THE AMERICAN BISONS. 109 



not only of their former abundance here, but of their extirpation. The 

 following circumstantial account of their former abundance in this region, 

 and their sudden extermination upon the arrival of the first white settlers, 

 was obtained by him from one of tbe participants in the work of destruc- 

 tion. "An old man," says Mr. Ashe, "one of the first settlers in this country, 

 built his log-house on the immediate borders of a salt spring. He informed 

 me that for the first several seasons the buffaloes paid him their visits with 

 the utmost regularity ; they travelled in single files, always following each 

 other at equal distances, forming droves, on their arrival, of about three hun- 

 dred each. The first and second years, so unacquainted were these poor 

 brutes with the use of this man's house, or with his nature, that in a few 

 hours they rubbed the house completely clown ; taking delight in turning the 

 logs off with their horns, while he had some difficulty to escape from being 

 trampled under their feet, or crushed to death in his own ruins. At that 

 period he supposed there could not have been less than two thousand in the 

 neighborhood of the spring. They sought for no manner of food, but only 

 bathed and drank three or four times a day, and rolled in the earth, or 

 reposed, with their flanks distended, in the adjacent shades; and on the fifth 

 and sixth days separated into distinct droves, bathed, drank, and departed in 

 single files, according to the exact order of their arrival. They all rolled 

 successively in the same hole, and each thus carried away a coat of mud to 

 preserve the moistui-e on their skin, and which, when hardened and baked 

 in the sun, would resist stings of millions of insects, that otherwise would 

 persecute these peaceful travellers to madness or even death. 



" In the first and second years this old man, with some companions, killed 

 from six to seven hundred of these noble creatures, merely for the sake of 

 their skins, which to them were worth only two shillings each ; and after 

 this ' work of death ' they were obliged to leave the place till the following 

 season, or till the wolves, bears, panthers, eagles, rooks, ravens, etc., had 

 devoured the carcasses, and abandoned the place for other prey. In the 

 two following years, the same persons killed great numbers out of the first 

 droves that arrived, skinned them, and left their bodies exposed to the sun 

 and air; but they soon had reason to repent of this, for the remaining 

 droves, as they came up in succession, stopped, gazed on the mangled and 

 putrid bodies, sorrowfully moaned or furiously lowed aloud, and returned 



between both the Susquehanna and Alleghany Rivers, but not a buffalo is mentioned as having been 

 met with anywhere in the Onondaga region. Hence Mr. Ashe was undoubtedly misinformed in respect 

 to the trail to Onondaga Lake having been made by buffaloes. 



