and up the
counterpart of that you have just traversed, seeing nothing but these
gentle, wave-like undulations of the surface to limit your gaze, which
contemplates at once some fifty to eighty square miles of unfenced,
treeless, but green and close-cropped pasturage; and it is hard to
realize that you are out of the pale of civilization, hundreds of miles
from a decent dwelling-house, and that the innumerable cattle moving and
grazing before you--so countless that they seem thickly to cover half
the district swept by your vision--are not domestic and heritable--the
collected herds of some great grazing county, impelled from Texas or New
Mexico to help subdue some distant Oregon. It seems a sad waste to see
so much good live-stock ranging to no purpose and dying to no profit:
for the roving, migrating whites who cross the Plains slaughter the
buffalo in mere wantonness, leaving scores of carcasses to rot where
they fell, perhaps taking the tongue and the hump for food, but oftener
content with mere wanton destruction. The Indian, to whom the buffalo is
food, clothing, and lodging (for his tent, as well as his few if not
scanty habiliments, is formed of buffalo-skins stretched over
lodge-poles), justly complains of this shameful improvidence and
cruelty. Were _he_ to deal thus with an emigrant's herd, he would be
shot without mercy; why, then, should whites decimate his without
excuse?

Beyond the Buffalo region the Plains are bleak, monotonous, and
solitary. The Antelope, who would be a deer if his legs were shorter and
his body not so stout, is the redeeming feature of the well-grassed
plains next to Kansas, and which recur under the shadow of the Rocky
Mountains; but he is an animal of too much sense to remain in the
scantily grassed desert which separates the buffalo range from the
latter. There the lean Wolf strolls and hunts and starves; there the
petty Prairie-Wolf, a thoroughly contemptible beast, picks up such a
dirty living as he may; while the sprightly, amusing little Prairie-Dog,
who is a rather short-legged gray squirrel, with a funny little yelp and
a troglodyte habitation, lives in villages or cities of from five
hundred to five thousand dens, each (or most of them) tenanted in common
with him by a harmless little Owl and a Rattlesnake of questionable
amiability. The Owl sits by the mouth of the hole till driven away by
your approach, when he follows his confrere's example by diving; the
Rattlesnake sta