178 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACADEMY OF [1896. 



be cited as showing the character of country, which formed the 

 favorite buffalo range in the early days of Tennessee : " The land 

 on the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers is generally well timbered. 

 In some places there are glades of rich land without timber, but 

 these are not frequent or large * * * The glades are covered 

 with wild rye, buffalo grass and pea vine. =i= * * The under- 

 growth in many places is cane 15 to 20 feet high, so close together 

 as to exclude all other plants." 



From the accounts in Haywood's History, we can gather that 

 the buffaloes were not migratory in that latitude, but remained 

 throughout the year. In 1779 a company of Watauga adventurers 

 planted a field of corn on the present site of Nashville. " After 

 the crop was made, Overhall, White and Swanson were left to keep 

 the buffaloes out of the unenclosed fields of corn, while the rest of 

 the party returned for their families." The abundance of these 

 animals and other game in Middle Tennessee is proved by the fol- 

 lowing from Ramsey (p. 450). "Michael Stoner this year [1780], 

 discovered Stoner's Lick and Stoner's Creek. The woods abounded 

 in game, and the hunters procured a full supply of meat for the 

 inhabitants by killing bears, buffalo and deer. A party of twenty 

 men went up the Caney Fork as high as Flinn's Creek, and 

 returned in canoes with their meat during the winter. In their 

 hunting excursion they killed 105 bears, 75 buffaloes and more than 

 80 deer." This record is interesting, as it accounts for the naming 

 of Buffalo Valley in the west end of Putnam County, and proves 

 the former abundance of these animals in that and Smith County. 



Regarding the presence of buffaloes in East Tennessee we have 

 fewer and less definite records. Ramsey tells us, (p. 69) that in 

 1764, " Daniel Boon, who still lived in the Yadkin * * * came 

 again this year [to Tennessee and Kentucky] to explore the coun- 

 try — Callaway [his hunting companion] was at the side of Boon, 

 when approaching the spurs of the Cumberland Mountain and in 

 view of the vast herds of buffalo grazing in the vallies between 

 them, he exclaimed, ' I am richer than the man mentioned in script- 

 ure, who owned the cattle on a thousand hills — I own the wild 

 beasts of more than a thousand vallies.' " 



In other places we read that the route taken by explorers from 

 North Carolina and Virginia to the Cumberland River valley Avas 

 by way of Cumberland Gap, which lies on the boundary between 

 Claiborne County, Tennessee and Bell County, Kentucky. There 



