When the white race appeared upon the scene, game of every kind,--fish, flesh, and fowl,--was plentiful. Trappers and hunters went up and down the rivers, where beaver and otter, musk and mink, lived, and through the forests where birds nested and deer, antelope, and other game browsed; climbed the mountains where bear and puma lodged, and ever their bales of skins, furs, peltries, and hides loaded the canoes and the decks of returning vessels. Here was the best proof of the Indian’s self-restraint and provident foresight for the future, in that the white man found such an abundance of all kinds of game ready to his hand. Then came the master mind of an Astor who valued money more than the future. What did it matter to him that game of a hundred kinds disappeared from the face of the earth provided he could make a fortune? What cared he that men and women would starve in the days to come so long as he could pile up his hoard of pelts, and sell them to add to his wealth? Modern commercialism, that damned and damning spirit of our civilization that sees nothing but dollars, that would shut out the glory of the sun rather than miss the ten-cent piece close at hand, entered into the game. Then the sportsman and the pot hunter of the white race came also, and between them and the Buffalo Bills who shot down buffaloes by the thousand for food to supply the builders of the transcontinental railways, in half a generation they cleared the prairies of the millions of noble buffaloes which used to roam in vast herds, left nothing but slender bands or solitary animals of the moose and elk, and drove these into almost inaccessible solitudes for self-preservation, and nearly stripped the country of deer, antelope, wild turkeys, and sage hens. Then they passed laws to protect “game,” making a close season so that the Indians, who, in their days of freedom and wildness, needed no law but their own good sense and self-restraint, cannot now shoot at all save in the few days when the restrictions are removed. So that, practically speaking, the Indian now has no hunting-ground; he is debarred from obtaining wild game for food for himself and family, and all because of the infernal greed and equally infernal brutality of the pot-hunter. Here, then, is a national proof--for what I have said is practically true of every state in the country--that the white race has much to learn of self-restraint from the despised Indian. Self-restraint as to greed,--for, until the advent of the white, one Indian never sought to build up mere wealth at the expense of or to the injury or detriment of his fellows. This was the white man’s way, not his! He practised self-restraint, for the Indians knew and realized that if the animals were killed too closely the species would soon become extinct, and future generations, if not themselves, have to suffer.