BOVlLhE 



363 



abundant over a large portion of Europe in the Pleistocene period 

 — the fossil r.uc described as B. priseus not being specifically dis- 

 tinct ; but at the present day it exists only in the primeval forests 

 of Lithuania, Moldavia, Wallachia, and the Caucasus, where it is 

 artificially preserved. 



The American Bison formerly ranged over about one-third of 

 the North American continent. Thus, to quote from Mr. Horna- 

 day, 1 " starting almost at tide-water on the Atlantic coast, it ex- 

 tended across the Alleghany mountain system to the prairies along 

 the Mississippi, and southward to the delta of that great system. 



Fig. 14S. — The American Bison (Bos americanus). After Hornaday. 



Although the great plain country of the West was the natural 

 home of the species, where it flourished most abundantly, it also 

 wandered south across Texas to the burning plains of North-Eastern 

 Mexico, westward across the Rocky Mountains into New Mexico, 

 Utah, and Idaho, and northward across a vast treeless waste to the 

 bleak and inhospitable shores of the Great Slave Lake itself." In 

 consequence of the settlement of the country by Europeans the area 

 inhabited by the Bison was gradually contracted, till about 1840 

 one mighty herd occupied the centre of its former range. The 

 completion of the Union Pacific Eailway in 1869 divided this great 

 herd into a southern and a northern division, the former comprising 

 a number of individuals estimated at nearly four millions, while the 

 latter contained about a million and a half. Before 1880 the 

 southern herd had, however, practically ceased to exist ; while the 

 same fate overtook the northern one in 1883. In 1889 some twenty 

 stragglers in Texas represented the last of the southern herd ; 

 while there were a few others in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, 



1 The Extirpation of the American Bison, 1889. 



