scattered
remnants of the great herds may still have existed for some time
afterward, the great droves stretching "for above a league together,"
were seen no more.

The great snowfall was the culminating tragedy. In order to secure
whiskey and brandy the horse tribes of the prairies had slaughtered
thousands, and bartered away their robes and hides. What distinguishes
the savage from civilized man is, that the savage takes no heed of the
morrow. To satisfy his present passions and appetites he will sacrifice
every hope of the future. He no longer cures the skins and clothes his
nakedness. He thinks no longer of husbanding his supply of meat and
game. He robs the plain, and despoils every stream and river, and then
becomes a drunken beggar in the frontier towns, crying for alms. The
same thing that happened on the plains of Illinois at the close of
eighteenth, took place on the plains west of the Mississippi in the last
half of the nineteenth century. The giant herds melted away before the
remorseless killings of the still hunters and savages, who threw away a
meat supply worth millions of dollars in a mad chase for gain and
plunder, and no one took a more prominent part in that killing than the
Indian himself.

"When the snow fall was unusually heavy," says William T. Hornaday, "and
lay for a long time on the ground, the buffalos fast for days together,
and sometimes even weeks. If a warm day came, and thawed the upper
surface of the snow, sufficiently for succeeding cold to freeze it into
a crust, the outlook for the bison began to be serious. A man can travel
over a crust through which the hoofs of a ponderous bison cut like
chisels and leave him floundering belly-deep. It was at such times that
the Indians hunted him on snow-shoes, and drove their spears into his
vitals as he wallowed helplessly in the drifts. Then the wolves grew fat
upon the victims which they, also, slaughtered without effort." This is
probably an accurate description of what took place east of the
Mississippi river about the year 1790, and left the bones of the herds
to bleach on the prairies.

However the facts may be, it is certain that at the opening of the
nineteenth century the buffalo were practically extinguished in the
territory of the northwest. A few scattered animals may have remained
here and there upon the prairies, but the old herds, whose progenitors
were seen by Croghan were forever gone. In the month of December, 1799,
Judge