388 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1887. 



he beholds the prodigious roads they have made from all quarters, as 

 if leading to some populous city ; the vast space of land around these 

 springs desolated as if by a ravaging enemy, and hills reduced to 

 plains; for the land near these springs is chiefly hilly. * * * I 

 have heard a hunter assert he saw above one thousand buffaloes at the 

 Blue Licks at once; so numerous were they before the first settlers had 

 wantonly sported away their lives." Col. Daniel Boone declared of the 

 Red Kiver region in Kentucky, "The buffaloes were more frequent 

 than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browzing on the leaves of 

 the cane, or cropping the herbage of those extensive plains, fearless be- 

 cause ignorant of the violence of man. Sometimes we saw hundreds in 

 a drove, and the numbers about the salt springs were amazing." 



According to Kamsey, where Nashville now stands, in 1770 there 

 were " immense numbers of buffalo and other wild game. The country 

 was crowded with them. Their bellowings sounded from the hills and 

 forest." Daniel Boone found vast herds of buffalo grazing in the val- 

 leys of East Tennessee, between the spurs of the Cumberland mount- 

 ains. 



Marquette declared that the prairies along the Illinois Biver were 

 " covered with buffaloes." Father Hennepin, in writing of northern 

 Illinois, between Chicago and the Illinois River, asserted that "there 

 must be an innumerable quantity of wild bulls in that country, since 

 the earth is covered with their horns. * * * They follow one an- 

 other, so that you may see a drove of them for above a league together 

 * * * Their ways are as beaten as our great roads, and no herb grows 

 therein." 



Judged by ordinary standards of comparison, the early pioneers of 

 the last century thought buffalo were abundant in the localities men- 

 tioned above. But the herds which lived east of the Mississippi were 

 comparatively only mere stragglers from the innumerable mass which 

 covered the great western pasture region from the Mississippi to the 

 Rocky Mountains, and from the Rio Grande to Great Slave Lake. The 

 town of Kearney, in south central Nebraska, may fairly be considered 

 the geographical center of distribution of the species, as it originally 

 existed, but ever since 1800, and until a few years ago, the center of 

 population has been in the Black Hills of southwestern Dakota. 



Between the Rocky Mountains and the States lying along the Missis- 

 sippi River on the west, from Minnesota to Louisiana, the whole country 

 was one vast buffalo range, inhabited by millions of buffaloes. One 

 could fill a volume with the records of plainsmen and pioneers who 

 penetrated or crossed that vast region between 1800 and 1870, and 

 were in turn surprised, astounded, and frequently dismayed by the tens 

 of thousands of buffaloes they observed, avoided, or escaped from. 

 They lived and moved as no other quadrupeds ever have, in great mul- 

 titudes, like grand armies in review, covering scores of square miles at 

 once. They were so numerous they frequently stopped boats in the 



