30 MAMMALS OF PENNSYLVANIA AND NEW JERSEY. 



greatest numbers of these animals congregated, and it was in such localities 

 that the last representatives of this noble deer vainly sought to escape their 

 final destruction. From accounts received from numerous correspondents it 

 appears that the " Flag Swamp," situated in the eastern part of Elk Co., near 

 the Cameron Co. line, and forming one of the headwaters of Bennett's Branch 

 of the Susquehanna on the east and of a branch of the Clarion River on the 

 west, was the last refuge of the wapiti in Pennsylvania. A few are recorded 

 as living there in 1850 in a History of Elk County of that date. Between the 

 dates of 1860 and 1867 I have secured records of the capture of two or three 

 which are each claimed to be the last taken in the state. To one of these 

 undoubtedly that distinction belongs, so far as can be discovered. The one 

 recorded by Roosevelt for 1869 is the same as the one stated by Capt. Clay 

 to have been killed in 1866 (see records). It is probably the same as the 

 one stated in the Utica Globe article to have been killed by an Indian in 

 1867, and in the History of Elk Co. the same date is given for its extinction 

 in that county, reference no doubt being made to the same individual. This 

 "Flag Swamp Elk," taken in November, 1867, in Elk Co., by an Indian of 

 the Cattaraugus reservation named Jim Jacobs, appears to have been the last 

 of its race in the Allegheny Mountains, unless it shall be proved that some 

 existed later in the mountain wilds of West Virginia. In the northeastern 

 Alleghenies of Sullivan, Luzerne and Wyoming counties they seem to have 

 totally disappeared in the second decade of the igth century, although a few- 

 remained in a favorite haunt called "Elk Forest" in the Pocono range of 

 Wayne Co. until exterminated between 1830 and '40. In Tioga, Lycoming 

 and Potter counties they haunted the headwaters of Pine Creek and the Black 

 Forest until 1862, when the last was killed. The veteran pioneer, Mr. 

 Austin, saw their tracks as late as 1857 in Potter Co., and near the same time 

 a party of hunters captured 3 alive in Tioga Co. In Somerset and Bedford 

 counties, where the mountain glades and saline or sulphur springs were sought 

 out by numerous bands of wapiti and buffalo in early colonial times, their exter- 

 mination must have been of very early date, as records of them in these locali- 

 ties seem to rest upon place-names and tradition. (See note under Somerset 

 Co.) Even more obscure is the evidence of their former occurrence in the 

 southwestern counties of Pennsylvania, and in the parts of New Jersey per- 

 taining to the valley of the upper Delaware. Elk View, Elk Mills and Elk 

 Creek in Chester Co., and Elk River in Maryland, are names whose origin I 

 have not satisfactorily traced, but indicate the former presence of this animal 

 nearer the Atlantic seaboard than anywhere else in the United States. From 

 our knowledge of the partiality of the wapiti to mountain districts it is very 

 unlikely that it ever resided permanently in Chester Co. Kalm and one or 

 two historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries record them in 

 southeastern Penna., and Kalm relates how the " stags " (as distinguished 



