I remember, not too long ago, I was reading some history about our nation and its westward expansion. This particular book had to do with the disappearance of the buffalo on the plains. Before white settlers happened upon the scene, buffalo were so numerous that vast herds stretched literally as far as the eye could see. There were millions of buffalo. So great were there numbers that it didn’t really occur to people that they could ever vanish. Well, we all know how this story went. In an astonishingly short period of time, the buffalo, for all intents and purpose, were gone. Due to a frenzied and short-sighted wholesale slaughter, the likes of which fails the imagination, these millions became but a memory. Today, small herds exist here and there, but there will never again be the huge a…