THE AMERICAN BISONS. 101 



facts certainly show that the buffalo was absent both from Florida and 

 Georgia during the early part of the sixteenth century, and I have found 

 no writers who claim to have ever seen the living buffalo at any time in 

 any part of Florida, or of Southern and Eastern Georgia. In the many enu- 

 merations of the natural productions of Florida (as at present restricted) 

 made prior to the beginning of the present century, based on personal observa- 

 tions, the buffalo is absent from all. Romans, it is true, supposed he saw its 

 tracks, but this, in the light of other contemporaneous history of the re- 

 gion, seems wholly improbable. Roberts, writing a few years before Ro- 

 mans wrote, says, " The wild animals found in this country are the panther, 

 bear, catamountain, stag, goat, hare, rabbit, beaver, otter, fox, raccoon, and 

 squirrel." * 



Had the buffalo formerly inhabited Florida, it seems probable that its 

 remains would occur in the shell-mounds of that State ; but Professor Wyman 

 specializes the buffalo as one of the animals whose remains he had not found 

 in the mounds of Florida, although he had obtained the bones of most of the 

 other large species of Florida mammals from them, among which he enumer- 

 ates those of the bear, raccoon, hare, deer, otter, and opossum, together with 

 those of the turkey and alligator, and of several different species of turtles 

 and fishes.f 



Southern Boundary of the Range of the Buffalo east of the 



Mississippi. 



As already shown, the buffalo was never met with in the present States of 

 Florida and Georgia, except over a small area west of the Savannah River 

 adjoining the Abbeville District in South Carolina. It was apparently also 

 altogether absent from the rest of the Gulf States east of the Mississippi. 

 Certainly it was not met with by De Soto in his journey across this region 

 in 1540-41, during which journey he explored the Coosa River from its 

 source to its junction with the Alabama, and descended the latter to its 

 union with the Tombigbee. He thus crossed the State of Alabama diago- 

 nally from northeast to southwest, and afterwards traversed what is now 



* Roberts (Wm.), An Account of the First Discovery and Natural History of Florida, 1763, p. 4. 

 t Mera. Peabody Acad. Sciences, Vol. I, pp. 78, 80. 



