nd
probably not fewer than 230,000 head of buffalo were slaughtered in the
previous year. This number would have been sufficient to sustain a
population of a quarter of a million. Yet so vast a number of the
animals are left to rot on the ground, that in all probability not more
than 30,000 Indians fed on the flesh of the slaughtered buffaloes.

The civilised fur-traders, however, with greater forethought, take means
to preserve the flesh of the animals they kill in the neighbourhood of
the forts, so that it may last them through the summer. For this
purpose they dig a square pit capable of containing seven or eight
hundred carcasses. As soon as the ice in the river is of sufficient
thickness, it is cut with saws into square blocks, of a uniform size,
with which the floor of the pit is regularly paved. The blocks are then
cemented together by pouring water in between them, and allowing it to
freeze into a solid mass. In like manner the walls are built up to the
surface of the ground. The head and feet being cut off, each carcass,
without being skinned, is divided into quarters; and these are piled in
layers in the pit, till it is filled up, when the whole is covered with
a thick coating of straw, which is again protected from the sun and rain
by a shed. In this manner the meat is preserved in good condition
through the whole summer, and is considered more tender and better
flavoured than when freshly killed.

Even in the winter the buffalo continues to range over the plains in a
far northern latitude. Mr Kane mentions seeing a band, numbering
nearly ten thousand, at the very northern confines of the Fertile Belt,
where the snow was very deep at the time. They, however, had never
before appeared in such vast numbers near the Company's establishments.
Some, on on that occasion, were shot within the gates of Fort Edmonton.
They had killed with their horns twenty or thirty horses, in their
attempt to drive them from the patches of grass which the horses had
laid bare with their hoofs. They were probably migrating northward, to
escape the human migrations so rapidly filling up the southern and
western regions which were formerly their pasture-grounds.

The Cree Indians use dogs to draw their sleighs. They are powerful,
savage animals, having a good deal of the wolf about them. They are
considered as valuable as horses, as everything is drawn over the snow
by them. When buffaloes have been killed in winter, th