a 
164 FRIENDS WORTH KNOWING. 
building people appear to have settled the country. Its 
-advent thus seems to have been singularly recent. 
The question of the origin of the buffalo and its relation 
to the earliest tribes of people in the Ohio Valley is made 
still more complicated by the fact that an earlier and close- 
ly related species of buffalo, probably coeval with the mam- 
moth and musk-ox, and possibly with the caribou and elk, 
was living at the time just following the close of the gla- 
cial epoch. ‘I am strongly disposed to think,” writes Pro- 
fessor Shaler, “that in the Bison americanus we have the 
descendant of the Lvson latifrons, modified by existence 
in the new conditions of soil and climate to which it was 
driven by the great changes closing the last ice age.” But 
he adds that future explorations will probably show that 
there was an interval of some‘thousands of years between 
the two species along the Ohio. 
Although the main chain of the Rocky Mountains has 
been supposed commonly to form the western limit of the 
range ot the buffalo, there is abundant proof of its former 
existence over a vast area westward, including a large part 
of the Utah basin, the Green River plateau, and the plains 
of the Columbia, as far as the Blue Mountains of Ore- 
gon and the Sierra Nevada. Evidence of this is found in 
the bleached skulls, in accounts of early explorers, and in 
