An integral part of this belief was a conviction that buffalos were supernatural in origin and therefore infinite in numbers. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge wrote that Plains Indians “firmly believed that the buffalo were produced in countless numbers in a country under the ground; that every spring the surplus swarmed, like bees from a hive, out of great cave-like openings to this country, which were situated somewhere in the great ‘Llano Estacado,’ or Staked Plain of Texas.”
