Countless ages passed, tribes warred and wandered, but the life of the wilderness lay deep beneath the waves of time, and the roll of the passing centuries disturbed not its slumber.
At last the white man came, and soon from south and north the restless adventurers of Latin Europe pierced the encircling forests, and beheld the mighty meadows of the Central Continent. Spaniards on the south, Frenchmen on the north, no one in the centre; for the prudent Plymouth Puritan was more intent on flogging witches and gathering riches than on penetrating the tangled forest which lay westward of his settlement. No; his was not the work of adventure and discovery. Others might go before and brave the thousand perils of flood and forest; he would follow after, as the Jew pedlar follows the spendthrift, as the sutler dogs the footsteps of the soldier.
What though he be in possession of the wide dominion now, and the names of France and Spain be shrunken into a shapeless dream; that only proves what we knew before, that the men who lead the way to a great future are fated never to reap the golden harvest of their dreams.
And ever since that advent of the white man the scene has changed; the long slumber of the wilderness was broken, and hand in hand with the new life death moved amidst the wild denizens of the Prairies. Human life scattered over a vast area, animal life counted by tens of millions, take a long time to destroy; and it is only to-day—370 years after a Portuguese sailor killed and captured a band of harmless Indians, and 350 since a Spanish soldier first beheld a herd of buffaloes beyond the meadows of the Mississippi—that the long, hopeless struggle of the wild dwellers of the wilderness may be said to have reached its closing hour.
In thus classing together the buffalo and the red man as twin dwellers on the Great Prairie, I have but followed the Indian idea.
“What shall we do?” said a young Sioux warrior to an American officer on the Upper Missouri some fifteen years ago. “What shall we do? the buffalo is our only friend. When he goes all is over with the Dacotahs. I speak thus to you because like me you are a Brave.”
It was little wonder that he called the buffalo his only friend. Its skin gave him a house, its robe a blanket and a bed, its undressed hide a boat, its short, curved horn a powder-flask, its meat his daily food, its sinew a string for his bow, its leather a lariot for his horse, a saddle, bridle, rein, and bit. Its tail formed an ornament for his tent, its inner skin a book in which to sketch the brave deeds of his life, the “medicine robe” of his history. House, boat, food, bed, and covering, every want from infancy to age, and after life itself had passed, wrapt in his buffalo robe the red man waited for the dawn.
SUNSET SCENE WITH BUFFALO.