THE AMERICAN BISONS. 155 
foule and fierce beast of countenance and forme of bodie. The horses fledde 
from them, either because of their deformed shape, or else because they had | 
never scene them. Their masters have no other substance: of them they 
eat, they drinke, they apparel, they shooe themselves.” * 
According to Davis, Castafieda thus describes the buffalo and the Plains 
where it was met with by the people of Coronado’s Expedition: “The first 
time we encountered the buffalo, all the horses took to flight on seeing them, 
for they are horrible to the sight..... They have a broad and short face, 
eyes two palms from each other, and projecting in such a manner sideways 
that they can see a pursuer. Their beard is like that of goats, and so long 
that it drags the ground when they lower the head. They have, on the 
anterior portion of the body, a frizzled hair like sheep’s wool; it is very fine 
upon the croup, and sleek like a lion’s mane. Their horns are very short 
and thick, and can scarcely be seen through the hair. They always change 
their hair in May, and at this season they really resemble lions. To make 
it drop more quickly, for they change it as adders do their skins, they roll 
among the brush-wood, which they find in the ravines. 
“Their tail is very short, and terminates in a great tuft. When they run’ 
they carry it in the air like scorpions. When quite young they are tawny, 
and resemble our calves; but as age increases they change color and form. 
. . . . Their wool is so fine that handsome clothes would certainly be made 
of it, but it cannot be died, for it is a tawny red. We were much surprised 
at sometimes meeting innumerable herds of bulls without a single cow, and 
other herds of cows without bulls. It would sometimes be forty leagues 
from one herd to another, and that in a country so level that from a 
distance the sky was seen between their legs, so that when many were 
together, they would have been called pines whose foliage united, and if 
but one was seen his legs had the effect of four pines. When near, then it 
was impossible by an effort to see the ground beyond, for all this country 
is so flat that turn which way we will the sky and the grass are alone to 
be seen. 
“Who would believe that a thousand horses, one hundred and fifty cows 
of Spanish breed, and more than five thousand sheep, and fifteen hundred 
persons, including Indian servants, would not leave the slightest trace of their 
passage in the desert, and that it was necessary to raise, from point to point, 
heaps of stones and buffalo bones, in order that the rear guard might follow 
* Hakluyt, Voyages, Vol. HI, p. 456, 
