When The Buffalo Disappeared

In 187C Fort Benton alone sent 80,000 buffalo hides to market. In 1883 two carloads were ehipped from tlickinson, North Dakota. In 1884 Fort Benton sent none at all. In 1879 a little band of the animáis were known to be grazing near Fort Totten, on Devil Lake, North Dakota, and it is believed that these animáis furnished the two oarloads of robes which came eastward to St. Paul from Dickinson in 1883. This was the last year of the buffalo- 1883. A herd, numbering perhaps 80,000, crossed the Yellowstone river in that year and went north toward the British line. "They never came back," is the pitiful refrain which one hears from the Indians along the border frorn Winnipeg in Manitoba to St. Mary's Lakes in Alberta. No, they never came back while riding with the officers of the Nanadian mounted pólice through Alberta, they told me the story of this last year of the buffalo, but it was never told twice alike by any two men, for a strange mystery seems to hang over the closing scène of the erreat crime which annihilated the iniehty herds.