the foothills, not so the
wild creatures or the savage men who had lived there longer than science
records. The buffalo then ranged from the Rio Grande to the Athabaska,
from the Missouri to the Rockies, and beyond. No one seems to have
concluded in those days that there was after all slight difference
between the buffalo and the domestic ox. The native cattle, however, in
untold thousands and millions, had even then proved beyond peradventure
the sustaining and strengthening nature of the grasses of the Plains.

Now, each creature, even of human species, must adjust itself to its
environment. Having done so, commonly it is disposed to love that
environment. The Eskimo and the Zulu each thinks that he has the best
land in the world: So with the American Indian, who, supported by the
vast herds of buffalo, ranged all over that tremendous country which
was later to be given over to the white man with his domestic cattle.
No freer life ever was lived by any savages than by the Horse Indians
of the Plains in the buffalo days; and never has the world known a
physically higher type of savage.

On the buffalo-range--that is to say, on the cattle-range which was to
be--Lewis and Clark met several bands of the Sioux--the Mandans and
the Assiniboines, the Blackfeet, the Shoshones. Farther south were the
Pawnees, the Kaws, the Otoes, the Osages, most of whom depended in part
upon the buffalo for their living, though the Otoes, the Pawnees, the
Mandans, and certain others now and then raised a little corn or a few
squashes to help out their bill of fare. Still farther south dwelt the
Kiowas, the Comanches, and others. The Arapahoes, the Cheyennes, the
Crows, and the Utes, all hunters, were soon to come into the ken of the
white man. Of such of these tribes as they met, the youthful captains
made accounting, gravely and with extraordinary accuracy, but without
discovering in this region much future for Americans. They were
explorers and not industrial investigators.

It was nearly half a century after the journey of Lewis and Clark that
the Forty-Niners were crossing the Plains, whither, meanwhile, the
Mormons had trekked in search of a country where they might live as they
liked. Still the wealth of the Plains remained untouched. California was
in the eyes of the world. The great cow-range was overleaped. But, in
the early fifties, when the placer fields of California began to be less
numerous and less rich, the half-savage popul