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The Father: “My son, you have been to college. Tell me, what is the meaning of ‘The Irony of Fate?’”
The Son: “It means, my father, and Indian cutting hay on the prairie to feed the buffalo."
Ernest Thompson-Seton estimates that once upon a time 50,000,000 buffaloes roamed the plains of Western Canada. Old timers tell how the Indians slaughtered them, heading them over the cut banks, when they piled up in a misery of death like Napolean’s horsemen in the trench at Waterloo. The Indians took their tongues, and sometimes their skins, and left them to the feast of the wolves. A barbarous civilization long since sang a barbarous requiem over the monarch of the plains. The wild buffalo, never very wild, is no more, and now as a just retribution, fate has set the Indian to work cutting hay to feed the tame ones that have been preserved.
The writer was passing through buffalo park north-east of Hardisty the other day, where over 400 buffalo are to be confined, and down in one of the valleys he saw the Indians at the haymaking. He reined his horse, and paused a while in contemplation of the idea. If he had been a poet he would have written a song about it. “Cutting hay for the buffalo?” he asked the audience. “Ugh,” grunted they in reply.
It was a huge sport herding the great herds of helpless creatures over the cut banks to their torture. Now work and feed them, dang you.
The buffalo park is a credit to Canada ...
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