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216 



THE AMEEICAK BISONS. 





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"the wild cows and oxen .... which are to be met with in Carohna 

 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 

 o-reat strength in their neck, it was easy for them to overthrow the pales 



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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, 



new breed."* 



mia ; 



Bernard Eomans also says (writing a century ago), "The bounteous hand 

 of nature has here given us an animal which, by exjmience^ we know may 

 easily be domesticated, whose fine wool! might yield good profit, and whose 

 flesh is equal at least to our beef, and yields as much tallow; i mean the 



buffaloe."t 



Gallatin also says that they were not only domesticated in Virginia, but 



that they were bred wdth 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- 



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 w^ould 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 wi 

 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 

 mio'ht have improved the breed of oxen for draft, but this was not attended 

 to, horses being almost exclusively employed in that quarter for agricultural 



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* Kalm (Peter), Travels in North America (Forstcr's translation). Vol I p. 162. 

 t Nat. Illst. of East and Vt'est Florida, p. 174. 



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