46 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to have settled the country. Its advent thus seems to have been sin- 

 gularly recent. 



The question of the origin of the buffalo and its relation to the 

 earliest tribes of people in the Ohio Valley is made still more compli- 

 cated by the fact that an earlier and closely related species of buffalo, 

 probably coeval with the mammoth and musk-ox, and possibly with 

 the caribou and elk, was living at the time just following the close of 

 the glacial epoch. " I am strongly disposed to think," writes Pro- 

 fessor Shaler, " that in the Bison Americanus we have the descendant 

 of the Bison latifrons, modified by existence in the new conditions of 

 soil and climate to which it was driven by the great changes closing 

 the last ice age." But he adds that future explorations will probably 

 show that there was an interval of some thousands of years between 

 the two species along the Ohio. 



Although the main chain of the Rocky Mountains has been t sup- 

 posed commonly to form the western limit of the range of the buffalo, 

 there is abundant proof of its former existence over a vast area west 

 of it, including a large part of the Utah Basin, the Green River plateau, 

 and the plains of the Columbia, westward to the Blue Mountains of 

 Oregon, and the Sierra Nevada. Evidence of this is found in the 

 bleached skulls, in accounts of early explorers, and in traditions of the 

 Indians. During the very severe and snowy winter of 1836-'37 large 

 herds were lost through starvation ; by 1840 they had retreated east- 

 ward to the forks of the Yellowstone and been extirpated in the Utah 

 Valley and about the head-waters of the Colorado ; and ten years later 

 were never to be found west of the Rocky Mountains, between the 

 British possessions and the Rio Grande del Norte. Westward of this 

 great river it does not seem, within the past two centuries, to have 

 extended itself at all into the highlands of New Mexico ; but, farther 

 south, there is proof of its former range over the northeastern prov- 

 inces of Mexico to at least the twenty-fifth parallel, though it was 

 never abundant there, and abandoned that region before the beginning 

 of the current century. 



The great center of buffalo-life in ages past was the vast expanse 

 of treeless plains which stretch uninterruptedly from the Texas coasts 

 almost to the Arctic Circle, and here, in restricted areas, they have 

 survived until the present time. 



When Cabeca de Vaca met them in 1530 they ranged throughout 

 nearly the whole of Texas, the higher prairie-lands of northwestern 

 Louisiana and Arkansas, and thence uniformly northward and west- 

 ward. But soon after 1820 they disappeared altogether from Arkan- 

 sas, and were not seen in western Missouri and southern Iowa later 

 than 1825 ; but immense herds still roamed over the northern half of 

 the latter State. Since 1845, however, few have been seen anywhere 

 within Iowa, nor did they linger many years longer in Minnesota. 



The stream of emigration across the plains to Calif ornia about 1859 



