1384 THE AMERICAN BISONS. 
crossed it; though they entered the highlands, they turned back before 
meeting with buffaloes. 
It hence appears that at this early date the buffalo frequented none of 
the lowlands of the Mississippi, nor those of the Washita and the Red 
Rivers, and only reached the Gulf coast at the mouth of the Guadaloupe 
and San Antonio Rivers; and that it probably extended thence south- 
ward along the coast as far at least as the mouth of the Rio Grande del 
Norte. 
The former existence of the buffalo in the valley of the Pecos seems to be 
well substantiated. Speaking of Espejo’s march down the Pecos River in 
1584, Davis says: “They passed down a river they called Rio de las Vacas, 
or the river of oxen [the river Pecos, and the same Cow River that Vaca 
describes], and was so named because of the great number of buffaloes that 
fed upon its banks. They travelled down this river the distance of one hun- 
dred and twenty leagues, all the way passing through great herds of buf- 
faloes.”* 
As already noticed, Coronado met with vast herds of buffaloes in 1542 on 
the plains near Cicuic, on the Upper Pecos River. From Cicuic Coronado 
marched eastward across the plains of Northern Texas to about the one hun- 
dredth meridian, and thence returned again to Quivira,t making a journey 
of “three hundred leagues.” “All that way & plaines are as full of crooke- 
backed oxen, as the mountaine Serena in Spaine is of sheepe.” $ 
These “ crookebacked oxen” Gomara (as translated by Hakluyt) has thus 
described: “These Oxen are of the bignesse and colour of our Bulles, but 
their hornes are not so great. They have a great bunch upon their fore 
shoulders, and more haire on their fore part than on their hinder part: and it 
is like wooll. They have as it were an horse-mane upon their backe bone, 
and much haire and very long from the knees downeward. They have great 
tuffes of haire hanging downe their foreheads, and it seemeth that they have 
beardes, because of the great store of haire hanging downe at their chinnes 
and throates. The males have very long tailes, and a great knobbe or flocke 
at the end: so that in some respect they resemble the Lion, and in some 
other the Camell. They push with their hornes, they runne, they overtake 
and kill an horse when they are in their rage and anger. Finally, it is a 
* Davis’s Spanish Conquest of New Mexico, p. 260. See also Hakluyt, Voyages, Vol. II, p. 472. 
+ See R. H. Kern’s Map of Coronado’s route, as before cited. 
{ Hakluyt, Voyages, Vol. IIT, p. 455. (Translated from Gomara’s Historia de las Indias, Cap. 214.) 
