One winter they came to Fort Edmonton, and there the mother who had suffered for years from goitre, and was doubtless wearied with much wandering, lay down and quietly died.
Towards the close of the winter there came to the Post a Touchwood Indian who had been in the Slave River country as a dog driver for a Hudson's Bay officer. He told the halfbreed hunter that in the northern country of the lakes and rivers he had heard strange tales of great herds of buffalo. He had actually seen some himself. They were larger than the old-time buffalo of the plains, and their coats were longer and silkier.
The old hunter brightened at the news. Here at last was the word of the missing herds; making a company of travel with an Iroquois river man, they penetrated through labyrinths of waterways to the region of the far north.
There is no doubt but that the old hunter had been misled by rumors of the herd of wood-buffalo which had existed for many years in the Slave River country, and which are today carefully protected by the Northwest Mounted Police patrol.
The original area over which the buffalo ranged began almost at tide-water on the Atlantic coast. It extended westward through a vast tract of dense forest, across the Alleghany mountains to the prairies along the Mississippi, and southward to the delta of that great stream.
Although the vast plains country of the west was the natural home of the species, where it flourished most abundantly, it also wandered south across Texas to the burning plains of north-eastern Mexico, westward across the Rocky mountains into New Mexico, Utah and Idaho, and northward across a vast treeless waste to the bleak and inhospitable shores of Great Slave and Hudson Bay.
Vast herds of bison seemed to clothe the prairies in a coat of brown. They roamed the country around the headwaters of the Qu'Appelle river in tens of thousands.
Catlin has given some idea of the enormous numbers of bison that were killed during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1832 he stated that 150,000 to 200,000 robes were marketed annually, which meant a slaughter of 2,000,000 or perhaps 3,000,000 bison. So great was the destruction that he prophesied their extermination within eight or ten years.
The death knell was struck when the construction of the Union Pacific railway was begun at Omaha in 1866. Prior to the advent of the first transcontinental railway the difficulties of marketing the results of the slaughter served as a slight check on the rate of extermination. The destruction began in earnest in 1876 and was complete four years later. The facility for shipping out the hides over the new railways was the cause of the rapid disappearance of the buffalo.
In the United States, buffalo hunters grew prosperous shooting down the animals for "a dollar a hide."