PENNSYLVANIA. — From the eastern end of Lake Erie the boundary of the bison’s habitat extends south into western Pennsylvania, to a marsh called Buffalo Swamp on a map published by Peter Kalm in 1771. Professor Allen says it “is indicated as situated between the Alleghany River and the West Branch of the Susquehanna, near the heads of the Licking and Toby’s Creeks (apparently the streams now called Oil Creek and Clarion Creek).” In this region there were at one time thousands of buffaloes. While there is not at hand any positive evidence that the buffalo ever inhabited the southwestern portion of Pennsylvania, its presence in the locality mentioned above, and in West Virginia generally, on the south, furnishes sufficient reason for extending the boundary so as to include the southwestern portion of the State and connect with our starting point, the District of Columbia.
III. Abundance
Of all the quadrupeds that have lived upon the earth, probably no other species has ever marshaled such innumerable hosts as those of the American bison. It would have been as easy to count or to estimate the number of leaves in a forest as to calculate the number of buffaloes living at any given time during the history of the species previous to 1870. Even in South Central Africa, which has always been exceedingly prolific in great herds of game, it is probable that all its quadrupeds taken together on an equal area would never have more than equaled the total number of buffalo in this country forty years ago.
To an African hunter, such a statement may seem incredible, but it appears to be fully warranted by the literature of both branches of the subject.
Not only did the buffalo formerly range eastward far into the forest regions of western New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, but in some places it was so abundant as to cause remark. In Mr. J. A. Allen’s valuable monograph[21] appear a great number of interesting historical references on this subject, as indeed to every other relating to the buffalo, a few of which I will take the liberty of quoting.
In the vicinity of the spot where the town of Clarion now stands, in northwestern Pennsylvania, Mr. Thomas Ashe relates that one of the first settlers built his log cabin near a salt spring which was visited by buffaloes in such numbers that “he supposed there could not have been less than two thousand in the neighborhood of the spring.” During the first years of his residence there, the buffaloes came in droves of about three hundred each.
Of the Blue Licks in Kentucky, Mr. John Filson thus wrote, in 1784: “The amazing herds of buffaloes which resort thither, by their size and number, fill the traveller with amazement and terror, especially when 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 River 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 because ignorant of the violence of man. Sometimes we saw hundreds in a drove, and the numbers about the salt springs were amazing.”
According to Ramsey, 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 valleys of East Tennessee, between the spurs of the Cumberland mountains.
Marquette declared that the prairies along the Illinois River 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 another, 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 mentioned 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 Mississippi 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 multitudes, like grand armies in review, covering scores of square miles at once. They were so numerous they frequently stopped boats in the rivers, threatened to overwhelm travelers on the plains, and in later years derailed locomotives and cars, until railway engineers learned by experience the wisdom of stopping their trains whenever there were buffaloes crossing the track. On this feature of the buffalo’s life history a few detailed observations may be of value.
Near the mouth of the White River, in southwestern Dakota, Lewis and Clark saw (in 1806) a herd of buffalo which caused them to make the following record in their journaclass="underline"
“These last animals [buffaloes] are now so numerous that from an eminence we discovered more than we had ever seen before at one time; and if it be not impossible to calculate the moving multitude, which darkened the whole plains, we are convinced that twenty thousand would be no exaggerated number.”
When near the mouth of the Yellowstone, on their way down the Missouri, a previous record had been made of a meeting with other herds:
“The buffalo now appear in vast numbers. A herd happened to be on their way across the river [the Missouri]. Such was the multitude of these animals that although the river, including an island over which they passed, was a mile in length, the herd stretched as thick as they could swim completely from one side to the other, and the party was obliged to stop for an hour. They consoled themselves for the delay by killing four of the herd, and then proceeded till at the distance of 45 miles they halted on an island, below which two other herds of buffalo, as numerous as the first, soon after crossed the river.”[22]
21
All who are especially interested in the life history of the buffalo, both scientific and economical, will do well to consult Mr. Allen’s monograph, “The American Bisons, Living and Extinct,” if it be accessible. Unfortunately it is a difficult matter for the general reader to obtain it. A reprint of the work as originally published, but omitting the map, plates, and such of the subject-matter as relates to the extinct species, appears in Hayden’s “Report of the Geological Survey of the Territories,” for 1875 (pp. 443–587), but the volume has for several years been out of print.
The memoir as originally published has the following titles:
These two publications were simultaneous, and only differed in the titles. Unfortunately both are of greater rarity than the reprint referred to above.