A Monarch of the Plains—The Hunchback Cows of Cibola—A Boon to the Frontiersman—Wide Range of the Bison—Marrow Bones for the Epicure—Washington Irving a Buffalo Hunter—The Rushing Run of the Bison Herd—The Sacred White Buffalo Cow Skin—A Calf with a Bull Head—Wolves and White Bears. Another denizen of the wilderness that performed an important part in its preparation for occupation by the white race was the buffalo or _Bison Americanus_, a monarch of the plains, huge and fierce in appearance; a monarch with the mien of a lion and the resistance of a sheep; an animal quite the opposite of the interesting beaver in almost every particular but numbers. In this respect, however, it vied with its smaller associate, roaming by millions and millions up and down across the limitless prairie-ocean, apparently as inexhaustible as the vagrant breezes blowing one day here and one day there. But the breezes still waft above the billowy surface, while the bison has vanished like a dream. The farm, the ranch, the town, and the railway now claim his vast grazing grounds. Were it not for a few specimens preserved in private herds and zoölogical gardens, this strange creature would be as unfamiliar to us in the life as are the _Dinosaurs_ of the Jurassic plains. [Illustration: The Monarch of the Plains. The Figure a Photograph by C. C. Pierce & Co.] They were the "hunchback cows" which Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca first accurately described to the European world, although it is said that Montezuma had one captive in his collection of animals at the time Cortez pillaged the Aztec capital. They were later called "cattle or cows of _Cibola_" (and _Sibolo_)[4] by the Spaniards, perhaps because the inhabitants of the first group of native villages of New Mexico encountered by Coronado were supplied with buffalo robes and were in the habit of going to hunt the animals on the plains of the river Pecos, where at that time they were abundant. The name passed into common use and to-day, although there is the correct word _Bisónte_, the American bison is generally known in Spanish as _Cibolo_. In his celebrated traverse of the Texas and Kansas prairies in 1540 Coronado saw immense herds that roamed there. The buffalo range was great, especially in a north and south direction, its southernmost limit having been in north-eastern Mexico a little below the lower end of Texas, while its northernmost was the upper shores of Great Slave Lake. It seems, however, that it did not cover this range in latitude at one time, so that in Coronado's day the northern limit was doubtless considerably below Great Slave Lake. The buffalo was not migratory in the sense that herds from the extreme north traversed the entire range and occupied a place on the southern edge, but it was migratory as a whole, swinging back and forth from north to south and south to north like a huge pendulum, the various sub-herds always retaining practically the same