296 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM vol. 86 



phur or salt spring at Nashville. During 1783 when the road was 

 opened from Clinch River to Nashville by way of Crab Orchard 

 [Cumberland County] it passed through "vast upland prairie, cov- 

 ered with a most luxuriant growth of native grasses, pastured over as 

 far as the eye could see, with numerous herds of deer, elk, and buf- 

 falo" (Ramsey, 1853, p. 501). 



Lewis Brantz, who had been sent out by the merchants of Balti- 

 more, departed from Nashville on December 28, 1785, and traveled 

 with a pack horse 140 miles through the barrens to the Holston River 

 settlements. He noted in his journal (Williams, 1928, p. 286) that 

 while enroute he saw but one rlk, although he observed large numbers 

 of antlers. 



Henry Rutherford and his guide, while surveying a large tract of 

 land in 1785 on the south side of the Forked Deer River, Lauderdale 

 County, killed elk and other game for food (Williams, 1930, p. 44). 



Andre Michaux, while residing at Nashville, noted in his journal 

 under date of June 21. 1795, that elk were present in that region 

 (Williams, 1928, p. 335). 



Putnam (1859, p. 127) states that half a dozen elk were kept in 

 1859 in a private woodland tract at Belle Meade, or Dunhams Station. 



Elk at one time were plentiful in most parts of Tennessee, occur- 

 ring not only in the high passes and narrow valleys of the moun- 

 tainous sections but also in association with the buffalo visited the 

 licks of middle Tennessee, browsed along the rivers and creeks in 

 the southern counties, and wandered through the canebrakes of the 

 Mii^sissippi bottomlands. 



When the early hunters and settlers first set foot in eastern Ten- 

 nessee, there were many large tracts covered with native grasses on 

 the low hills and narrow valleys of the southern Allegheny Moun- 

 tains that afforded pasture lands for herds of elk and in the summer 

 for buffalo (Ramsey, 1853, p. 96). 



David Crockett (1834) in his autobiogra})hical sketch repeatedly 

 refers to elk in the bottomlands of Obion and Dyer Counties in the 

 decade between 1820 and 1830. 



According to B. C. Miles (Rhoads, 1896, p. 181) an elk was killed 

 by David Merriwether about 1849 at Rpelfoot Lake, and another was 

 reported to have been killed in Obion County in 1865. 



Under the pen name "Antler" (1880, p. 306) a resident of Piney 

 Creek Falls, Van Buren County, wrote in 1880 as follows: The Caney 

 Fork district "embracing the tributaries of the Caney Fork, remains 

 a wilderness still. The stirface is rough and broken. Deer and wild 

 turkevs are found here in moderate numbers, with a few bears, and 

 occasionally some gray wolves are found ; but the oldest mountaineer 

 can not remember back to the time when elk and buffalo roamed 



