■I? 



116 



THE ameeica:^ £180:^-8. 



Its M 



ion. 







— Upon the establishment of the first permanent white set- 

 tlements over this region^ the extermination of the buffalo progressed with 

 wonderful rapidity. Its history is a shameful record of wasteful and wanton 

 destruction of life^ like that which ever marks the contact of man with the 

 larger mammalia. The extermination of the buffalo in Western Pennsyl- 

 vania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, was very rapid, this 

 animal surviving at most points for but a few years after the first permanent 

 settlements were made. In Illinois and Indiana it existed for about a cen- 

 tury and a quarter after the country was first explored by the Jesuit mis- 

 sionaries, and for more than half a century seems to have scarcely diminished 

 in numbers. As late as 1773 it was abundant on both sides of the Kaskaskia 

 Kiver, and also along the Illinois, and apparently over all the prairies of the 

 intermediate region.* Later its extermination was more rapid, its disap- 

 pearance here apparently antedating by several years its extirpation along 

 e upper tributaries of the Ohio. The date of its disappearance from Illi- 

 nois and Indiana, however, I can give less definitely than that of its exter- 



mination at points more to the eastward. In Pennsylvania, according to 



■ 



Mr. Ashe, they were all destroyed within a few years after the arrival of the 

 first settlers, being apparently w^hoUy exterminated prior to the year 1800. 

 It lingered in West A^irginia till a few years later, as it did also in portions 

 of Kentucky. Toulmin, writing about 1792, says, "The buffalo are mostly 

 driven out of Kentucky.^ Some are still found upon the head-waters of 

 Licking Creek, Great Sandy, and the head-waters of Green River." f It ap- 

 pears, according to Audubon, to have lingered here, however, only a few 





years longer. ^^In the days of our boyhood and youth," says this author, 

 "buffaloes roamed over the small and beautiful prairies of Indiana and Illi- 



nois, and herds of them stalked through the open woods of Kentucky and 

 Tennessee ; but they had dwindled down to a few stragglers, which resorted 

 chiefly to the ^Barrens,' towards the years 1808 and 1809, and soon after 

 entirely disappeared." $ Cuming adds that all had been driven from the 

 salt licks of the Licking and Ohio Rivers before 1807, while Mr. Ashe,§ an 

 apparently reliable authority, affirms that as early as 1806 not one was to 



* See Kennedy's Journal o£ an Expedition from Kaskaskia Village to the Head-waters of the Illinois 

 River, in Hutchins*s Topog. Descrip. of Virgmia, Pennsylvania, etc, pp. 51-64; also Hutchins's Topog. 

 Descrip., etc., pp. 35, 41, 44. 



t Toulmin (Henry), Description of Kentucky, p. 85. 



if Quadrupeds of North America, Yol. II, p. 36. 



§ Travels in America, etc., p. 49. 



