Railway in 1880.  The Canadian Pacific Railway played no part whatever in the extermination of the bison in the British Possessions, for it had already taken place.  The half-breeds of Manitoba, the Plains Crees of Qu’Appelle, and the Blackfeet of the South Saskatchewan country swept bare a great belt of country stretching east and west between the Rocky Mountains and Manitoba.  The Canadian Pacific Railway found only bleaching bones in the country through which it passed.  The buffalo had disappeared from that entire region before 1879 and left the Blackfeet Indians on the verge of starvation.  A few thousand buffaloes still remained in the country around the headwaters of the Battle River, between the North and South Saskatchewan, but they were surrounded and attacked from all sides, and their numbers diminished very rapidly until all were killed.

The latest information I have been able to obtain in regard to the disappearance of this northern band has been kindly furnished by Prof.  C. A. Kenaston, who in 1881, and also in 1883, made a thorough exploration of the country between Winnipeg and Fort Edmonton for the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.  His four routes between the two points named covered a vast scope of country, several hundred miles in width.  In 1881, at Moose Jaw, 75 miles southeast of The Elbow of the South Saskatchewan, he saw a party of Cree Indians, who had just arrived from the northwest with several carts laden with fresh buffalo meat.  At Fort Saskatchewan, on the North Saskatchewan River, just above Edmonton, he saw a party of English sportsmen who had recently been hunting on the Battle and Red Deer Rivers, between Edmonton and Fort Kalgary, where they had found buffaloes, and killed as many as they cared to slaughter.  In one afternoon they killed fourteen, and could have killed more had they been more blood-thirsty.  In 1883 Professor Kenaston found the fresh trail of a band of twenty-five or thirty buffaloes at The Elbow of the South Saskatchewan.  Excepting in the above instances he saw no further traces of buffalo, nor did he hear of the existence of any in all the country he explored.  In 1881 he saw many Cree Indians at Fort Qu’Appelle in a starving condition, and there was no pemmican or buffalo meat at the fort.  In 1883, however, a little pemmican found its way to Winnipeg, where it sold at 15 cents per pound; an exceedingly high price.  It had been made that year, evidently in the mouth of April, as he purchased it in May for his journey.

The first really alarming impression made on our northern herd was by the Sioux Indians, who very speedily exterminated that portion of it which had previously covered the country lying between the North Platte and a line drawn from the center of Wyoming to the center of Dakota.  All along the Missouri River from Bismarck to Fort Benton, and along the Yellowstone to the head of navigation, the slaughter went bravely on.  All the Indian tribes of that vast region—­Sioux, Cheyennes, Crows, Blackfeet, Bloods, Piegans, Assinniboines, Gros Ventres, and Shoshones—­found their most profitable business and greatest pleasure (next to scalping white settlers) in hunting the buffalo.  It took from eight to twelve buffalo hides to make a covering for one ordinary teepee, and sometimes a single teepee of extra size required from twenty to twenty-five hides.