128 THE AMERICAN BISONS. 
sufficient evidence of the exaggerated style of the narrative, — a fault well 
known to be common to the descriptive writings of those times. This ob- 
scure statement does not apparently afford satisfactory ground for doubting 
what historians have so generally accepted in respect to the buffalo, namely, 
that it was first met with in its native haunts by Cabeca de Vaca, on the 
plains of Texas, in 1530, and next by Coronado’s expedition in 1542. In 
rebuttal of this supposed proof of the existence of the buffalo in Western 
Mexico, on the Yaquimi or Yaqui River during the middle of the sixteenth 
century, we have the rather weighty evidence that the other early Spanish 
explorers who traversed this region did not even hear of the buffalo till they 
reached the Gila, where they found, as before stated, its robes in the posses- 
sion of the Indians, which the latter had obtained from the tribes living far 
to the northeastward. In 1539, for example, Friar Marco de. Nica set out 
from the town of San Miguel, in the Province of Culiacan, situated far to the 
southward of the Rio Yaqui, in search of the famed Kingdom of Cibola. In 
this journey he reached the Zuii River, whence he retraced his steps to San 
Miguel and passed on to Compostella, situated in latitude about 21°. The 
following year (1540) Coronado, with his large army, passed over nearly the 
same route, both crossing the Rio Yaqui. Nica, however, saw only the pre- 
pared skins of the buffalo, which was also all that Coronado saw till after he 
had passed Cicuic and reached the Great Plains east of the Rocky Moun- 
tains. It is from these explorers and from Cabeca de Vaca that we get the 
first specific account of the buffalo. It hence follows that there is good 
reason for supposing the buffalo to have been absent from the western prov- 
inces of Mexico, and from that part of the United States west of the Rio 
Grande del Norte from a period antedating the sixteenth century till the 
present time. Why it may not during some earlier period have existed 
throughout this whole region would be hard to say, since, as will be soon 
shown, its existence on the Yaqui River would not carry its range south of 
points the buffalo is known to have reached on the Atlantic slope. 
Former RANGE SOUTH OF THE Rio GRANDE DEL NORTE. 
Most writers give the southern limit of the former habitat of the buffalo as 
latitude 28° to 30°, believing it never to have extended south of the Rio 
Grande. There is, however, sufficient proof of its former extension over the 
