The Swarms of Game.

The explorers had now left behind them the fertile, tree-clad country, and had entered on the great plains, across which they journeyed to the Arkansas, and then up that river.  Like Lewis and Clark, Pike found the country literally swarming with game; for all the great plains region, from the Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande, formed at this time one of the finest hunting grounds to be found in the whole world.  At one place just on the border of the plains Pike mentions that he saw from a hill buffalo, elk, antelope, deer, and panther, all in sight at the same moment.  When he reached the plains proper the three characteristic animals were the elk, antelope, and, above all, the buffalo.

    The Bison.

The myriads of huge shaggy-maned bison formed the chief feature in this desolate land; no other wild animal of the same size, in any part of the world, then existed in such incredible numbers.  All the early travellers seem to have been almost equally impressed by the interminable seas of grass, the strange, shifting, treacherous plains rivers, and the swarming multitudes of this great wild ox of the West.  Under the blue sky the yellow prairie spread out in endless expanse; across it the horseman might steer for days and weeks through a landscape almost as unbroken as the ocean.  It was a region of light rainfall; the rivers ran in great curves through beds of quicksand, which usually contained only trickling pools of water, but in times of freshet would in a moment fill from bank to bank with boiling muddy torrents.  Hither and thither across these plains led the deep buffalo-trails, worn by the hoofs of the herds that had passed and re-passed through countless ages.  For hundreds of miles a traveller might never be out of sight of buffalo.  At noon they lay about in little groups all over the prairie, the yellow calves clumsily frisking beside their mothers, while on the slight mounds the great bulls moaned and muttered and pawed the dust.  Towards nightfall the herds filed down in endless lines to drink at the river, walking at a quick, shuffling pace, with heads held low and beards almost sweeping the ground.  When Pike reached the country the herds were going south from the Platte towards their wintering grounds below the Arkansas.  At first he passed through nothing but droves of bulls.  It was not until he was well towards the mountains that he came upon great herds of cows.

    Other Game.

The prairie was dotted over with innumerable antelope.  These have always been beasts of the open country; but the elk, once so plentiful in the great eastern forests, and even now plentiful in parts of the Rockies, then also abounded on the plains, where there was not a tree of any kind, save the few twisted and wind-beaten cottonwoods that here and there, in sheltered places fringed the banks of the rivers.

    Indians Hunting.