season, and consequently the cattle must depend wholly upon their own resources.  When the winter is reasonably mild, and the snows never very deep, nor lying too long at a time on the ground, the cattle live through the winter with very satisfactory success.  Thanks to the wind, it usually happens that the falling snow is blown off the ridges as fast as it falls, leaving the grass sufficiently uncovered for the cattle to feed upon it.  If the snow-fall is universal, but not more than a few inches in depth, the cattle paw through it here and there, and eke out a subsistence, on quarter rations it may be, until a friendly chinook wind sets in from the southwest and dissolves the snow as if by magic in a few hours’ time.

But when a deep snow comes, and lies on the ground persistently, week in and week out, when the warmth of the sun softens and moistens its surface sufficiently for a returning cold wave to freeze it into a hard crust, forming a universal wall of ice between the luckless steer and his only food, the cattle starve and freeze in immense numbers.  Being totally unfitted by nature to survive such unnatural conditions, it is not strange that they succumb.

Under present conditions the stockman simply stakes his cattle against the winter elements and takes his chances on the results, which are governed by circumstances wholly beyond his control.  The losses of the fearful winter of 1886-’87 will probably never be forgotten by the cattlemen of the great Western grazing ground.  In many portions of Montana and Wyoming the cattlemen admitted a loss of 50 per cent of their cattle, and in some localities the loss was still greater.  The same conditions are liable to prevail next winter, or any succeeding winter, and we may yet see more than half the range cattle in the West perish in a single month.

Yet all this time the cattlemen have had it in their power, by the easiest and simplest method in the world, to introduce a strain of hardy native blood in their stock which would have made it capable of successfully resisting a much greater degree of hunger and cold.  It is really surprising that the desirability of cross-breeding the buffalo and domestic cattle should for so long a time have been either overlooked or disregarded.  While cattle-growers generally have shown the greatest enterprise in producing special breeds for milk, for butter, or for beef, cattle with short horns and cattle with no horns at all, only two or three men have had the enterprise to try to produce a breed particularly hardy and capable.

A buffalo can weather storms and outlive hunger and cold which would kill any domestic steer that ever lived.  When nature placed him on the treeless and blizzard-swept plains, she left him well equipped to survive whatever natural conditions he would have to encounter.  The most striking feature of his entire tout ensemble is his magnificent suit of hair and fur combined, the warmest covering possessed