elve horses were slain, so that their spirits would carry him in the
green prairies of the happy hunting-grounds; four hundred blankets were
piled around as offerings to his memory, and then the tribe moved away
from the spot, leaving the tomb of their dead king to the winds and to
the wolves.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

The Buffalo--His Limits and favourite Grounds--Modes of Hunting--A Fight
--His inevitable End--I become a Medicine-man--Great Cold-Carlton--Family
Responsibilities.

WHEN the early Spanish adventurers penetrated from the sea-board of
America into the great central prairie region, they beheld for the first
time a strange animal whose countless numbers covered the face of the
country. When De Soto had been buried in the dark waters of the
Mississippi, the remnant of his band, pursuing their western way, entered
the "Country of the Wild Cows." When in the same year explorers pushed
their way northward from Mexico into the region of the Rio-del-Norte,
they looked over immense plains black with moving beasts. Nearly 100
years later settlers on the coasts of New England heard from
westward-hailing Indians of huge beasts on the shores of a great lake not
many days journey to the north-west. Naturalists in Europe, hearing of
the new animal, named it the bison; but the colonists united in calling
it the buffalo, and, as is usual in such cases, although science clearly
demonstrated that it was a bison, and was not a buffalo, scientific
knowledge had not a chance against practical ignorance, and "buffalo"
carried the day. The true home of this animal lay in the great prairie
region between the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi, the Texan forest,
and the Saskatchewan River and although undoubted evidence exists to show
that at some period the buffalo reached in his vast migrations the shores
of the Pacific and the Atlantic; yet since the party of De Soto only
entered the Country of the Wild Cows after they had crossed the
Mississippi, it may fairly be inferred that the Ohio River and the lower
Mississippi formed the eastern boundaries to the wanderings of the herds
since the New World has been known to the white man. Still even within
this immense region, a region not less than 1,000,000 of square miles in
area, the havoc worked by the European has been terrible. Faster even
than the decay of the Indian has gone on the destruction-of the bison and
only a few years must elapse before this noble beast, hunted down in