Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/175

 SECT. V.] GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. 139 not live immediately on the shores of the Pacific, or in the Rocky Mountains, derived their means of subsistence almost exclusively from the salmon, which ascends the rivers to their sources, and from various species of native roots, some of which are very unwholesome. They cultivate absolutely nothing ; and it is therefore evident that their population must be less, in propor- tion to territory, than that of the Indians east of the mountains. The bisons are found, in the Missouri plains, in flocks of several thousands. They generally migrate in winter to the country south of the Arkansa. Many however find during that season, even in high latitudes, an asylum in the valleys of the mountains, or wherever a detached tract of forest land is to be found. Their bulk, shape, and habits render mountains a formi- dable obstacle to their progress. Wherever a buffalo path is found in a mountainous or hilly country, it is a sure guide for the most practicable way of crossing the mountain. It was such a path, which, for a number of years, became the main route across the Cumberland Mountains, between the southwest parts of Vir- ginia and Kentucky. In the same manner the buffalo has pointed out the most practicable route, across the ridge which divides the sources of the Yellow Stone and the river Platte, from that of Lewis's River, a southern branch of the Columbia, and from those of the Rio Colorado of California. They have penetrated down the last river as far south as the fortieth degree of latitude, and down Lewis's River as far west as the one hun- dred and fifteenth degree of longitude. Reyoncl those points they have been arrested in both directions by impassable moun- tains. Toward the east they had crossed the Mississippi, and, before they were driven away by the American settlements, they had ascended the valley of the Ohio within one hundred miles of Pittsburgh, and that of the Tennessee to its sources. They were but rarely seen south of the ridge which separates that river from the sources of those which empty into the Gulf of Mexico, and nowhere, in the forest country, in herds of more jthan from fifty to two hundred. The bison is but a variety of the European ox ; and the mixed breed will again propagate.* He the mixed breed was quite common fifty years ago, in some of the north- western counties of Virginia ; and that the cows, the issue of that mixture, propagated like all others. No attempt that I know of was ever made by the inhabitants to tame a buffalo of full growth. But calves were occa- sionally caught by the dogs and brought alive into the settlements. A
 * As doubts have lately been raised upon that point, I must say that