114 THE AMERICAN BISONS. 
extracts from the journal of John Donelson, respecting a voyage made by 
him from Fort Patrick Henry, on the Holston River to the French Salt 
Springs on the Cumberland River, in December, 1780. Donelson says that 
he “procured some buffalo meat on the Cumberland, near its mouth,” and 
two days further up this river, he says, “ We killed some more buffalo.” The 
next day, he writes: “We are now without bread, and are compelled to hunt 
the buffalo to preserve life.”* Subsequently, in speaking of the salt or sul- 
phur springs on the Cumberland, apparently near the present site of Nash- 
ville, we find the following passages: “The open space around and near the 
sulphur or salt springs, instead of being an ‘old field,’ as had been supposed 
by Mr. Mausker, at his visit here in 1769, was thus freed from trees and 
underbrush by the innumerable herds of buffalo and deer and elk that came 
to these waters... . Trails, or buffalo paths, were deeply worn in the 
earth from this to other springs. . . . . All the rich lands were covered with 
cane-brakes; through these there were paths made by the buffalo and other 
wild animals.” + 
Ramsey states that in 1769 and 1770 an exploring party of ten persons 
passed up the Cumberland, and that “where Nashville now stands they dis- 
covered the French Lick, and found around it immense numbers of buffalo 
and other wild game. The country was crowded with them. Their bellow- 
ings sounded from the hills and forest.” $ According to the same authority, 
the buffalo was at one time also numerous in the valleys of East Tennessee. 
He states that in 1764 Daniel Boone left his home on the Yadkin to explore, 
in company with others, the then unknown country to the westward. “Cal- 
laway,” says Ramsey, “was at the side of Boone when, approaching the spurs 
of the Cumberland Mountain, and in view of the vast herds of buffalo grazing 
in the valleys between them, he exclaimed: ‘I am richer than the man men- 
tioned in Scripture, who owned the cattle on a thousand hills, —I own the 
wild beasts of more than a thousand valleys!’”§ Whether or not the buffalo 
ranged formerly to the Tennessee River, I have been unable to determine, 
although, as already noticed, there is pretty good evidence that it did not 
extend beyond this boundary. The existence of a stream named Buffalo 
River, near the Great Bend of the Tennessee, seems to render it probable 
that it extended nearly or quite to the Tennessee itself. Gallatin gives the 
* Putnam’s Middle Tennessee, pp. 74, 75. 
+ Ibid., p. 81. 
t{ The Annals of emnesses, to the End of the Eighteenth Century, etc., p. 105. 
§ Ibid., p. 69. 
