The vast plain beyond was absolutely blackened with countless herds of buffaloes, which were browsing on the rich grass.

They were still so far distant that their bellowing, and the trampling of their myriad hoofs, only reached the hunters like a faint murmur on the breeze.

In the immediate foreground, however, there was a group of about half-a-dozen buffalo cows feeding quietly, and in the midst of them an enormous old bull was enjoying himself in his wallow.
The animals, towards which our hunters now crept with murderous intent, are the fiercest and the most ponderous of the ruminating inhabitants of the western wilderness.

The name of _buffalo_, however, is not correct.

The animal is the _bison_, and bears no resemblance whatever to the buffalo proper; but as the hunters of the far west, and, indeed, travellers generally, have adopted the misnomer, we bow to the authority of custom and adopt it too.
Buffaloes roam in countless thousands all over the North American prairies, from the Hudson Bay Territories, north of Canada, to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
The advance of white men to the west has driven them to the prairies between the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains, and has somewhat diminished their numbers; but even thus diminished, they are still innumerable in the more distant plains.