116 THE AMERICAN BISONS. 
Its Extirpation. — Upon the establishment of the first permanent white set- 
tlements over this region, the extermination of the buffalo progressed with 
wonderful rapidity. Its history is a shameful record of wasteful and wanton 
destruction of life, like that which ever marks ‘the contact of man with the 
larger mammalia. The extermination of the buffalo in Western Pennsyl- 
vania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, was very rapid, this 
animal surviving at most points for but a few years after the first permanent 
settlements were made. In Illinois and Indiana it existed for about a cen- 
tury and a quarter after the country was first explored by the Jesuit mis- 
sionaries, and for more than half a century seems to have scarcely diminished 
in numbers. As late as 1773 it was abundant on both sides of the Kaskaskia 
River, and also along the Illinois, and apparently over all the prairies of the 
intermediate region.* Later its extermination was more rapid, its disap- 
pearance here apparently antedating by several years its extirpation along 
the upper tributaries of the Ohio. The date of its disappearance from Illi- 
nois and Indiana, however, I can give less definitely than that of its exter- 
mination at points more to the eastward. In Pennsylvania, according to 
Mr. Ashe, they were all destroyed within a few years after the arrival of the 
first settlers, being apparently wholly exterminated prior to the year 1800. 
It lingered in West Virginia till a few years later, as it did also in portions 
of Kentucky. Toulmin, writing about 1792, says, “The buffalo are mostly 
driven out of Kentucky. Some are still found upon the head-waters of 
Licking Creek, Great Sandy, and the head-waters of Green River.” + It ap- 
pears, according to Audubon, to have lingered here, however, only a few 
years longer. “In the days of our boyhood and youth,” says this author, 
“buffaloes roamed over the small and beautiful prairies of Indiana and Il 
nois, and herds of them stalked through the open woods of Kentucky and 
Tennessee ; but they had dwindled down to a few stragglers, which resorted 
chiefly to the ‘Barrens, towards the years 1808 and 1809, and soon after 
entirely disappeared.’ $ Cuming adds that all had been driven from the 
salt licks of the Licking and Ohio Rivers before 1807, while Mr. Ashe,§ an 
apparently reliable authority, affirms that as early as 1806 not one was to 
* See Kennedy’s Journal of an Expedition from Kaskaskia Village to the Head-waters of the Illinois 
River, in Hutchins’s Topos. Desorip. of Virginia, Pennsylvania, etc., pp. 51-64; also Hutchins’s Topog. 
Descrip., ete., pp. 85, 41, 44. 
¢ Toulmin (Henry), Description of Kentucky, p. 85. 
t Quadrupeds of North America, Vol. I, p. 36. 
§ Travelsin America, etc., p. 49. 
