The Vanished Buffalo Herds of North America
Kingly Race That Once Roamed a Continent Almost Wiped Out for "A Dollar a Hide"; Straggling Survivors Carefully Guarded
By W. E. ANDERSON
About the year 1879 a party of Metis hunters came to the plains southwest of the present situation of Regina, Saskatchewan, to hunt buffalo. The party consisted of the father, a man then on the elderly side of middle age, but who had been in his youth a noted buffalo runner and Indian fighter; his wife, a heavy half-breed woman of some fifty years; and his daughter, a girl of about seventeen of a comely and attractive appearance.
The father, according to his custom, followed the chase on horseback, the old woman, seated amongst robes and camp baggage, drove the creaking Red river cart, whilst the young girl was in and out of the vehicle like an eager young spirit of the prairie.
That season there were very few carts which came to the plains after buffalo. The great herds that used to blacken the country to the rim of the horison had thundered away into the limbo of the lost, and all that was left of them was a few stragglers that still haunted some of the more remote valley bottoms.
The halfbreeds had strange and superstitious ideas about the passing of the buffalo. They could not believe that they had gone never to return. It was only yesterday that the plains were black with the shaggy herds. Their trails and wallows were still to be seen everywhere.
Our map diagram indicates the approximate distribution of the buffalo grounds prior to 1800; limitations, Mississippi River, Rocky Mountains, Gulf of Mexico and Great Slave Lake.
This particular Metis hunter believed that they had gone to some new pasturage, and that if they could be found the hunting would again be as good as in the days of yore.
So for a period of years he led his family up and down the plains. One season they wintered at Wood Mountain, another they wandered as far north as Ile a la Crosse, then again at the Milk River; but in all their wanderings they found none of the vanished herds.