of his live-stock. In the
three years 1872-74 four and a half millions of buffalo--considerably more
than half as many as all the black cattle in the British Islands--were
slaughtered. From this fact may be gathered an impression of the vast
provision of human food until lately stored by Nature in a region still
marked on modern geographies as a desert. Of the value of this endowment
the Indian, with all his improvidence, had some notion. It was a resource
he may be said to have husbanded. Of nothing like the wanton and shameful
destruction dealt by the whites since the feeding-grounds were made
accessible by rail was he ever guilty. He managed his hunts
systematically, placed them under the rigid control of a sort of guild
known as "dog-soldiers," and allowed to be slain only what were needed for
his wants. The buffalo was to him what the cocoa-palm is to the
Polynesian; and more, for he needed warm shelter and warm clothing. He
cared for it accordingly. It grew around him almost as the cocoa-grove
around the hut of the islander. A herd will even now graze quietly for
days in the neighborhood of an Indian village of a thousand souls, while
an encampment of half a dozen whites disperses it instantly. The whites
kill only for the hides, two of which they lose for every one saved in
merchantable condition. A very small proportion of the flesh is utilized
when the railway happens to be near enough, and within a like limit of
territory the bones are collected. In the single year 1874 over ten
millions of tons of these were sent East to fertilize the exhausted fields
of the Atlantic slope with the refuse riches of the "desert."

No treaties are made with the buffalo. He is swindled by no agents,
post-traders or secretaries at war. He addresses no pathetic remonstrances
to his Great Father, and expresses no sense of his wrongs by taking scalps
or inflicting worse horrors still. School-houses, temperance societies,
small-pox and whiskey are not for him. Yet does he move toward
annihilation, as we have said, in singularly close lock-step with the
Indian. His problem, like the other, is being settled by the settler. Were
the red man edible, the parallelism in destiny would be more complete. As
it is, the quadruped will disappear before the biped native. Individuals
of the latter will be absorbed into the bosom of civilization, as the
remnants of the Senecas, the Oneidas and the Pamunkeys have long since
been. As a race, the Indi