MATERIAL CULTURE. 21 



That the use of the horse made a great change in cul- 

 ture is quite probable. It must have stimulated 

 roving and the pursuit of the buffalo and discouraged 

 tendencies toward fixed abodes and agriculture. 



Buffalo Hunting. All Plains tribes seem to have 

 practised cooperative hunting in an organized military- 

 like 1 manner. This usually took the form of a surround 

 in which a large body of Indians on swift horses and 

 under the direction of skilled leaders rode round and 

 round a herd bunching them up and shooting down the 

 animals one by one. Stirring accounts of such hunts 

 have been left us by such eye-witnesses as Catlin, 

 James, and Grinnell. All tribes seem to have used this 

 method in summer and it was almost the only one 

 followed by the southern plains tribes. 



In winter, however, when the northern half of the 

 plains w r as often covered with snow, this method was 

 not practised. Alexander Henry, Maximilian, and 

 others, have described a favorite winter method of 

 impounding, or driving the herd into an enclosure. 

 Early accounts indicate that the Plains-Cree and 

 Assiniboine w r ere the most adept in driving into these 

 enclosures and may perhaps have introduced the method 

 among the Plains tribes. The Plains-Cree are but a 

 small outlying part of a very widely distributed group 

 of Cree, the culture of wmose main body seems quite 

 uniform. Now 7 , even the Cree east of Hudson Bay, 

 Canada, use a similar method for deer, and since there 

 is every reason to believe that the Plains-Cree are but 

 a colony of the larger body to the east, it seems fair to 



