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 Hison 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 of 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 Eiver 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 



