Part 5 (2/2)

If the trapper had a crest like the knights of the wilderness who lived lives of daredoing in olden times, it should represent a canoe, a snow-shoe, a musket, a beaver, and a buffalo While the beaver was his quest and the coin of the fur-trading realreat staple on which the very existence of the trapper depended

Bed and blankets and clothing, shi+elds for warti of rude lance-heads, kettles and bull-boats and saddles, roof and rug and curtain wall for the hunting lodge, and, most important of all, food that could be kept in any cliht with the greatest nourishment--all these were supplied by the buffalo

Frohanies to the Rockies the buffalo was to the hunter heat is to the farmer

Moose and antelope and deer were plentiful in the lirass the buffalo could thrive in any latitude south of the sixties, with a preference for the open ground of the great central plains except when storms and heat drove the herds to the shelter of woods and valleys

Besides, in that keen struggle for existence which goes on in the anith to defy all enerisly was a ends, even the grisly held back fro a beast in the pri herds, like the coyotes and ti a calf, or breaking a young cow's neck, or tackling so worsted in battle and deposed fro up so blind on the trail of a prairie fire The buffalo, like the range cattle, had a quality that made for the persistence of the species When attacked by a beast of prey, they would line up for defence, charge upon the assailant, and tra all foes, wonderful sagacity against attack--these were factors that partly explained the vastness of the buffalo herds once roah remain to show that the size of the herds sireat areas theirin the knoorld These were: (1) between the Arkansas and the Missouri, fenced in, as it were, by the Mississippi and the Rockies; (2) between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded by the Rockies on the west and on the east, that depression where lie Lakes Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Winnipegoosis In both regions the prairie is scarred by trails where the buffalo have -places--trails traroove sinks to the depth of a rider's stirrup or the hub of a wagon-wheel At fording-places on the Qu'Appelle and Saskatchewan in Canada, and on the Upper Missouri, Yellowstone, and Arkansas in the Western States, carcasses of buffalo have been found where the sta a bridge of the dead over which the vast host rushed

Then there were ”the fairy rings,” ruts like the water trail, only running in a perfect circle, with the hoofprints of countless iven of these When the calves were yet little, and the wild anier, the bucks and old leaders for The late Colonel Bedson of Stony Mountain, Manitoba, who had the finest private collection of buffalo in Ao, when the herd was shi+pped to Texas, observed another occasion when the buffalo formed a circle Of an ordinary winter storm the herd took small notice except to turn backs to the wind; but if to a howling blizzard were added a biting north wind, with the therrees below zero, the buffalo lay down in a crescent as a wind-break to the young Besides the ”fairy rings” and the fording-places, evidences of the buffaloes' numbers are found at the salt-licks, alkali depressions on the prairie, soggy as paste in spring, dried hard as rock infootprints like a plaster cast; while at the here the buffalo have been taking round is scarred and ploughed as if for ramparts

The comparison of the buffalo herds to the northland caribou has become almost commonplace; but it is the sheerest nonsense Froo, to Mr Tyrrel or Mr Whitney in the Barren Lands in 1894-'96, noten thousand Few herds of one thousand have ever been seen

What are the facts regarding the buffalo?

In the thirties, when the American Fur Company was in the heyday of its power, there were sent frole year one hundred thousand robes The coht only the perfect robes The hunter usually kept an aht by the company, three times as many were taken from the plains

St Louis was only one port of shi+p 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 froe 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 co the line of the Santa Fe trail Inman computes that from St Louis alone the bones of thirty-one million buffalo were shi+pped between 1868 and 1881 Northward the testimony is the same John MacDonell, a partner of the North-West Co 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 nu 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 exterht 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 staers of another

Much has been said about man's part in the destruction of the buffalo; and too hter ent into the buffalo-hunt fro the Indians to drive a herd over an embankment or into soft snohile the valiant hunters sat in so off the helpless quarry This was not hunting It was butchery, which none but hungry savages and white barbarians practised The plains-man--who is the true type of the buffalo-runner--entered the lists on a fair field with the odds a hundred to one against hith the dexterity of his own aim

Man was the least cruel of the buffalo's foes Far crueler havoc orked by the prairie fire and the fights for supremacy in the leadershi+p of the herd and the sleuths of the trail and the wild sta more than the shadow of a cloud on the prairie Natural history tells of nothing sadder than a buffalo herd overtaken by a prairie fire Flee as they ht, the fiery hurricane was fleeter; and when the fla over blackened wastes, blind froed of fur to the raw, and mad with a thirst they were helpless to quench

In the fights for leadershi+p of the herd old age went down before youth

Colonel Bedson's daughter has often told the writer of her sheer terror as a child when these battles took place a the buffalo The first inti fellows of th On the rove for the first year or two of their existence these youngsters were hooked and butted back into place as a rear-guard; and woe to the fellohose vanity te-hook horns! Just as the wolf ai sinews of a victim, so the irate buffalo struck at the point most vulnerable to his sharp, curved horn--the soft flank where a quick ripfellows refuse to be hooked and hectored to the rear! Then one of the boldest braces hi his lowered horns in line with the head of the older rival That is the buffalo challenge! And there presently follows a bellowing like the ru his eye on the other, circling and guarding and countering each other's es, the other wheels to ht in front; and with a crash the horns are locked It is then a contest of strength against strength, dexterity against dexterity Not unusually the older brute goes into a fury frouarded charges become blind rushes, and he soon finds hi horns As soon as the ruan, Colonel Bedson used to send his herders out on the fleetest buffalo ponies to part the contestants; for, like the king of beasts that he is, the buffalo does not kno to surrender He fights till he can fight no led, a deposed king, whipped and broken-spirited and relegated to the fag-end of the trail, where he drags lamely after the subjects he once ruled

So, the rustle of a leaf, the shadow of a cloud, startles a giddy young cow She throws up her head and is off There is a staround rocks and nothing re dust of the far horizon--nothing but the poor, old, deposed king, too weak to keep up the pace, feeble with fear, tre in terror at a leaf blown by the wind

After that the end is near, and the old buffalowould Has he roauarded the calves from sleuths of the trail and seen the devourers leap on a fallen comrade before death has coray for to the crest of a hill when he hides in the valley, always skulking through the prairie grass when he goes to a lookout on the crest of the hill, always stopping when he stops, creeping closer when he lies down, scuttling when he wheels, snapping at his heels when he stoops for a drink? If the buffalo did not knohat these creatures uarding against theedy of the old king's end He invariably seeks out soainst the wolves with a face to the foe

But the end is inevitable

While the main pack baits him to the fore, skulkers dart to the rear; and when, after a struggle that lasts for days, his hind legs sink powerless under hi by the snap of some vicious coyote, he still keeps his face to the foe But in sheer horror of the tragedy the rest is untellable; for the hungry creatures that prey do not wait till death co that ically pitiful as nature's process of deposing a buffalo leader?

Catlin and Inion between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan testify that the quick death of the bullet was, indeed, the mercy stroke compared to nature's end of her wild creatures In Colonel Bedson's herd the fighters were always parted before either was disabled; but it was always at the sacrifice of two or three ponies' lives

In the park specimens of buffalo a curious deterioration is apparent On Lord Strathcona's farm in Manitoba, where the buffalo still have several hundred acres of ranging-ground and are nearer to their wild state than elsewhere, they still retain their leonine splendour of strength in shoulders and head; but at Banff only the older ones have this appearance, the younger generation, like those of the various city parks, gradually assuestion of a big, round-headed, clumsy sheep