THE AMEKICAN BISONS. 115 



range of the buffalo east of the Mississippi as being " between the Lakes and 

 the Tennessee River";* but he also says that it formerly ascended the Val- 

 ley of the Tennessee " to its sources," and adds : " They were but rarely 

 seen south of the ridge which separates that river from the sources of those 

 which empty into the Gulf of Mexico, and nowhere, in the forest country, 

 in herds of more than from fifty to two hundred." t I have found, how- 

 ever, no positive reference to their being found anywhere south of the 

 Tennessee. 



As previously stated, the range of the buffalo east of the Mississippi, with 

 the exception of its occasional appearance on the eastern slope of the Al- 

 leghanies in North and South Carolina, on the head-waters of the James 

 River in Virginia, and possibly in Union County, Pennsylvania, was restricted 

 to the area drained by the Ohio and Illinois Rivers and their tributaries, and 

 the lesser eastern tributaries of the Mississippi in Northern Wisconsin and 

 Minnesota. It was also absent from the lowlands of the lower portion of 

 the Ohio River. The foregoing citations, however, show it to have been 

 originally very numerous and uniformly distributed over the prairies of Illi- 

 nois and Indiana, and also throughout the country immediately bordering 

 the Ohio and its upper tributaries, as the Licking, Great and Little Kanawha, 

 and the Alleghany and Monongahela Rivers. It seems to have been some- 

 what less uniformly and less numerously dispersed over the States of Ohio, 

 the western parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and the north- 

 ern parts of Tennessee, although it regularly frequented portions of each of 

 these States, and was probably more or less abundant throughout the open 

 woods and "Barrens" of the two last named. Its range was hence restricted 

 to the prairies, the scantily wooded districts, and the narrow belts of open 

 land along the streams, t 



* Transactions Amer. Ethnological Society, Vol. I, p. 1. 



f Transactions Amer. Antiquarian Society, Vol. II, p. 139. 



X The area of wooded and woodless territory is thus given by Gallatin : As is well known, the whole 

 Atlantic slope " was covered with a dense and uninterrupted forest when the European settlers landed in 

 America"; and the country south of the 40th parallel, excepting " the Barrens" of Kentucky, westward to 

 the Mississippi Valley, and north of the Great Lakes as far west as Winnipeg, was similarly forested. 

 Between the 40th parallel and Lake Erie there were areas destitute of wood, or prairies, which increased 

 in size westward, till in Central and Northern Illinois they equalled the timbered areas, while west of the 

 Mississippi the forests were confined to narrow belts along the rivers. — Trans. Amer. Antiq. Soc, Vol. 

 II, pp. 137, 138, 1836. 



In respect to the former distribution of forests in the United States, see also Professor W. II. Brew- 

 er's map of the distribution of woodland recently published in General Francis A. Walker's " Statistical 

 Atlas of the United States," Plates III and IV (1873). . 



