 Great 60 million, they from Pennsylvania to the Ross and from the Great Slave Lake to the Rio Grande. The herds were growing when the Spaniards saw them in 1521. 60 million and growing. This was the new world and 300 years went by. A frontier was pushing on the west. Now there were 40 million buffaloes and all west of the Mississippi. It was 1830 and there were 40 million buffaloes. Then came the rifles, the rum and the call for ropes. The railroad spalled. Only 58 years and 1888. It was 1888 and four on only a few hundred fugitives died. It was the buffalo. The buffalo was food, clothing, shelter, sport, trade goods and every utensil. His bile was seasoned and his chips were fired. The great mysterious one had given the buffalo. Wackentonka, the great grandfather, had given the buffalo. And the great bull buffalo had been named with the reverence of their word for father. The Sioux called him Totonka. Totonka was part of the unbroken hoop of the world and each spring new herds rumbled out of a legendary cavern and covered the land with abundance. With the wind swept the voice they shared. The buffalo high. I make the buffalo come. I am relatable. Some men offered their spirit powers to bring to Totonka. Powers given them long ago in their vision quests. Follow society danced. They danced to bring the buffalo. Totonka would come if only they danced long enough. Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, earth-large dwellers in the days before horses. Totonka would come. Totonka must come. For they had only marquisans to travel. And they danced. They danced through days and nights. Totonka would come, but the vision must be danced and sung. Totonka would come and they danced the vision of the food and of the hunt. They danced the vision of the meat. It was meat when a tired dancer bent low and another dancer sent a blunt arrow to his side. A new dancer replaced the fallen one and the women would mock butcher. And Totonka came. A scout sent the sign. Without horses they hunted like the wolves that followed the herds. There was meat and there was sharing and there was joy and there was gratitude. Yesterday hunger, tonight feasting. The chiefs and good hunters brought meat to the lodges of the meeting. First meat was for the fire and offering to the great powers. The host waits and makes tobacco while the others eat. It is their way. Totonka was near and so with contentment, good humor, good stories. Totonka was near and in his belly boiled a stew. They take the pipe. It is an act of grace, of universal peace. The earth, the sun and all directions. They are one. A mandan could pound the ashes from his pipe and his guests would depart. It was not so easy to end the gaiety outside the lodges. Morning brings a day of labor. It is a woman's work. The men are gone to hunt. The hides are scraped with stone and horn. The sinew is stitched in a quill work design. The jerky is stripped and dried. The hunters are gone and the women labor. It is the time of the blackening cherries. As the jerky is dried, the choke cherries are ground. Together they are wasna. Wasna to nourish the hunters far from their lodges. And old white buffalo man waits and sketches a story of his remembering on his winter count road. He is a decoy in a surround. The decoy charms the herd leader and edges toward the cliff. Heard stairs and follows. Stairs and follows by secret blinds and chasers. For a great hunt, there were grateful offerings. A voice and a robe of the finest quill work were sent to stay with the winds, with the earth, with the sun. The Spaniards brought them. They strayed, they were stolen, they were bred. Till at last the plains Indian was the finest horseman in the world. Now he followed the unpredictable herds and the children singing a tremolo of joy. They would find the arrows of their family and butcher. Fresh liver was a delicacy at the end of a hunt and the juicy entrails might please the young ones. The mountain man. He came as a hunter, a trapper, a trader. He lived on the land same as the Indians. Sometimes he lived with the Indians. Below and furs were his game and trade. The trade is rendezvous. The mountain dollars a robe. It was a fair shake. For the Indian, ten cents worth of watered down whiskey might be an even trade. The traders brought whiskey and they brought guns, rifles to get more robes to trade for more rum. A cycle had been started. A cycle which had nothing to do with survival for the Indians. Soon the hides began to pour down the Missouri River to St. Louis. And soon the railroads came. Gentlemen hunters who slew for so-called sport. They brought hunters who killed for tongues alone and they brought hide hunters with their skinners. The prairies began to rot with wasted carcasses and the sharps rifles fired without ceasing. Horse hunting had become too slow. To get a stand with the long-range sharps was the wholesale way to kill. One man with one sharps could take 3,000 in a season. By 1869 the Union Pacific Railroad had divided the buffalo into northern and southern herds. By 1873 the hide hunter campaign reached its peak in the south. The hunters and skinners now covered the plains from the North Platte to the Arkansas River. They were a raucous blend of bumped railroad workers and civil war veterans. They liked killing and they liked whiskey and they could gorge themselves on hump meat and tongue. Enthusiasm for buffalo meat was legend on the plains. The roasted marrow of a buffalo's thigh bone could be caused for a wild wingding. But if you will pay good wages, give an expectation too. I think that I will go with you to the range of off the low. Oh it's now we've crossed these river voids and homeward we are bound. No more than the black hungry and the buffalo ring and the damned old buffalo. Colonel Dodge had said, every buffalo dead is an Indian gone and buffalo extermination was the unwritten policy in the winning of the west. So the butchery went on. On the south Platte hunters built fires to keep the buffalo from water at night and killed them as they came to slake their thirst by day. 1875 saw the end. In 1875 the great southern herd was gone. There were still great herds in the north. By 1882 the northern Pacific Railroad was built and 5,000 hunters and skinners were emptying the northern range. Sitting Bull led his people on their last hunt in 1883. Between the black hills and Bismarck they killed 1,200 buffalo in two days. It was the last three herd anyone ever saw. A year later the hunters flocked to the range as usual. They returned with empty wagons and broke. It was 1884. The days of the still hunt, the hide men and the skinners were over. The massive herds were gone. For the Indian the end of the buffalo meant starvation and disease. Still he could invoke the mysterious powers of Tatanka for healing. The people still lived on the desperate hope that Tatanka would return. And for those who lived on hope alone, the medicine men became the new leaders. These were the waning moons of desolation. And the last robes wrapped the bodies of the dead. Now a resurrection of bones was clearing the prairie. The supply wagons going south from Dodge City returned to the railroads with bones for the fertilizer and carbon works. Now unemployed hunters, droughts, stricken sodbusters and starving Indians became bone pickers. The bones of a hundred buffalo might bring ten dollars. The bone-scattered sod was the tragic graveyard of independence for the plains Indian. Now he came to the reservations. The bright fires of strong leaders were fading. Wolf road, dull night, kills buffalo, little wolf, gall, high bear, spotted tail, satanta, red shirt, American horse, red clown. Still once more the dream of Tatanka returned. The tree would blossom and the hoop would come back to the people. It was the Messiah dream, a new religion. They called it the ghost dance. They sang and danced endlessly. I will live now, the father said so. I will live now, the father said so. The buffalo are coming, the father said so. The buffalo are coming, the father said so. The ghost dance had been the vision of a youth Indian. Now it was shared by Kiowa, Rappahoe, Cheyenne and Sue. A new world would come through the dance and the dance brought visions of the spirit world, of departed loved ones and of Tatanka coming again. The holy man Black Elk danced until a vision came. His vision took him to the spirit world where he was given a holy shirt to bring to his people. When he returned he told his people of the shirt which was given to be worn by the ghost dancers to bring the vision of the dance. Soon the ghost dancers were wearing the shirt and soon they believed the ghost shirt would shed the bullets of the white man. The massacre at Wounded Knee. The white man called it a battle. It was a massacre. Fear that the ghost dancers meant to rise against the government brought Chief Bigfoot's band to surrender. Surrender, hungry, sick. They were being disarmed. Then a frightful moment of disturbance and the nervous rapid-fire hotchkiss guns were loosed on all the people. Bigfoot, their leader, lay frozen in the snow. The wagon men loaded their bodies and put them in a common grave for the old ones. The hoop of the world was broken.