THE FORMER RANGE OF THE BUFFALO. 97 
had dwindled down to a few stragglers, which resorted chiefly to 
the ‘Barrens,’ towards the years 1808 and 1809, and soon after 
entirely disappeared.” * 
From my own reading and reflection upon the subject, I would 
place the range of the buffalo, before the advent of the whites 
in this country, within the following area,— beginning upon the 
Atlantic sea-board at Charleston, thence north of west to the 
Mississippi, thence down the river to the gulf, thence to the mouth 
of the Rio Grande, thence up said river to the Rocky Mountains, 
thence north to the Great Slave Lake in latitude 60°, thence 
south-east to the source of the Mississippi, thence to the south 
end of Lake Michigan, thence east to the east end of Lake Erie, 
thence south-east to the Atlantic coast, near the mouth of Chesa- 
peake Bay, and thence down the coast to place of beginning. I 
can at least show good authority for the buffalo having been found 
at all of the extreme limits of the above area, but of course we 
can only conjecture as to whether it ranged over the whole of the 
above territory at the first settlement of this country. 
But the buffalo has been driven westward until now the area 
over which it ranges is probably not over one-tenth of that above 
described. Like the Red Indian it must succumb in that mighty 
struggle which has been going on from the remotest geological 
time,— which has literally filled the earth with relics of lost spe- 
cies and still continues to-day, controlled by the same laws, and 
producing the same effects as it did when the last mastodon laid 
down to die. 
The old French and Indian population, before the year 1812, 
exterminated the buffalo from the prairies of Illinois, notwith- 
standing the countless numbers that roamed over them at the end 
of the seventeenth century and during the first half of the eigh- 
teenth. It has not been more than one hundred and twenty or 
or one hundred and fifty years at farthest, since they were being 
slaughtered by the thousand everywhere over our state, yet, 
though for years I have kept a sharp lookout, I have never met 
with a single bone of this animal. Audubon states that in the . 
* Quadrupeds of North America, Audubon and Bachman, Vol. 2, p. 36. 
+ Prof. Worthen informs me that he has found the bones of the buffalo very rare in 
this state. A portion of a skeleton comprising big bones, ribs, etc. was found with 
Broadhea: skull 
on. four 
only a foot or two below the surface in Christian or Montgomery county, and those are 
all the remains he knows of having been found recently in the state. 
AMER. NATURALIST, VOL. VI.* T 
