^ 



r 



IrS .'■ 



:!■:-. 



■i > 

 i ' . 



. * + 





■■\\ 



L 

 1 i 



■1 



u ^ 





82 THE AMEEICAK BISOITS 



Wisconsin Eivers, but lie appears not to have met with the buffalo till he 

 reached the Wisconsin Eiver,* 



' j- 



Charlevoix^ who traversed the same country in 1720^ and who has left us 

 in his letters a full account of his journey up the St. Lawrence^ and thence 

 westward through Lakes Ontario and Erie, only heard of their existence on 



the southern shore of Lake Erie, he himself coasting along the northern 

 shore. Concerning the game of the country bordering Lake Erie he says, 



Water 



Game in the Woods, but I know that on the South Side there are vast Herds 

 of wild Cattle,"! Again he says, ^^But at the end of five or six leagues 

 [from Detroit Kiver], inclining towards the Lake Urie to the South West, 

 one sees vast Meadows which extend above a hundred Leagues every 

 Way, and which feed a prodigious Number of those Cattle which I have 

 already mentioned several Times." | He gives, however, an account of the 

 "chase" in Canada, in which he describes the method of hunting the buifalo, 

 but the locality is specified as " the Southern and Western Parts of New 

 France, on both Sides of the Mississippi," § which was then generally called 



Canada. 



r 



In the account of the A^oyage of Father Simon Le Moine to the country 

 of the "Iroquois Onondagoes" in 1653-54 we find what at first sight seems 

 to be indisputable evidence of the existence of the buffalo at the eastern end 

 of Lake Ontario, in both New York and Canada. In this account we find 

 the following : "At the other side of the Rapid || I perceived a herd of wild 



t 



reat state. Five or six hundred 



are seen sometimes in these re2:ions in one drove.'' ^^ In the "Eelation de la 

 Nouvelle France en I'Annee 1665," we find the following description of the 

 St. Lawrence River: "This is one of the most important rivers that can be 

 seen, whether we, regard its beauty or its convenience, for we meet there 

 almost throuo-hout, a vast number of beautiful Islands, some large, others 



* An Account of tbe Discovery of some new Countnes and ISIations in N. America in 1673. Transla- 

 tion in French's Hist. Coll La., Part II, pp. 279-297. 



VI 



f Letters, Goadby's Englisli Ed., 1 763, p. 170. Dodsley's English Edition says "a prodigious quantity 



of Buffaloes " (Vol IT, p. 3). . ' 



{ Ibid., p. 178. Dodsley's Translation says again, *' those buffaloes" (Vol. II, p. 18). 



§ Ibid., p. 68. 



II This locality is just below St. Ignatius, on the St. Lawrence, not far from Lake Ontario. 



IT " Yaches sauvages," in the original. Relation de la Nouv. France en les Annees 1653 - 54, p. 85. 



** Documentary Hist. New York, A^ol. I, p. 31. 



