THE AMERICAN BISONS. 101 
facts certainly show that the buffalo was absent both from Florida and 
Georgia during the early part of the sixteenth century, and I have found 
no writers who claim to have ever seen the living buffalo at any time in 
any part of Florida, or of Southern and Eastern Georgia. In the many enu- 
merations of the natural productions of Florida (as at present restricted) 
made prior to the beginning of the present century, based on personal observa- 
tions, the buffalo is absent from all. Romans, it is true, supposed he saw its 
tracks, but this, in the light of other contemporaneous history of the re- 
gion, seems wholly improbable. Roberts, writing a few years before Ro- 
mans wrote, says, “The wild animals found in this country are the panther, 
bear, catamountain, stag, goat, hare, rabbit, beaver, otter, fox, raccoon, and 
squirrel.” * 
Had the buffalo formerly inhabited Florida, it seems probable that its 
remains would occur in the shell-mounds of that State; but Professor Wyman 
specializes the buffalo as one of the animals whose remains he had not found 
in the mounds of Florida, although he had obtained the bones of most of the 
other large species of Florida mammals from them, among which he enumer- 
ates those of the bear, raccoon, hare, deer, otter, and opossum, together with 
those of the turkey and alligator, and of several different species of turtles 
and fishes.t 
SouTHERN BouUNDARY OF THE RANGE OF THE BUFFALO EAST OF THE 
MISSISSIPPI. 
As already shown, the buffalo was never met with in the present States of 
Florida and Georgia, except over a small area west of the Savannah River 
adjoming the Abbeville District in South Carolina. It was apparently also 
altogether absent from the rest of the Gulf States east of the Mississippi. 
Certainly it was not met with by De Soto in his journey across this region 
in 1540-41, during which journey he explored the Coosa River from its 
source to its junction with the Alabama, and descended the latter to its 
union with the Tombigbee. He thus crossed the State of Alabama diago- 
nally from northeast to southwest, and afterwards traversed what is now 
* Roberts (Wm.), An Account of the First Discovery and Natural History of Florida, 1763, p. 4. 
t Mem. Peabody Acad. Sciences, Vol. I, pp. 78, 80. : 
