ? Fifty 

 writers have broached their various theories, a hundred solutions 

 have been offered. The missionary claims them as the lost 

 tribes of Israel, one ethnologist finds in them a likeness to 

 the Tartar, and another sees the Celtic eye, another the Roman 

 nose, another traces them back to Japan, or China, or Aus- 

 tralasia ; the whole world is scarcely large enough to give them room 

 for their speculations. And what say we ? Nothing ; or if aught, 

 a conjecture perhaps more vague or shadowy than the rest. It 

 has seemed to us when watching this strange, wild, hunter, this 

 3 " The Wild JSTorth Land," 1873. 



