The liquor trade ceased altogether but the police and the traders became fast friends, while the police and the Northern Blackfeet have been loyal allies ever since. After the buffalo vanished, the tribes were fed by the Canadian government and not lavishly, perhaps rather stingily, helped to learn the important arts of ranching. Meanwhile far away to the southward, the white men were slaughtering buffalo for their hides, and in Kansas alone during ten years, thirty-five million carcasses were left to rot on the plains. The bison herds still seemed as large as ever, the country black with them as far as the eye could reach. But men like Schultz who had brains, had news that away from these last migrating herds, the plains were empty for thousands of miles. I remember the northern plains like a vast graveyard, reaching in all directions to the sky-line, bare save for its tombstones, the bleached skulls of millions of bison. Afterward the sugar refiners sent wagons and took them all away. In 1880, the whole of the prairie nations surrounded the last herds, and white men took a hundred thousand robes leaving the carcasses to rot as usual. The Indians slaughtered also but sold the robes for groceries, and dried the whole of the meat for winter food. “We are near the end of it,” said Red Bird’s Tail. “I fear that this is our last buffalo hunt. Are you sure,” he asked Schultz, “that the white men have seen all the land between the two salt waters?” “There is no place,” answered the trader, “where the white men have not traveled, and none of them can find buffalo.” “That being the case,” said the chief with a deep sigh, “misery and death are at hand for me and mine.” The Indians were compelled to strip the plains of every living creature, the Blackfeet, despite their religion, to eat fish and birds. Then came the winter; Schultz and his wife rode at dusk to the camp of Lodge-Pole chief. “Hurry,” he commanded his women, “cook a meal for our friends. They must be hungry after their long ride.” His wives brought out three small potatoes and two little trout, which they boiled. “’Tis all we have,” said one of them, brushing the tears from her eyes, and then the chief broke down. “We have nothing,” he said haltingly. “There are no more buffalo. The Great Father sends us but a little food, gone in a day. We are very hungry. There are fish, to be sure, forbidden by the Gods, unclean. We eat them, but they do not give us any strength, and I doubt not we will be punished for eating them. It seems as if our gods had forsaken us.” Mrs. Schultz went out and brought back a sack of food, and they made a feast, merry as in the days of plenty, which were gone forever. Schultz came from the starving camps to write a letter to a New York paper, but it was never printed--a matter of politics. Then he advised the Indians to kill their agent, but they remembered Colonel Baker’s visit.