Yet buffalo meat could not have been less delicious to the appetite of the plains traveller. It not only furnished food for the moment, but dried, or dried and pounded and mixed with the rendered tallow, sometimes including berries, it made _pemmican_,[10] which could be kept a long time, and which formed the basis of the supplies for long expeditions and for winter consumption. The meat from old bulls was often tough, but that from a fat cow was always delicious, and the marrow!—well, that was a dish fit to set before a king. The Hon. Grantley F. Berkley[11] of England was not exactly a king, unless we elevate him as far above the Americans as he thought himself to be, but he appreciated marrow in 1859 when he honoured the great plains by his presence. "No man [he exclaims] can guess what marrow amounts to until he has been to the Far West.... The bone was brought to table in its full length, and they had some way of hitting it with an axe which opened one side only, like the lid of a box. The bone then, when this lid was removed, exposed in its entire length a regular white roll of unbroken marrow, beautifully done. When hot, as the lid had kept it, and put on thin toast, it was perfection." Another part that was particularly delicious was the hump or rather the hump-ribs; and so too was the tongue. Still another tidbit was the meat along either side of the loin, so that altogether living was high on the rolling prairie as long as buffalo held out. Frequently the traveller became so pampered by these luxuries that he spurned all but the daintiest parts and thought nothing of killing a cow simply for the marrow or for the tongue. The poor beast deserved better treatment than it got; indeed, the only treatment was a dose of lead on sight, even when no meat was needed. The Amerinds often killed the bison recklessly before the arrival of the European, yet the herds would have resisted all such inroads. But when the white man came he quickly gave the native points in the game of useless destruction. The buffalo range immediately was transformed into a vast slaughter-house, and the carcasses were left to rot and dry under the western sun. And the more civilised the hunter—that is, the more unaccustomed to the frontier—the greater the waste of bison life at his hands. _More than sixteen thousand_ were shot for sport alone, on the plains of Kansas and Colorado, in 1871. The sportsmen killed all sizes and ages, pell-mell, just to kill and to ride away at headlong speed like escaped madmen, never stopping a moment even for the tongues. Everywhere the carcasses of wantonly slain buffalo in disgusting masses of putrefaction were lying over hill and dale.[12] They enjoyed the bison's terror and agony, and with the improved breech-loader death was dealt in a steady stream, easily and at little cost. It was grand sport!