But apparently no such thoughts ever entered their minds, so far as they themselves were concerned.  They looked with jealous eyes upon the white hunter, and considered him as much of a robber as if they had a brand on every buffalo.  It has been claimed by some authors that the Indians killed with more judgment and more care for the future than did the white man, but I fail to find any evidence that such was ever the fact.  They all killed wastefully, wantonly, and always about five times as many head as were really necessary for food.  It was always the same old story, whenever a gang of Indians needed meat a whole herd was slaughtered, the choicest portions of the finest animals were taken, and about 75 per cent of the whole left to putrefy and fatten the wolves.  And now, as we read of the appalling slaughter, one can scarcely repress the feeling of grim satisfaction that arises when we also read that many of the ex-slaughterers are almost starving for the millions of pounds of fat and juicy buffalo meat they wasted a few years ago.  Verily, the buffalo is in a great measure avenged already.

The following extract from Mr. Catlin’s “North American Indians,"[60] I, page 199-200, serves well to illustrate not only a very common and very deadly Indian method of wholesale slaughter—­the “surround”—­but also to show the senseless destructiveness of Indians even when in a state of semi-starvation, which was brought upon them by similar acts of improvidence and wastefulness.

[Note 60:  H. Mis. 600, pt. 2-31]

“The Minatarees, as well as the Mandans, had suffered for some months past for want of meat, and had indulged in the most alarming fears that the herds of buffalo were emigrating so far off from them that there was great danger of their actual starvation, when it was suddenly announced through the village one morning at an early hour that a herd of buffaloes was in sight.  A hundred or more young men mounted their horses, with weapons in hand, and steered their course to the prairies. * * *

“The plan of attack, which in this country is familiarly called a surround, was explicitly agreed upon, and the hunters, who were all mounted on their ‘buffalo horses’ and armed with bows and arrows or long lances, divided into two columns, taking opposite directions, and drew themselves gradually around the herd at a mile or more distance from them, thus forming a circle of horsemen at equal distances apart, who gradually closed in upon them with a moderate pace at a signal given.  The unsuspecting herd at length ‘got the wind’ of the approaching enemy and fled in a mass in the greatest confusion.  To the point where they were aiming to cross the line the horsemen were seen, at full speed, gathering and forming in a column, brandishing their weapons, and yelling in the most frightful manner, by which they turned the black and rushing mass, which moved off in an opposite direction, where they were again met