certain that if the Indians had been uninfluenced by the white traders, or, in other words, had not been induced to take and prepare a large number of robes every year for the market, the species would have survived very much longer than it did.  But the demand quickly proved to be far greater than the supply.  The Indians, of course, found it necessary to slaughter annually a great number of buffaloes for their own wants—­for meat, robes, leather, teepees, etc.  When it came to supplementing this necessary slaughter by an additional fifty thousand or more every year for marketable robes, it is no wonder that the improvident savages soon found, when too late, that the supply of buffaloes was not inexhaustible.  Naturally enough, they attributed their disappearance to the white man, who was therefore a robber, and a proper subject for the scalping-knife.  Apparently it never occurred to the minds of the Sioux that they themselves were equally to blame; it was always the paleface who killed the buffaloes; and it was always Sioux buffaloes that they killed.  The Sioux seemed to feel that they held a chattel mortgage on all the buffaloes north of the Platte, and it required more than one pitched battle to convince them otherwise.

Up to the time when the great Sioux Reservation was established in Dakota (1875-’77), when 33,739 square miles of country, or nearly the whole southwest quarter of the Territory, was set aside for the exclusive occupancy of the Sioux, buffaloes were very numerous throughout that entire region.  East of the Missouri River, which is the eastern boundary of the Sioux Reservation, from Bismarck all the way down, the species was practically extinct as early as 1870.  But at the time when it became unlawful for white hunters to enter the territory of the Sioux nation there were tens of thousands of buffaloes upon it, and their subsequent slaughter is chargeable to the Indians alone, save as to those which migrated into the hunting grounds of the whites.

3. Western railways, and their part in the extermination of the buffalo.—­The building of a railroad means the speedy extermination of all the big game along its line.  In its eagerness to attract the public and build up “a big business,” every new line which traverses a country containing game does its utmost, by means of advertisements and posters, to attract the man with a gun.  Its game resorts are all laid bare, and the market hunters and sportsmen swarm in immediately, slaying and to slay.

Within the last year the last real retreat for our finest game, the only remaining stronghold for the mountain sheep, goat, caribou, elk, and deer—­northwestern Montana, northern Idaho, and thence westward—­has been laid open to the very heart by the building of the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway, which runs up the valley of the Milk River to Fort Assinniboine, and crosses the Rocky Mountains through Two Medicine Pass.  Heretofore that region has been so difficult to reach that the game it contains has been measurably secure from general slaughter; but now it also must “go.”