Governor Isaac I. Stevens, in his report of estimates of the Pacific Railroad in 1854 to Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, says: “The supplies of meat for all the laborers on this line east of the mountains ... will be furnished from the plains. The _inexhaustible_ herds of buffalo will supply amply the whole force till the road is completed.” [Illustration: Camp Red River Hunters.] There were at that time twenty-seven known tribes of Indians west of the Missouri river, of which the greater part subsisted by hunting the buffalo; and he says of the hunters from Mouse river valley to the Red river of the North: “They make two hunts each year, leaving a portion of their numbers at home to take care of their houses and farms: One from the middle of June to the middle of August, when they make ‘pemican’ and dry meat, and prepare the skins of buffalo for lodges and moccasins; and again from the middle of September to the middle of November, when, besides the pemican and dried meat, the skin is dried into robes. “I estimate that four months each year two thousand hunters, three thousand women and children, and eighteen hundred carts are on the plains; and estimating the load of a cart at eight hundred pounds, and allowing three hundred carts for luggage, that twelve hundred tons of meat, skins, and furs is their product of the chase.[19] “These people are simple-hearted, honest, and industrious, and would make good citizens. Each year they carry off to the settlements at Pembina at least two million five hundred thousand pounds of buffalo meat, dried, or in the shape of pemican.” Large tribes, as the Gros Ventres, Bloods, Piegans, and others, had hunted and feasted for ages without diminishing the number or strength of “the _inexhaustible_ herds of buffalo,” described by Governor Stevens in 1854. This source of subsistence to a numerous and poor people, and immense wealth to the nation, was wantonly destroyed by the “_pot-hunter_,” who is in no way related to the “squirrel hunter,” but stands in about the same relation to the sportsman as does the “missing link” to the species he disgraces. He is a destructive animal, and it is as useless to hope any species of game, beast or bird, will ever exist in numbers too great for this wily loafer to destroy, as it is to expect legal enactments and penalties will ever prevent him doing evil.