THE AMERICAN BISONS. 103 



TnE Extent of tiie Region east of tiie Mississippi formerly inhab- 

 ited by TnE Buffalo, with a History of its Extirpation there- 

 from. 



The accounts of the first exploration of the region between the Alleghany 

 Mountains and the Mississippi River show that the buffalo, early in the 

 seventeenth century, existed in vast herds not only on the prairies bor- 

 dering the Mississippi, but throughout nearly the whole of the more open 

 portions of the area drained by the Ohio River and its tributaries. Its range 

 eastward extended nearly or quite to the eastern end of Lake Erie, and 

 throughout the valleys among the mountains of Western Pennsylvania, West 

 Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and Eastern Tennessee. It also inhabited the 

 region drained by the Illinois River, and by some of the lesser upper east- 

 ern tributaries of the Mississippi. The country between the Ohio and the 

 Great Lakes was quite generally occupied by them, as was that south of the 

 Ohio, between this river and the Tennessee. There is less certainty in 

 regard to their former occupation of Southern Michigan and Wisconsin, 

 though it is probable that they also at times roamed over most of this 

 region also, notwithstanding the fact that they were not found there by the 

 first Europeans who visited this section of the country. Considerable docu- 

 mentary evidence relating to their former presence over the region between 

 the Mississippi and the Alleghanies, together with many references to their 

 extermination there, has been brought together in the following pages, and 

 is presented generally in the words of the original narrators. Beginning with 

 the northwestern portion of the region in question, we shall pass thence 

 southward and eastward, giving the facts bearing upon particular localities 

 somewhat in a chronological order. 



On the eastern side of the Mississippi River buffaloes were found by the 

 early Jesuit explorers occupying the country from the sources of the Mis- 

 sissippi almost uninterruptedly southward nearly to the mouth of the Ohio 

 River. Hennepin, as early as 1680, met with them in considerable numbers 

 in the vicinity of the St. Francis River, above the Falls of St. Anthonj% where 

 they were also seen later by other explorers. In 1766 Jonathan Carver 

 found them on the plains around Lake Pepin, he speaking of them as " the 

 largest buffaloes of any in America." * Pike, in ascending the Mississippi in 

 the autumn of 1804, met with the first signs of this animal about two hun- 



* Travels, p. 56. 



