56 
hunt corresponded in many ways to the beating of tigeis and 
leopards in the Asiatic jungles, and the rounding up of ostriches by 
the Bushmen of South Africa. It was indeed an ancient method, 
successfully employed by men of the Old Stone Age in BuH)]>e, 
thousands of years before the Christian era, in hunting the wild rein- 
deer, mammoths, and other animals that in those days migrated back 
and forth across the Carpathian mountains. The Salish Indians of 
the Columbia river practised it in a very simple form; they merely 
surrounded a herd of antelope on a plain and shot down a small 
proportion before the remainder broke through the circle and 
escaped.^ The plains’ Indians, the Iroquoians and other eastern 
w’oodland tribes, and the Indians of the Mackenzie River }:)asin 
adopted a more complex method; they drove or lured the buffalo, 
caribou, or deer into some kind of trap, usually an enclosed pound, 
and shot down entire herds. The old explorer Henry has left an 
excellent description of the buffalo hunts, which he witnessed among 
the Assiniboine. 
“ It is supposed that these people (the Assiniboine) are the most 
expert and dexterous nation of the plains in constructing pounds, and 
in driving buffalo into them. The pounds are of different dimensions, 
according to the number of tents in one camp. The common size is 
from 60 to 100 jxxces or yards in circumference, and about five feet 
in height. Trees are cut dowm, laid upon one another, and inter- 
woven wdth branches and green twdgs; small oi^enings are left to admit 
the dogs to feed upon the carcasses of the bulls, which are generally 
left as useless. This enclosure is commonly made betw^een two hum- 
mocks on the declivity or at the foot of rising ground. The entrance 
is about ten paces wude, and ahvays fronts the plains. On each side 
of this entrance commences a thick range of fascines, the tw’o ranges 
spreading asunder as they extend, to the distance of 100 yards, be- 
yond which o])enings are left at intervals; but the fascines soon 
become more thinly planted and continue to spread apart to the 
right and left, until each range has been extended about 300 yards 
from the pound. The labor is then diminished by only placing at 
1 Thompson- Op cit., p. 476. Cf. Kelsev'.s (loscriptinn of Ihr buffalo hunt airioni: llm .\ssini- 
boine at the end of the seventeenth century, before they were acquainted with horses “ Now ye 
manner of hunting these beasts on ye barren ground is when they see a great parcel of them together 
they surround them wth men wch done they gather themselves into a smaller compass keeping ye 
beast still in ye middle and so shooting >-m till they break out at some place or other and so get 
away from ym.” The KeJsey Papers. 7 ). 13. 
