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THE AMERICAN BISONS. doo 
not only of their former abundance here, but of their extirpation. The 
following circumstantial account of their former abundance in this region, 
and their sudden extermination upon the arrival of the first white settlers, 
was obtained by him from one of the participants in the work of destruc- 
tion. “An old man,” says Mr. Ashe, “one of the first settlers in this countr : 
_ built his log-house on the immediate borders of a salt spring. He informed 
me that for the first several seasons the buffaloes paid him their visits with 
the utmost regularity; they travelled in single files, always following each 
other at equal distances, forming droves, on their arrival, of about three hun- 
dred each. The first and second years, so unacquainted were these poor 
brutes with the use of this man’s house, or with his nature, that in a few 
hours they rubbed the house completely down; taking delight in turning the 
logs off with their horns, while he had some difficulty to escape from being 
trampled under their feet, or crushed to death in his own ruins. At that 
period he supposed there could not have been less than two thousand in the 
neighborhood of the spring. They sought for no manner of food, but only 
bathed and drank three or four times a day, and rolled in the earth, or 
reposed, with their flanks distended, in the adjacent shades; and on the fifth 
and sixth days separated into distinct droves, bathed, drank, and departed in 
single files, according to the exact order of their arrival. They all rolled 
successively in the same hole, and each thus carried away a coat of mud to 
preserve the moisture on their skin, and which, when hardened and baked 
in the sun, would resist stings of millions of insects, that otherwise would 
persecute these peaceful travellers to madness or even death. 
“Jn the first and second years this old man, with some companions, killed 
from six to seven hundred of these noble creatures, merely for the sake of 
their skins, which to them were worth only two shillings each; and after 
this ‘work of death’ they were obliged to leave the place till the following 
season, or till the wolves, bears, panthers, eagles, rooks, ravens, etc., had 
devoured the carcasses, and abandoned the place for other prey. In the 
two following years, the same persons killed great numbers out of the first 
droves that arrived, skinned them, and left their bodies exposed to the sun 
and air; but they soon had reason to repent of this, for the remaining 
droves, as they came up in succession, stopped, gazed on the mangled and 
putrid bodies, sorrowfully moaned or furiously lowed aloud, and ‘returned 
between both the Susquehanna and Alleghany Rivers, but not a buffalo is mentioned as having been 
met with anywhere in the Onondaga region. Hence Mr. Ashe was undoubtedly misinformed in respect 
to the trail to Onondaga Lake having been made by buffaloes. 
