This had been the third herd driven into one pound within ten or twelve days, the disgusted artist says, “and the putrefying carcasses tainted the air all round. The Indians in this manner destroy innumerable buffaloes, apparently for the mere pleasure of the thing. Not one in twenty is used in any way, so that thousands are left to rot where they fall.” Even the wolves, hovering around while the slaughter was going on, could not dispose of such a monstrous feast. Who can wonder at the disappearance of the buffalo, massacred like that? The Indian might have gone on hunting them on foot with bows and arrows forever without making much difference to the herd; but first came the horse, then the gun, and then the crowd of Métis wanting pemmican to feed white traders as well as themselves—with all these against him, the King of the Plains could not hope to survive. And other calamities besides man overtook him. Between Fort Pitt and Edmonton, Paul Kane saw large herds of buffalo swimming across the Saskatchewan, on their usual spring migration; but he saw also thousands of dead buffalo strewn along the banks—so weakened by disease, or by lack of food, that they were drowned in the attempt to swim the river. The guns which the Indians got from the white man and used to exterminate their “best friend, the buffalo,” helped them also to exterminate each other. The feud between the Iroquois confederacy and the Hurons in the early days of Eastern Canada was no more relentless than the feud between the Blackfoot confederacy and the Crees in the West, even in the reign of Queen Victoria. Voyaging down the North Saskatchewan one day, below Fort Pitt, Kane says, “we saw a large party of mounted Indians riding furiously towards us.” They proved to be “a war party of Blackfoot Indians, Blood Indians, Sur-cees, Gros Ventres and Paygans—the best mounted, the best looking, the most warlike in appearance, and the best accoutred of any tribe I had ever seen.” But—“we had a Cree Indian in one of our boats, whom we had to stow away under the skins lest he should be discovered.” The warriors were friendly enough to the white men. “They spread a buffalo skin for us to sit down upon, depositing all their knives, guns and bows and arrows on the ground in front of us, in token of amity,” and passed round the pipe of peace. “After our smoke several of the young braves engaged in a horse race, to which sport they are very partial, and at which they bet heavily; they generally ride on those occasions stark naked, without a saddle, and with only a lasso fastened to the lower jaw of the horse.”