THE BISON. 393 



keen, untutored scholar of nature, this human creature that 

 sickens beneath our civilization, and dies amidst our prosperity — 

 it has seemed to us that he was of a race older and more 

 remote than our own, a stock coeval with a shadowy age — a 

 remnant perchance of an earlier creation -jvhich has vanished 

 from the earth, preserved here in these wilds — a waif flung by 

 the surge of time to these later ages of our own 



" So much for the earlier existence'of the human dweller on the 

 prairie ; to us he is but a savage — the impediment to our progress 

 — ^the human counterpart of forests which have to be felled, 

 mountains which must be tunnelled, rivers whose broad currents 

 are things to conquer ; he is an obstacle, and he must be swept 

 away. To us it matters not whether his race dwelt here before 

 a Celt had raised a Druid altar. The self-styled heirs to all the 

 centuries reck little of such things." 



Side by side with these Indians, legions of the buS'alo have also 

 dwelt, and the fate of these twin owners of the soil appear so 

 closely bound up together, that by the extermination of the one 

 the doom of the other has been sounded, and, as Captain Butler 

 remarks, the Indian is aware of this himself. 



" ' What shall we do ? ' said a young Sioux warrior to an 

 American officer on the Upper Missouri some fifteen years ago. 

 ' What shall we do ? The buffalo is our only friend. When he 

 goes, all is over with the Dacotatis. I speak thus to you because, 

 like me, you are a brave.' 



" It was little wonder that he called the buffalo his only friend. 

 Its skin gave him a house, its robe a blanket and a bed, its un- 

 dressed hide a boat, its short, curved horn a powder-flask, its 

 meat his daily food, its sinew a string for his bow, its leather a 

 lariot for his horse, a saddle, bridle, rein, and bit. Its tail 

 formed an ornament for his tent, its inner skin a book in which 

 to sketch the brave deeds of his life, the ' medicine-robe ' of his 

 history. House, boat, food, bed, and covering, every want from 

 infancy to age, and after hfe itself had passed, wrapt in his 

 buffalo robe the red man waited for the dawn." 



The buffalo being so necessary to their well-being, it is only 

 natural to think that when the herds showed signs .of decreasing 



