BUFFALO AND MUSK OX 
settlers are poor and without much sentiment. They find a stock of fresh 
meat which saves them from killing their own beasts, and hides and horns 
are at all times a saleable commodity. When, therefore, railways enter a 
new country teeming with game, the fate of the wild animals is sealed, 
unless there exist large tracts, as in East Africa, which are useless to 
farmers, and which may be set apart as government reserves for the sole 
preservation of game. 
On all the farms of East Africa the settlers are killing the game to-day 
not in hundreds but in tens of thousands, and the government is as power- 
less to prevent them doing so as the American government was to stop 
the killing of the buffalo and the wapiti, or the British and Dutch govern- 
ments to stay the fearful slaughter in the plains of South Africa. History 
goes on repeating itself, and the destruction of the buffalo would just as 
surely take place in the year 1914 as in 1875-86 were the conditions the 
same. There are now very few places in the world where big game is abun- 
dant, and though the traveller may be faced with long and arduous journeys 
to reach them he is sure of finding the wild animals when he gets to the 
far north-west of Canada and the interior parts of Central Asia and Africa. 
With the present rapid rate of railway construction, which is now pushing 
every year deeper and deeper into the game sanctuaries, it is only reason- 
able to think that at the end of this time the big game hunter and lover of 
wild beasts will be hard put to it to find any untrodden wastes where he 
can find things as they used to be; for by that time all the game that is left 
will, for the most part, be in government reserves — that is to say, if the 
governments of the various countries do not act as they generally do — 
too late. 
The destruction of the buffalo was therefore due to the inevitable law 
of human progress, if it may so be called, and no sentimental considerations 
would ever have prevented it. 
To-day the last remnants of the millions of buffalo are found in the 
woods of Mackenzie, adjoining the Great Slave Lake in Northern Canada. 
Various authorities have attempted to compute the numbers of these 
large wood bison, but it is only safe to say that their numbers are few and 
that they have seldom been seen by white men. At present they are 
supposed to be strictly preserved like the musk oxen, and the Canadian 
North-West Mounted Police have instructions to confiscate all horns 
and robes, but this does not prevent them being killed by the Indians 
or any chance wandering trapper when the opportunity occurs. 
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