The buffalo then ranged from the Rio Grande to the Athabaska, from the Missouri to the Rockies, and beyond.

No one seems to have concluded in those days that there was after all slight difference between the buffalo and the domestic ox.

The native cattle, however, in untold thousands and millions, had even then proved beyond peradventure the sustaining and strengthening nature of the grasses of the Plains.
Now, each creature, even of human species, must adjust itself to its environment.

Having done so, commonly it is disposed to love that environment.

The Eskimo and the Zulu each thinks that he has the best land in the world: So with the American Indian, who, supported by the vast herds of buffalo, ranged all over that tremendous country which was later to be given over to the white man with his domestic cattle.
No freer life ever was lived by any savages than by the Horse Indians of the Plains in the buffalo days; and never has the world known a physically higher type of savage.
On the buffalo-range--that is to say, on the cattle-range which was to be--Lewis and Clark met several bands of the Sioux--the Mandans and the Assiniboines, the Blackfeet, the Shoshones.