The buffalo is the Indian’s whole dependence. It serves him for all his purposes—meat, clothing and lodging, powder horns, bowstrings, thread and hair to make saddles. In the winter season the hides are dressed, made into robes and traded to whites, by which means they are able to buy all their necessaries and even some luxuries. Robes are worth about $3 each, and although the number sent to market is great, yet the high price paid for them to Indians and the danger of transportation is such that fortunes are more easily and often lost than made at the business. Beaver were formerly numerous and valuable, therefore much hunted by whites and Indians, but of late years the price of that fur being greatly reduced, and the danger of hunting considerable, does not induce either whites or Indians to hunt them. This animal has been trapped and killed to such an extent as to threaten their entire extinction, though for the last 10 or 12 years, since beaver trapping by large bodies of men has been abandoned, they have greatly increased, and are now to be found tolerably plentiful in all the small streams and in the Missouri and Yellowstone. These Indians do not and never did trap them much; though the Crow and the Cree still make good beaver hunts, they do not rely much on this either as a source of profit or food. Elk, deer, bighorn, and antelope are numerous and afford a means of living and profit to the Indians although they are not hunted to any extent except in a great scarcity of buffalo. From this circumstance they do not diminish and are found now in much the same numbers as 20 years back. Wolves are very plentiful and of three kinds, the large white wolf, the large grayback wolf, and the small prairie wolf, all a good deal hunted and many killed, though they continue to increase. They follow the buffalo in large bands, waiting an opportunity to pounce upon one that has been wounded or mired. They also destroy a great many small calves in the month of May when they are brought forth. The skins of the larger kind are worth 70 cents to $1 each; the smaller about 50 cents each.