After crossing the Red River sometime in the 1830s, a priest climbed a tree seeking a spot where he could safely observe an approaching herd of buffalo. There he witnessed a deranging spectacle—the buffalo stretched all the way to where they disappeared into the line between sky and earth. He was forced to stay in the tree for three days as they passed, passed and migrated, three days of horizon-to-horizon buffalo. He nearly died of thirst. ‘You may judge now the richness of these prairies,’ he wrote later. There was no end to the beasts. Just like it seems there is no end to us, in our
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