THE AMEEICAN BISONS. 105 



Michigan,* although they found it abundant on the Kaskaskia, and further 

 .southward. t Marquette, in his description of the Illinois River, says : " I 

 never saw a more beautiful country than we found on this river. The 

 prairies are covered with buffaloes, stags, goats, and the rivers and lakes 

 with swans, ducks, geese, parrots, and beavers." $ 



That buffaloes were formerly abundant over the greater part of Illinois is 

 well attested. Father Hennepin, in describing the journey he made from 

 Fort Miamis, at the mouth of the Chicago River, to the village of the Illinois, 

 on the Illinois River, " one hundred and thirty leagues from Fort Miamis," in 

 December, 1679, says: "There must be an innumerable quantity of wild 

 Bulls in that Country, since the Earth is covered with their Horns. The 

 Miami's hunt them towards the latter end of Autumn." Again he says: "We 

 suffer'd very much on this Passage ; for the Savages having set the Herbs 

 of the Plain on fire, the wild Bulls were fled away, and so we could kill but 

 one and some Turkey-Cocks." " They change their Country," he adds, " ac- 

 cording to the Seasons of the Year; for upon the approach of the Winter, 

 they leave the North, and go to the Southern Parts. They follow one an- 

 other, so that you may see a Drove of them for above a League together, 



and stop all at the same place Their Ways are as beaten as our great 



Roads, and no Herb grows therein. They swim over the Rivers they meet 

 in their Way, to go and graze in other Meadows." § 



Father Marest, in passing from the southern end of Lake Michigan to the 

 Kankakee, in 1712, by way of the St. Joseph's River, says, in his narrative 

 of the journey : " At last [after having passed the portage, and embarked on 

 the Kankakee] we perceived our own agreeable country, the wild buffaloes, 

 and herds of stags, wandering on the border of the river," etc. || Charlevoix, 

 in 1721, in crossing over from the St. Joseph's River to the "Theakiki" 

 (Kankakee) soon found them in abundance. About fifty leagues from the 

 source of the Kankakee, he says : " The country begins to be fine : The 



* Schoolcraft says, but I know not on what authority : " It not only ranged over the prairies of Illinois 

 and Indiana, but spread to Southern Michigan, and the western skirts of Ohio. Tradition says it was 

 sometimes seen on the borders of Lake Erie." — History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes, 

 Vol. IV, p. 92. It would, however, be quite strange if it had not at times extended its range over the 

 prairie portions of both Michigan and Wisconsin. 



f J. G. Shea, Discoveries and Explorations of the Mississippi, pp. 18, 20. 



t French's Hist. Coll. of Louisiana, Part II, p. 297. 



§ A New Discovery of a vast Country in America, etc., pp. 90, 91, 92. 



|| Kip's Jesuit Missions, p. 224. 



