390 RANGE OF AMERICAN MAMMALS. 
Lawson says that “great plenty of buffaloes, elk, etc., existed 
near Cape Fear River ;” and Purchas says that “in 1613, the ad- 
venturers in Virginia discovered a slow kind of cattle as big as 
king, which were good meat.” 
Brickell says that two were taken alive in 1730, near where 
Newbern now stands; and those who settled the Abbeville dis- 
trict in South Carolina in 1756 found the buffalo there. 
Bernard Romans, who wrote in 1774, speaks of the buffalo as a 
“ benefit of nature bestowed upon Florida.” 
Alvar Nunez, about the year 1535, saw them not far from the, 
coast, and Ioutel in 1685 saw them at the Bay of St Bernard. 
De Soto, who traversed the coast of the Gulf of Mexico from 
Florida to the Mississippi, from 1539 to 1543, saw no buffalo, but 
frequently saw the skins, and was told that the animal was to the 
north of them. 
Gomara says, that in 1591, they were in great numbers in what 
is now New Mexico. 
Herrera states, that they roamed as far south as the river 
Yaquinie (supposed to be the Rio Gila). 
The buffalo is not found now west of the Rocky Mountains, ex- 
cept a few on the head waters of the Columbia river, but the In- 
dians have a tradition that shortly before the visit of the first 
explorers destructive fires drove the bison east of the mountains. 
Thus, it would seem that the bison once roamed over the entire 
country, now known as the United States, and extending as far 
north as the sixtieth parallel in British America. They are! not 
found now east of the Missouri river, nor south of Colorado; at 
the rate at which tliey have been driven back and destroyed, it is 
probable that they are soon to be known only in history. 
For many years, the annual number of robes brought to market 
has been about fifty-five thousand, and when it is known that the 
skin of the cow only is preserved, and that only in the winter 56a- 
son, and that the cows are generally with calf at this season, and 
that the skin is not taken from more than one in ten of those ani- 
mals that are killed, some estimate may be formed of the rapid 
destruction of these animals at the hand of man; and without 
APR 
into consideration the deaths from natural causes, acci- 
dents, etc., it is a low estimate to place the number of bison de- 
stroyed by man each year at not less than half a million. 
It is a little strange that, while the harmless animals have been - 
driven so far back from the Atlantic coast, the carnivorous still 
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