216 THE AMERICAN BISONS. 
“the wild cows and oxen ... . which are to be met with in Carolina and 
other provinces to the south of Pennsylvania,” had been obtained by “several 
people of distinction” who “brought them up among the tame cattle.” 
“When grown up,” he adds, “they were perfectly tame, but at the same 
time very unruly, so that there was no enclosure strong enough to resist 
them if they had a mind to break through it; for as they possess a 
great strength in their neck, it was easy for them to overthrow the pales 
with their horns, and to get into the cornfields; and as soon as they had 
made a road, all the tame cattle followed them; they likewise copulated 
with the latter, and by that means generated, as it were, a new breed.” * 
Bernard Romans also says (writing a century ago), “The bounteous hand 
of nature has here given us an animal which, by experience, we know may 
easily be domesticated, whose fine wooll might yield good profit, and whose 
flesh is equal at least to our beef, and yields as much tallow; i mean the 
buffaloe.” + 
Gallatin also says that they were not only domesticated in Virginia, but 
that they were bred with domestic cattle, and that the mixed breed was 
fertile. “As doubts have lately been raised upon that point,” he says, writ- 
ing forty years ago, “I must say that the mixed breed was quite common 
fifty [now ninety] years ago, in some of the northwestern counties of Vir- 
ginia; and that the cows, the issue of that mixture, propagated like all 
others. No attempt that I know of was ever made by the inhabitants to 
tame a buffalo of full growth. But calves were occasionally caught by the 
dogs and brought alive into the settlements. A bull thus raised was for a 
number of years owned in my immediate vicinity by a farmer living on the 
Monongahela, adjoining Mason and Dixon’s line. He was permitted to roam 
at large, and was no more dangerous to man than any bull of the common 
species. But to them he was formidable, and would not suffer any to ap- 
proach within two or three miles of his own range. Most of the cows I 
knew were descended from him. For want of a fresh supply of the wild 
animal they have now merged into the common kind. They were no favor- 
ites, as they yielded less milk. The superior size and strength of the buffalo 
might have improved the breed of oxen for draft, but this was not attended 
to, horses being almost exclusively employed in that quarter for agricultural 
* Kalm (Peter), Travels in North America (Forster's translation), Vol. I p. 162. 
+ Nat. Hist. of East and West Florida, p. 174. 
