When the Indians came with their packs of furs the trader’s men met them outside the stockade, and took from them all guns, bows, arrows, tomahawks, and any other dangerous weapons which they might be carrying. Then, in a group at a time, they were admitted to the stockade and the heavy gates locked behind them. They were virtually prisoners, and advancing across the open space between the stockade and the fort, they would come to the trading hole, where the agent of the fur merchant’s company was waiting to barter with them. One by one the Indians would offer to the trader, who was often an unscrupulous cheat, the beautiful soft furs which had been secured by trapping and shooting amid the dangers and the hardships of the cold and lonely North. Gaudy calico, cheap blankets, or the bad combination of bullets and whisky, were given in exchange for the valuable pelts. To such traders, to certain selfish and designing settlers, and to some of the government agents, who have steadily driven the Indians back and back from wide prairie to a hunting ground, and then to a reservation, the red man owes much of the degradation and humiliation which overtook him. As we look curiously at the straggling herds of buffalo, deer, and antelope in our parks and preserves to-day, we can scarcely realize how abundant was the game which the early hunters and trappers found roaming over the “Great American Desert.” There is evidence of one herd of buffalo that made the earth brown for a stretch of country seventy miles long by thirty miles wide. On one of the first railroads to be laid across the plains of Kansas, a train was once held up for nine hours while a herd crossed the tracks. Both whites and Indians slaughtered these vast herds carelessly and wantonly, using a variety of methods. A government report of 1875 speaks of one hundred thousand buffalo that were killed near Dodge City, Kansas. Only the saddles were used for food. The same report says: “It is known that south of the Arkansas River, west of Wichita, there were from one to two thousand men killing buffalo for hides alone.” At one place on the south forks of the Republican River in 1874, there were six thousand and five hundred carcases from which the hides had been stripped. Towers for religious purposes, or medicine lodges, were built by the Indians with the horns of buffalo, antelope, and deer. Some of these towers were so high that they could be seen for many miles. Father De Smet speaks of seeing one of them from the Missouri River as he made his way westward in the year 1846. As a result of this enormous destruction of the herds, the hide markets became so glutted that the skins of bulls brought only one dollar, and the hides of cows and calves from forty to sixty cents each.