[Note 59:  Assinniboine and Saskatchewan Expedition, p. 358.]

The last scene of the bloody tragedy is thus set forth a week later: 

“Within the circular fence ... lay, tossed in every conceivable position, over two hundred dead buffalo. [The exact number was 240.] From old bulls to calves of three months’ old, animals of every age were huddled together in all the forced attitudes of violent death.  Some lay on their backs, with eyes starting from their heads and tongue thrust out through clotted gore.  Others were impaled on the horns of the old and strong bulls.  Others again, which had been tossed, were lying with broken backs, two and three deep.  One little calf hung suspended on the horns of a bull which had impaled it in the wild race round and round the pound.  The Indians looked upon the dreadful and sickening sight with evident delight, and told how such and such a bull or cow had exhibited feats of wonderful strength in the death-struggle.  The flesh of many of the cows had been taken from them, and was drying in the sun on stages near the tents.  It is needless to say that the odor was overpowering, and millions of large blue flesh-flies, humming and buzzing over the putrefying bodies, was not the least disgusting part of the spectacle.”

It is some satisfaction to know that when the first “run” was made, ten days previous, the herd of two hundred buffaloes was no sooner driven into the pound than a wary old bull espied a weak spot in the fence, charged it at full speed, and burst through to freedom and the prairie, followed by the entire herd.

Strange as it may seem to-day, this wholesale method of destroying buffalo was once practiced in Montana.  In his memoir on “The American Bison,” Mr. J. A. Allen states that as late as 1873, while journeying through that Territory in charge of the Yellowstone Expedition, he “several times met with the remains of these pounds and their converging fences in the region above the mouth of the Big Horn River.”  Mr. Thomas Simpson states that in 1840 there were three camps of Assinniboine Indians in the vicinity of Carlton House, each of which had its buffalo pound into which they drove forty or fifty animals daily.

4. The “Surround."—­During the last forty years the final extermination of the buffalo has been confidently predicted by not only the observing white man of the West, but also nearly all the Indians and half-breeds who formerly depended upon this animal for the most of the necessities, as well as luxuries, of life.  They have seen the great herds driven westward farther and farther, until the plains were left tenantless, and hunger took the place of feasting on the choice tid-bits of the chase.  And is it not singular that during this period the Indian tribes were not moved by a common impulse to kill sparingly, and by the exercise of a reasonable economy in the chase to make the buffalo last as long as possible.