Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

can be had. From such a smoke it would be impossible to stampede a band of horses, and for the choicest positions in it they will fight with teeth and hoofs.

But the most impressive signs of the abundance of nobler animal life in recent times are the countless buffalo-trails found almost everywhere. Like the cart-trails they are worn deep into the soil, and they remain unchanged for years. While feeding or resting, the buffalo are scattered about, and they make no permanent impression of their presence; but when they are going to water or are traveling to new pastures, they move in single file behind the leader of the herd, and a trail is speedily formed by their sharp hoofs. On their now deserted pasturinggrounds these trails cut the surface in every direction, now and then marked by the wallowing-places worn deep in the ground, where each animal followed the leader not only in marching, but in taking a dry wash for health and comfort. Up-hill and down-hill these paths wind and wind. Even on the thin edges of the hogbacks in the valley of the Red Deer River, and on their almost vertical faces, where no horse can find a footing, and a man would find difficulty in going, the buffalo found an easy road for his sure-footed majesty.

It is not long since this noble animal was the monarch of these lonely regions. Not only are the hill-slopes in many places terraced by their deep-worn paths, running parallel to one another at the distance of perhaps a yard, but in favorite localities, where they once fed in countless droves, their bones and horns lie scattered on every hand, bleaching and slowly decomposing in the drying wind. Sometimes every square rod of the surface presents the sad memorials of a noble animal gone to his death in a pile of shoulder-blades, rib-bones, leg-bones, horns still covered with the black, shining corneous substance which made them so striking during life, and in a broad skull with empty eye-sockets, still tufted with brown hair, and still maintaining a lordly port. At one time in my wanderings I came, near the Eyebrow Hills, to a tract some hundreds of miles in extent, already early in the autumn as it was―scathed by the prairie fires and left black and charred, the only spots excepted being a few small round marshes in which the

1 Some notion of the former abundance of the buffalo in the Canadian Northwest may be obtained from the following memoranda of outfit for a single buffalo-hunt in 1840, the authenticity of which cannot be doubted. There were required: 200 carts and harness, 655 carthorses, 586 draft-oxen, 403 horses for running buffalo with saddles and bridles, 1240 scalping-knives for cutting up meat, 740 guns (flint-lock), 150 gallons of powder, 1300 pounds of balls, 6240 gun-flints, and the number of persons was 1630. The expedition returned to Fort Garry in August, and the Hudson's Bay Com

moisture had checked the sweeping flames, where we found the only available pasturage for our animals at night. The coal-black surface was thickly dotted with the white bones of the buffalo, which, in some merciless onslaught of the hunters, had fallen there by the thousand for the paltry booty of their hides. Just where they fell, they lay scattered over miles of country, their bones the only mementos of once happy, crowding, noble animal life. As the skeletons gleamed white in the darkness and silence of night, the impression made on the thoughtful observer was depressing enough.1

Desiring one day to look over the country at large, with my half-breed guide I crossed some clay cañons on horseback, and climbed the slopes of one of the hills spoken of, whence in all directions the undulating plain lay spread out below me. A locating engineer with his party was following on my trail at a distance of some weeks' travel, and with him I wished to communicate concerning the best direction in which to carry his line. As my party consisted of only two men besides myself, I could not detach a messenger, and my only resource was to erect some monument on the summit of the hill, which, seen against the sky, would attract his attention. For such a construction the numerous buffalo-bones lying about offered ample materials. Inscribing a message to Douglass, the engineer, on a broad, white shoulder-blade, I put it at the base of the monument, and collecting a score of great skulls with the horns still attached to them, I piled them together to the height of eight or ten feet. At the top I placed another blade-bone directing attention to the message deposited below. As we rode away in the slanting light of the setting sun, which threw the shadow of the hill and its melancholy cairn of bones for miles and miles across the plain toward the east, whence we had come, I thought of the appropriate nature of such a monument the monarch of the lonely plains, crowded to his death by the ruthless, fiery edge of advancing civilization, sullenly looking with sightless eyes afar to catch the first gleaming light and the thunderous rush of that highest embodiment of nineteenth-century progress and power, the railway locomotive.

Until the farmer came to look upon these broad areas as furnishing land for cultivation in

pany paid £1200, or $6000, for the booty brought in. How many animals were slain we can only conjecture. Less than twenty years ago, my intelligent half-breed guide told me, he had seen, more than once, piles more than six feet in height of buffalo tongues which had been thrown together just as they were cut out after a single successful hunt by a party of Indians. These tongues were the perquisite of the medicine-man, who, during the progress of the hunt, sat in his tepee beating his drum and uttering incantations for its successful outcome, instead of participating more actively in the slaughter.

[graphic][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed]

crops and for the raising of cattle, there was little to attract men, civilized or uncivilized, to make their homes here. Nature was forbidding, and offered few natural products for the subsistence of human beings; fuel was scarce and poor. water was of the meanest description, and a climate of the utmost rigor prevailed. The presence of fur-bearing animals in great abundance in former times, now sadly lessened, alone held out inducement to wandering tribes of Indians, who could clothe themselves from the fruits of the chase and feed their hungry bodies with the carcasses of the slain. More than two hundred years ago the early French voyageurs, traversing Lake Superior and penetrating among the tribes of Indians on the upper Mississippi, pushed their adventurous journeys northward also, and learned of the beaver, the buffalo, the otter, the fox, the sable, and other valuable fur-bearing animals existing in great numbers in a hitherto unexplored region. The Hudson's Bay Trading Company, one of the most remarkable commercial organizations of all history, entered and took possession of a waste of which as yet civilized men had no need. For two centuries, with their few European retainers and the dependent aborigines who gathered about them engaged in hunting and trapping, they held almost unchallenged possession of a territory nearly as large as the entire United States. A teeming population with settled homes and busy towns and cities was no part of their desire, and they took measures to exclude all except such servitors and dependents as could assist in gathering the annual stores of peltries and in transporting them to Montreal. When a few years ago this company was forced by the necessities of the times to dispose of its proprietary rights to the Canadian Dominion, the paucity of both human and animal life throughout these regions became apparent. The animals had been hunted and trapped, destroyed by powder and by poison until their skins no longer furnished a source of profitable trade, and the Indian tribes had largely perished by starvation and disease. The few remnants of once noble tribes were taken in hand by a paternal government and were gathered upon farms and reservations, deprived of the possibility of getting intoxicating liquor, and controlled by an efficient mounted police force, the like of which is not known on this side of the boundary line. Thus it is that the traveler of to-day in these lonely regions may journey for weeks at a time without encountering a single human being outside his own party, or finding a sign of former or present human occupancy, while the only tokens of the former abundance of animal life those which betoken its extinction.

[graphic][ocr errors][subsumed]

A MEMBER OF THE MOUNTED POLICE.

The early grass of spring is bright green in hue, like the springing wheat of the farmer; but as the season advances the prevailing tint is a sage-green, which forms an admirable background for the display of the colors of the flowers. The flora is abundant and varied, and of the usual character of the semi-arid regions, but the hues and tints of color in blossom and leaf and stem are of remarkable depth, purity, and intensity. The common orange-lily lifts its chalices of blood like that drawn fresh from living veins. The primroses flaunt their white and yellow in splendid magnificence, and the cactus blossoms flame against the graygreen surface. In favorable localities curious cypripediums, and the spiranthes, and other members of the orchis family, attract admiring attention. But the roses far surpass all other flowers; they nod and blush in perfect abandon over miles and miles of waste, to gladden the eye of the infrequent traveler.

C. A. Kenaston.

ITALIAN OLD MASTERS.

PAUL VERONESE.-1528-1588.

(PAOLO CAGLIARI.)

AUL VERONESE, the greatest of the decorative painters of the sixteenth century, judged as decorator simply, was born at Verona when Titian was in his prime, and the true art of color had been developed to its highest attainment, while the sister-arts of sculpture and architecture had been carried to a luxuriance which already had begun to stifle the Renaissance, and to produce forms rather artificial than artistic, but which at the same time gave an opportunity for decoration such as the world had not seen since the Roman emperors. Veronese, as he is generally called in our day, was of a family of artists, his father being a sculptor and his uncle a painter. He began as a pupil of the former, but found the art of the latter more to his taste; and his father, impressed, no doubt, by his success in imitating the work of his uncle Badile, put him under the direction of Giovanni Carotto of Verona. Before he was twenty years old he had become an artist of note and recognized promise, and he found in the Cardinal Ercole di Gonzaga his first protector, and his first considerable commissions were executed for Mantua. But enthusiasm for the arts in the grand-ducal family was no longer what it had been in the days of Mantegna. Veronese burned to spread his conceptions over surfaces of a vastness which was not accorded to him in Mantua, and he returned to Verona and undertook the decoration of the villa of the Porti family near Vicenza. Here he had full liberty in choice and treatment of his subjects, and he covered the walls with scenes from mythology and classic history conceived in the pure spirit of the life of his day, in which Venetian gentlemen and ladies with all the picturesque paraphernalia of the most brilliant epoch of Italian history hobnobbed with the gods of Olympus and the worthies of old Rome.

From Vicenza he went to Treviso, then a portion of the Venetian state, where he decorated the Villa Emi at Tanzolo, near by; and here again he filled his space with visions of a resuscitated past masquerading in the garb of Venice. But the City of the Doges was the goal of all artistic ambition of the day, and in 1555 he went there with letters of recommendation to a compatriot, Bernardo Torlioni, Prior

of the Convent of St. Sebastian, who obtained for him from his brotherhood the commission to decorate the sacristy with the "Crowning of the Virgin" and four other subjects, a commission which he fulfilled with such brilliant success that he received a further order for the church of the convent, where he painted the history of Esther. The moment was most favorable for his entry into the capital of the arts. Tintoretto was absorbed in his great undertaking at the School of St. Rochus; and Titian, the supreme authority in matters of art in Venice, who was now growing old, became at once the friend and protector of the newcomer. In 1563 Titian was the foremost to support the claims of Veronese to the award of the decorations of the Library of St. Mark, in the competition which was invited by the Council, and in which his protégé gained one of his greatest triumphs. This is the date of the production of the "Marriage Feast at Cana," now in the Louvre. The details of the history of this, which is regarded as the greatest of his pictures, are interesting, as giving us at once an idea of the power of the painter and the value of art at the day of its production. The contract for it was signed on June 6, 1562, and the picture was delivered on September 8, 1563. The canvas and colors were found for him, the convent provided for his subsistence, and promised him a pipe of wine as a bonus, and he was to be paid 324 ducats, the ducat being of the value of three francs. When the difference in the value of the precious metals is estimated, the sum was equivalent to about $1500 to-day.

By this time the reputation of the painter had reached France and Spain, and Louis XIV. made propositions for the purchase of one of his pictures. Upon the "Supper with Simon" the lot fell to be the subject of contention between France and Spain. The picture belonged to the Convent of the Servants of the Madonna, who were willing to sell it; but the Council interfered, and purchased the picture, which they presented to the king of France, for the law of the time forbade the exportation of works of art, which the state regarded as important to the dignity of Venice.

In 1565 Veronese went to Rome; but with all due consideration for the critics who find in his later work the influence of Michelangelo,

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][subsumed]
« AnteriorContinuar »