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Pate? 41. 
1, — GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION, PAST AND PRESENT, OF 
BISON AMERICANUS. 
Tre fate of none of our larger mammals is more interesting than is that 
of the bison, since total extermination is eventually surer to none than to 
this former “monarch of the prairies.” Since Europeans first came to this 
continent all the larger ruminants and carnivores have become greatly re- 
duced in number throughout its vast extent, and many species have already 
become extinct over extensive areas where they were formerly the most 
characteristic animals. The moose and the caribou have a far less extended 
range, particularly to the southward, now than formerly; the common 
deer, once abundant throughout Eastern North America, is now confined 
to the least settled parts of the country, having totally disappeared over 
three fourths of the region it formerly occupied ; the elk, formerly existing 
over nearly the whole continent, now scarcely survives east of the Mississippi 
River, though less than half a century ago it ranged in large bands over the 
fertile prairies of Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, and was of occa- 
sional occurrence in the mountainous parts of even the Atlantic States ; the 
bear, the wolf, and the panther, formerly so numerous as to be, if not dan- 
gerous, at least a source of great annoyance to the early settlers, are now 
found, east of the Great Plains, only in the least settled and more broken 
wooded portions of the country. The bison, at once the largest and the 
most important animal to the aboriginal tribes of this continent, as it was also 
the most numerous over the immense region it frequented, still occurs in 
almost numberless bands, but it has become so circumscribed in its habitat, 
and is so constantly persecuted by professional hunters, that its total exter- 
mination seems to be fast approaching. 
The precise limits of the range of the buffalo at the time when the first 
