THE AMEEICAN BISONS. 55 



eastward throughout the region drained by the Ohio River and its tribu- 

 taries. Its northern limit east of the Mississippi was the Great Lakes, along 

 which it extended eastward to near the eastern end of Lake Erie. It appears 

 not to have occurred south of the Tennessee River, and only to a limited 

 extent east of the Alleghanies, chiefly in the upper districts of North and 

 South Carolina. 



Its present range embraces two distinct and comparatively small areas. 

 The southern is chiefly limited to Western Kansas, a part of the Indian Ter- 

 ritory, and Northwestern Texas, — in all together embracing a region about 

 equal in size to the present State of Kansas. The northern district extends 

 from the sources of the principal southern tributaries of the Yellowstone 

 northward into the British Possessions, embracing an area not much greater 

 than the present Territory of Montana. Over these regions, however, it is 

 rapidly disappearing, and at its present rate of decrease will certainly be- 

 come wholly extinct during the next quarter of a century. 



Habits. — The American bison is, as is well known, pre-eminently a gre- 

 garious animal. At times herds have been met with of immense size, num- 

 bering thousands, and even millions, of individuals. The accounts given by 

 thoroughly veracious travellers respecting their size sound almost like 

 exaggerations. Herds were formerly often met with extending for many 

 miles in every direction, so that the expression " so numerous as to blacken 

 the plains as far as the eye can reach " has become a hackneyed description 

 of their abundance. Some writers speak of travelling for days together with- 

 out ever being out of sight of buffaloes, while it is stated that emigrant 

 trains were formerly sometimes detained for hours by the passage of dense 

 herds across their routes. In the early history of the Kansas Pacific Railway 

 it repeatedly happened that trains were stopped by the same cause. Such 

 statements as these seem like exaggerations, but no facts are perhaps better 

 attested. I must myself confess to slight misgivings in respect to their 

 thorough truthfulness until I had, in 1871, an opportunity of seeing the 

 moving multitudes of these animals covering the landscape on the plains 

 of Kansas, when I was convinced of the possibility of the seemingly most 

 extravagant reports being true. Only when demoralized and broken up by 

 constant persecution from hunters do the herds become scattered. At other 

 times only the old bulls, lean and partly disabled from age, leave the herds 

 and wander as stragglers. 



The organization and composition of the herds, though wholly simple and 



