EXTINCT AND VANISHING MAMMALS 



passes and narrow valleys of the mountainous sections but 

 also in association with the buffalo visited the licks of middle 

 Tennessee, browsed along the rivers and creeks in the southern 

 counties, and wandered through the canebrakes of the Missis- 

 sippi bottomlands." Crockett refers to them repeatedly be- 

 tween the years 1820 and 1830 as then present in the bottom- 

 lands of Ob ion and Dyer Counties. The last records as given 

 by Rhoads (1896) seem to be: About 1849 one killed at Reelfoot 

 Lake by David Merri wether and one reported killed in 1865 in 

 Obion County. Doubtless a few must have reached the 

 mountains of northern Alabama as evidenced by the place- 

 names, previously mentioned, and may have wandered into 

 the adjacent part of Georgia, but no contemporary record is 

 known to me. 



West of the Alleghenies to the edge of the Plains this race of 

 elk was formerly common. Historical accounts of Ohio tell of 

 its presence in the pioneer days of settlement, but it seems to 

 have been much reduced by the end of the eighteenth century. 

 Kirtland, however, writing in 1838, says it was "frequently to 

 be met with in Ashtabula county until within the last six years. 

 I learn from Col. Harper, of that county, that one was killed 

 there as recently as October "of the present season." There 

 were elk in Kentucky in pioneer days, affording the early 

 settlers a desirable source of meat and leather but they were 

 early reduced in numbers. Audubon wrote that when he first 

 settled in that State (in 1808) there were still some to be found 

 and a few in Illinois across the Ohio River, but by 1847 they 

 seem to have been pretty well gone. Cory has assembled many 

 older accounts for Wisconsin and Illinois. In 1818 they were 

 no longer to be found east of the Illinois River, in Illinois, 

 though a few seem to have remained in the northern part of 

 the State. In southern Illinois they are said to have been com- 

 mon up to about 1820; the last records in Indiana are of one 

 killed in Knox County in 1829 and another in the following 

 year. In Wisconsin they apparently held on till much later. 

 Hoy wrote in 1882 that they were found on Hay River in that 

 State in 1863, but Bray ton, in 1882, said they were still found 

 in the vicinity of Green Bay, Wis. They seem to have been 

 "numerous" in eastern Michigan as late as 1860 in Huron and 

 Sanilac Counties about the headwaters of Cass River, but so 

 relentlessly were they being hunted with rifle and trap pens 



