340 EXTINCT AND VANISHING MAMMALS 



In its southward extent, the bison seems to have reached 

 northern Alabama, central Mississippi, and Louisiana but at- 

 tained the Gulf coast only in extreme southern Texas and 

 northeastern Mexico (see map in J. A. Allen, 1876a). 



There is but little contemporary record of buffalo in early 

 days east of the Alleghenies, but what evidence remains indi- 

 cates that they were locally common in western Pennsylvania, 

 West Virginia, and the Carolinas, but were constantly perse- 

 cuted by settlers, explorers, and to some extent by the Indians, 

 for meat and hides, and even wantonly destroyed. In their 

 spring migration northward and during the autumnal migra- 

 tion southward over a considerable extent of country, they wore 

 deep trails following the easiest gradients and natural passes, 

 going to better feeding grounds. Many of these paths came to 

 be the trails and routes used later by the settlers pushing west- 

 ward from the coast. This emigration received impetus after 

 the Revolution when "thousands of officers and men who had 

 served in the war received their pay in land script" (Garretson, 

 1938). Even before this, the settlers had found that numbers 

 of bison were incompatible with their own safety, for on oc- 

 casion the herds would eat and trample down their slender 

 crops and on one occasion an e&rly settler on Toby and Licking 

 Creeks (now Oil and Clarion Creeks), Pennsylvania, had his 

 cabin demolished by a herd of these animals that persisted in 

 rubbing their backs and sides against its timbers. In his first 

 two seasons this man and his companions killed 600 or 700 

 bison, the skins of which brought but 2 shillings apiece. Such 

 continued slaughter together with the destruction of the natural 

 food of the bison, through firing of the grass and canebrakes by 

 the settlers, gradually reduced their numbers so that by the 

 close of the eighteenth century the "buffalo" in Pennsylvania 

 "had been reduced to one herd, numbering between three and 

 four hundred animals which had sought refuge in the wilds of 

 the Seven Mountains, where, surrounded on all sides by settle- 

 ments, they survived for a short time by hiding on the most 

 inaccessible parts of the mountains" (Garretson, 1938). Ac- 

 cording to Garretson, the last buffalo migrations from the Ohio 

 country into Pennsylvania had ceased prior to 1783, and the 

 year 1795 marked the disappearance of the last herds in the 

 northwestern parts of the State. In the very severe winter of 

 1799-1800, what was probably the last herd in Pennsylvania 



