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bones of the Moose and Caribou. I am inclined to believe, from these investigations, 

 that the Bison amerioanus did not appear at Big Bone Lick, until a very recent time. 



" All the observations made by the Kentucky Survey, in the caverns of the State and 

 the neighboring district of Tennessee, have led to the discovery of no Bison remains in 

 these subterranean receptacles, where the bones of the Beaver, Deer, Wolf, Bear, and 

 many other mammals have been discovered. The observations of the officers of the 

 survey to be published hereafter, will show that our caves have been used as the homes 

 of the living and the receptacles of the dead, by more than one of the earlier tribes of 

 this region, bat they seem never to have brought the bones of this animal to the caves. 



" Some years ago, I ventured to call attention to the general absence of the remains 

 of this animal in all the mounds of the historic races, and to the fact that on their pipes 

 and pottery, though they figure every other indigenous mammal and some of the birds 

 of this region, seeking their models even in the Manitee of FloriCa, I have never been 

 able to find any trace of Buffalo bones in any of the mounds which so often contain 

 bones of other animals, nor have I been able to ascertain that they have ever been 

 found in such places. At an ancient camping-ground on the Ohio Eiver, about twelve 

 miles above Cincinnati, where the remains are covered by alluvial soil of apparently 

 some antiquity, and where the pottery (hereafter to be figured in the memoirs of the 

 survey) is rather more ancient in character than that made by our modern Indians, I 

 found bones of Deer, Elk, Bear, Fox, etc., but none of Buffalo. At a number of other 

 old camps on the Ohio Eiver, there is the same conspicuous absence of the remains of 

 this animal. These evidences, negative and incomplete as they are, make it at least 

 probable that the Buffalo was unknown to the people who built the mounds and pre- 

 ceded the tribes which were found here by the whites in the seventeenth century. The 

 same argument warrants us in supposing that the Bison latifrons, with its contempora- 

 ries, the Musk Ox, the Elephant, and the Mastodon, had vanished before the advent of 

 this race, or at least before the time of which we have evidence in the fossils already 

 found. 



"I have long been of the opinion, without claiming originality therein, that the 

 tribes which built the mounds, and shapely, measured forts of this region, were driven 

 to the southward, by an invasion of other tribes coming from the northward and north- 

 westward. 



"In the memoirs now in preparation concerning the ancient peoples of this region, it 

 will be claimed, on what seems to Mt Lucian Carr, Ethnologist of the Survey, and to 

 myself, sufficient evidence that these mound-building people were essentially related to 

 the Natchez group of Indians, and were driven southward by the ruder tribes of the 

 somewhat related tribes which occupied the northern part of the Mississippi Valley when 

 we first knew it. All this seems to me to have a possible significance in the problem of 

 the coming of the Buffalo. When we remember that the Indians north of the Ohio 

 were much in the habit of burning the forests, and so making open plains or prairies, 

 and that, as Mr. Allen has well pointed out, the Buffalo cannot penetrate far into the 

 denser forests, it may be that it was this destruction of forests that laid the way open 

 to their entrance. The so-called barrens of Kentucky — the southward extension of the 

 Wabash prairies — give us evidence on this point. As soon as the Indians were driven 

 away, these Kentucky prairies sprang up in timber, and are now densely wooded. The 

 same is in part true of other prairies of the Ohio Valley. I am inclined to think that 

 the forcing back of the timber line from the Mississippi, is principally due to the burn- 

 ing of the forests by the aborigines in their eastward working, aided by the continual 



