The earliest published drawing of the American bison is supposed to be that which appeared in 1558 in Thevet's book,[7] sixteen years after the return to Mexico of Coronado, but it would seem that some illustration of an animal that was considered so remarkable must have been printed before that. Since then it has been drawn and painted unnumbered times. It figured largely, as a matter of course, in Catlin's celebrated illustrations of aboriginal life in the Far West, and forms the subject for about the best picture Albert Bierstadt ever painted, _Buffalo Hunting on Laramie Plains_.[8] [Illustration: The Grand Teton from Jackson's Hole. The Buffalo Reached this Valley by 1824. Photograph by W. H. Jackson, U. S. Geol. Survey.] But it was not as material for picture making that the bison became of greatest value, it was as a meat supply to the trapper, the trader, and the traveller generally upon the bosom of that wide expanse of rolling prairie that so resembled the great salt ocean itself. As Butler[9] describes it, "the unending vision of sky and grass, the dim, distant, and ever shifting horizon; the ridges that seem to be rolled upon one another in motionless torpor; the effect of sunrise and sunset, of night narrowing the vision to nothing, and morning only expanding it to a shapeless blank, ... and above all the sense of lonely, unending distance which comes to the _Voyageur_ when day after day has gone by, night has closed, and morning dawned upon his onward progress under the same ever-moving horizon of grass and sky." No wonder the moment buffalo were first sighted by the anxious caravan, a joyful cry went up, equivalent, as Irving says, to the cry of, "A sail, a sail!" at sea. All was commotion on the instant, and everybody prepared for the hunt. Thenceforward, as long as buffalo were near, hunger held no terrors on that boundless plain that now our limited express so contemptuously spurns beneath its throbbing steel, as the ennuied lady sits wearisome at the window gazing with disdain on those blood-bathed reaches of country, so full of thrilling story and history, a bill of fare in her hand that would have driven the old voyageur to distraction. [Illustration: Canyon of Lodore—Green River. Canyons of this Character were almost Continuous from a few Miles below the Union Pacific Railway Crossing. Photograph by E. O. Beaman, U. S. Colo. Riv. Exp.]