﻿I48 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



could hardly be mainland Indians. Fiske replies : " Bisons on the 

 Atlantic coast, Mr. Laing? " Now they were found near the sites of 

 Washington and Richmond in the early seventeenth century, 1 hunted 

 in the marshes of Georgia long afterward, and not wholly extirpated 

 from the Appalachian mountains until 1800 or later ; so that stragglers 

 of their advance guard almost certainly reached salt water. But so 

 far as concerns New England, Dr. Fiske's note of exclamation may 

 well be right, although the Orkneyman's position is not really absurd. 

 A straggling bison 2 was killed about 1790 or 1800 near Lewisburg on 

 the Susquehanna, and there are indications of their former presence 

 about as far east at other points. They were plentiful in parts of the 

 Pennsylvania mountains, yet it is unlikely that they ever crossed the 

 Hudson. 



Moreover, the bison herds came late into the Appalachian region, 

 and left early. Shaler's 3 excavations near a Kentucky saltlick showed, 

 lowest, a considerable depth of mammoth bones ; then, those of a 

 muskox when the glacier front was but little way northward ; finally, 

 the bison, with every appearance of recentness. Few of their remains 

 are found in even the later mounds of the Mississippi drainage. 

 From all indications and with the aid of the best ethnologists, Shaler 

 inferred that the culture of these agricultural people and builders of 

 the great defensive earthworks was in full flower about the year 1000 

 (Leif's date) and that the bison at that time had not crossed the 

 Mississippi, coming eastward, but were all probably still near the 

 Rocky Mountains. He suspects them of tempting the mound builders 

 afterward out of their incipient civilization and into burning the woods 

 to make buffalo pastures. But the menace of these wild herds to the 

 hundred acre cornfields, also the attacks of hordes of savages 

 traveling with or after them, would perhaps have still more to do 

 with the final breaking up. 



How far an acquaintance with bison would prepare the Hop 

 natives to receive with equanimity the charge of the settlers' bull 

 is a metaphysical question I can not answer. Perhaps they supposed 

 his challenge to be incited by their entertainers, especially if the 

 Norsemen laughed at them, as we may guess they unwisely did. 

 Thus viewed, Indians might see insult, treachery, and deadly danger 



1 W. T. Hornaday : The Extermination of the American Bison. Ann. Rep. 

 U. S. Nat. Mus., 1887. 



2 Allen: History of the American Bison. U. S. Geol. and Geogr. Survey of 

 Colorado (1875), p. 443. 



3 Nature and Man in America, pp. 181-186. 



