Of the enormous numbers of the wild cattle which were once the exclusive property of the Indian we have been accustomed to form but a very inadequate idea. They exceed those which have raised the Tartar into the comparatively high rank of a pastoral nomad. The patriarch or poet Job was a famous cattle-owner, but he was a small dairyman by the side of a Cheyenne or Rickaree chief, and a stampede of a small detachment of buffalo would have run down unnoticed the whole of his live-stock. In the three years 1872-74 four and a half millions of buffalo--considerably more than half as many as all the black cattle in the British Islands--were slaughtered. From this fact may be gathered an impression of the vast provision of human food until lately stored by Nature in a region still marked on modern geographies as a desert. Of the value of this endowment the Indian, with all his improvidence, had some notion. It was a resource he may be said to have husbanded. Of nothing like the wanton and shameful destruction dealt by the whites since the feeding-grounds were made accessible by rail was he ever guilty. He managed his hunts systematically, placed them under the rigid control of a sort of guild known as "dog-soldiers," and allowed to be slain only what were needed for his wants. The buffalo was to him what the cocoa-palm is to the Polynesian; and more, for he needed warm shelter and warm clothing. He cared for it accordingly. It grew around him almost as the cocoa-grove around the hut of the islander. A herd will even now graze quietly for days in the neighborhood of an Indian village of a thousand souls, while an encampment of half a dozen whites disperses it instantly. The whites kill only for the hides, two of which they lose for every one saved in merchantable condition. A very small proportion of the flesh is utilized when the railway happens to be near enough, and within a like limit of territory the bones are collected. In the single year 1874 over ten millions of tons of these were sent East to fertilize the exhausted fields of the Atlantic slope with the refuse riches of the "desert."