e
being sent from Mackinaw, Detroit, Montreal, and Hudson Bay. A million
would not cover the number of robes sent east each year in the thirties
and forties. In 1868 Inman, Sheridan, and Custer rode continuously for
three days through one herd in the Arkansas region. In 1869 trains on
the Kansas Pacific were held from nine in the morning till six at night
to permit the passage of one herd across the tracks. Army officers
related that in 1862 a herd moved north from the Arkansas to the
Yellowstone that covered an area of seventy by thirty miles. Catlin and
Inman and army men and employees of the fur companies considered a drove
of one hundred thousand buffalo a common sight along the line of the
Santa Fe trail. Inman computes that from St. Louis alone the bones of
thirty-one million buffalo were shipped between 1868 and 1881. Northward
the testimony is the same. John MacDonell, a partner of the North-West
Company, tells how at the beginning of the last century a herd
stampeded across the ice of the Qu'Appelle valley. In some places the
ice broke. When the thaw came, a continuous line of drowned buffalo
drifted past the fur post for three days. Mr. MacDonell counted up to
seven thousand three hundred and sixty: there his patience gave out. And
the number of the drowned was only a fringe of the travelling herd.

To-day where are the buffalo? A few in the public parks of the United
States and Canada. A few of Colonel Bedson's old herd on Lord
Strathcona's farm in Manitoba and the rest on a ranch in Texas. The
railway more than the pot-hunter was the power that exterminated the
buffalo. The railway brought the settlers; and the settlers fenced in
the great ranges where the buffalo could have galloped away from all the
pot-hunters of earth combined. Without the railway the buffalo could
have resisted the hunter as they resisted Indian hunters from time
immemorial; but when the iron line cut athwart the continent the herds
only stampeded from one quarter to rush into the fresh dangers of
another.

Much has been said about man's part in the destruction of the buffalo;
and too much could not be said against those monomaniacs of slaughter
who went into the buffalo-hunt from sheer love of killing, hiring the
Indians to drive a herd over an embankment or into soft snow, while the
valiant hunters sat in some sheltered spot, picking off the helpless
quarry. This was not hunting. It was butchery, which none but hungry
savages and wh