The Miller press. [volume] (Miller, S.D.) 190?-current, 1907-03-14
FROM BUFFALO
TODOMESTIC COW
Vast Herds Now Cover the Buff alo
Feeding Ground

The total area once inhabited by
the buffalo is estimated at 100000
square miles. 1t stretched from the
Hano Estacado in Texas to the head
waters of the Missouri, a distance
approaching two thousand miles.
The buffalo was migrant, being
forced to abandon denuded pastures
for fresh grass, which in turn was
abandoned when consumed. Thus,
by an memorable law of nature,
these noble animals were kept con-
stantly on the move, driven by an
irresistible impulse, in search of
subsistence. Their migrations were
one of the most marvellous spectacles
of the plains. Nothing stopped them
no obstacle deferred no danger caus-
ed them to hesitate. They plunged
fearlessly into the mightiest of
rivers, swan with bold stroke
through the Red, Arkansas, the
Cimarron, and the Kaw and did not
hesitate when confronted by the
majestic Missouri's high tide. They
passed in countless hordes through
the ravines of the Ozarks, along the
narrow lodges of intervening rivers
eventually reached the grassy valleys
enclosed among the peaks of the
Rockies. The vast emigrations were
accompanied by many losses and in
Vulnerable tragedies. Flocks Of
ferocious wolves followed to leap up
on toe cripples, to devour those too
weak to follow. Woe to the calf
that could not keep up with its
mother; woe to the wounded fighter
or those that broke a leg in the
perilous passage of streams and
mountains. Only the fittest surviv-
ed; only the strongest went on.
Believing, blowing, fighting and
snorting they swept toward with a
force that made the earth tremble
and a noise that awaked the solitudes
for miles around.
The picture above sketched was a
familiar one all through the thirties
and forties and, in somewhat modi-
fled degree, far into the fifties and
sixties. No one who left a written
record seemed to think that the
scenes of the middle nineteenth CEN
fury would ever undergo material
change. 1t did not occur to them
that the same grass that supported
forty million buffalo might sustain
an equal number of domestic cattle
Washington Irving rode through
what is now Oklahoma in the fall of
1884, under the escort of band of
United States rangers, and went as
far as the Texas line through what
was then known as the Pawnee
Hunting Grounds. Experienced
traveller as he was and close observer
he thought this romantic county was
given over for all time to the nomads
of the prairies and the wild game
they pursued. The sanguinary
Comanche and still more bloodthirsty
Lipans made regular raids over the
Mexican border into the plains of
Texas, to hunt the buffalo and lay
waste such isolated white settle
ments as had found Judgement at
that distant day. Zebulon Pike, who
crossed the plains to the mountains
of Colorado some years later, saw
the buffalo and their Indian pur-
suers, saw the grass that sustained
the herds but failed to see in this
any outcome for what he denominat-
ed THE Great American Desert. "
Captain Bonneville, who spent four
years in what is now Wyoming, Ida
no and Oregon and hunted the
buffalo in the Horse Prairie, in the
valleys Of Salmon and Bear rivers,
and along the borders of the Seeds