236 EXTINCT AND VANISHING MAMMALS 



several accounts in local histories of such events in the latter 

 part of the eighteenth century, but the last one actually cap- 

 tured and still preserved seems to be the specimen now in the 

 possession of the Woodman Institute, Dover, N. H., which was 

 shot on November 1, 1853, in the town of Lee. I have one or 

 two later accounts of panthers seen at short range in the 

 White Mountains as lately as about 1880, the details of which 

 are so circumstantial that they seem quite credible. Vermont, 

 however, was the best country for these animals, and in the 

 days of settlement previous to the American Revolution they 

 were often hunted and killed. At the present time there are 

 extant perhaps three specimens, possibly four, that were killed 

 in the State. The last one was taken in the town of Barnard 

 in 1881 and is in the State Museum at Montpelier. Since then 

 there have been a few other reports, some of which seem 

 credible, but probably the species has ceased to exist in Ver- 

 mont for nearly 50 years 



The wilder parts of New York State were formerly good 

 country for panthers. In DeKay's time, a century ago, there 

 were still a few in the Catskills, and in his book of the mammals 

 of New York he mentions that as a boy he recalled the appear- 

 ance of one in Westchester County within 25 miles of the city 

 of New York and was also informed of one that had been killed 

 in Warren County. Merriam has given an account of the 

 species in the Adirondacks in the latter part of the last century. 

 Here they were then present in some numbers, and when in 

 1871 a bounty was offered on them no less than 46 were re- 

 ported killed in the succeeding decade, about half of them in 

 St. Lawrence County. Merriam (1882) comments that in 

 1882, owing to the incentive of the bounty, they had been 

 killed down to nearly the point of extermination, yet Miller 

 (1899) continues the bounty tabulation down to 1890, with an 

 additional 107 panthers on which $20 each had been paid. 

 Since the last date no further bounties were claimed up to 

 1897, when a panther, now mounted at Albany, was killed on 

 Sumner Stream. The last bounty was paid on one killed 

 December 27, 1899. Since that date, however, there were oc- 

 casional reports of panthers from the Adirondacks, the last in 

 1903, said to have been seen at Big Moose, though it seems 

 safe to say that they were virtually extinct in the State by 

 about the close of the century. 



