THE BUFFALO AND HIS FATE. 45 



of small herds through the mountains from West Virginia into the 

 upper parts of North and South Carolina by way of the New, Holston, 

 and French Broad Rivers. They seem to have been common on the 

 savannas about the heads of the rivers in the western parts of those 

 States ; but it is well attested that they never came down to the sea- 

 coast. Nor can good evidence be shown that they ever reached any 

 part of Georgia, Florida, or Alabama (although possibly Mississippi), 

 as at present bounded, not appearing habitually to have penetrated 

 south of the Tennessee River unless just along the bank of the Fa- 

 ther of Waters on account of the thickness of the forest. 



The records in general then show, that at the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century the range of the buffalo east of the Mississippi, 

 with the exception of its occasional appearance on the eastern slope of 

 the Alleghanies in the Carolinas and Virginia, was restricted to the 

 area drained by the Ohio River except over the lowlands at its mouth 

 and to the eastern tributaries of the Mississippi in northern Wiscon- 

 sin and Minnesota ; also that it was very numerous and uniformly dis- 

 tributed over the prairies of Illinois and Indiana, and also about the 

 upper tributaries of the Ohio, but less numerously and uniformly over 

 Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and the north- 

 ern portion of Tennessee, being everywhere restricted to the prairies 

 and scantily wooded land along the streams. 



In the appendix Professor Shaler offers a short discussion of the 

 probable age of the bison in the Ohio Valley. In the swamps sur- 

 rounding the " salt-licks " of Kentucky buffalo-bones are found packed 

 in great quantities in the mucky soil, but only about the latest vents 

 of the saline waters, which have from time to time changed their points 

 of escape from the ground. The caverns of Kentucky and Tennessee, 

 which were the homes of the aboriginal people of the region, and re- 

 ceptacles for their dead, and where have been found skeletons of the 

 beaver, deer, wolf, bear, and many other mammals, have never yielded 

 any bones of the bison. Moreover, among all the many figures of ani- 

 mals and birds found on the pottery and ornaments of the prehistoric 

 races of the West, the marked form of the buffalo does not appear, 

 making it presumable that this animal was unknown to the people who 

 built the mounds. Professor Shaler is of the opinion, held by many 

 ethnologists, that the "mound-builders" were essentially related to the 

 Natchez group of Indians, and were driven southward by ruder tribes 

 of red-men from the north and northwest. The Indians north of the 

 Ohio are known to have been much in the habit of burning the forests, 

 and no doubt the invaders alluded to above signalized their advance 

 by such conflagrations. This making of plains by the repeated burn- 

 ing of forests, aided by " the continued decrease of the rainfall, which 

 was " a concomitant of the disappearance of the glacial period," per- 

 mitted the buffalo to advance rapidly eastward as far as the Alle- 

 ghanies, and, coincidently, as far as the mound-building people appear 



