M 





fir';.. 



CHAPTER XII. 



THE BISON OR AMERICAN BUFFALO. 



WHEN we became a nation, in 1776, the buffa- 

 loes, the first animals to vanish when the 

 wilderness is settled, roved to the crests of 

 the mountains which mark the western boundaries of 

 Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. They were- 

 plentiful in what are now the States of Ohio, Ken- 

 tucky, and Tennessee. But by the beginning of the 

 present century they had been driven beyond the 

 Mississippi ; and for the next eighty years they formed 

 one of the most distinctive and characteristic features of 

 existence on the great plains. Their numbers were count- 

 less — incredible. In vast herds of hundreds of thousands 

 of individuals, they roamed from the Saskatchewan to the 

 Rio Grande and westward to the Rocky Mountains. They 

 furnished all the means of livelihood to the tribes of Horse 

 Indians, and to the curious population of French Metis, or 

 Half-breeds, on the Red River,as well as to those dauntless 

 and archtypical wanderers, the white hunters and trappers. 

 Their numbers slowly diminished, but the decrease was 

 very gradual until after the Civil War. They were not de- 



230 



