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bones of the Moose and Caribou. I am inclined to believe, from these investigations, 
that the Bison americanus 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 eariier tribes of 
this region, but 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 Florida, 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 River, 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 River, 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. 
“‘Y 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 Mr. Lucian Carr, Ethnologist of the Survey, and te 
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 
