Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/54

 with the domestic cattle. The half-breeds are large, fine animals, possessing most of the characteristics of their wild parentage. They can be broken to the yoke, but are not so sober and manageable in their work as the tame breed—sometimes, for instance, making a dash for the nearest water, with disastrous results to the load they are drawing. It is somewhat difficult, also, to make a fence which shall resist the destructive strength of their head and horns. But the efforts at taming buffaloes have not been many or seriously carried on, and no attempt appears to have been made to perpetuate an unmixed domestic race. Probably after a few generations they would lose their natural untractableness, and when castrated would doubtless form superior working-cattle, from their greater size, strength, and natural agility.

“The fate of extermination so surely awaits, sooner or later, the buffalo in its wild state, that its domestication becomes a matter of great interest, and is well worthy the attention of intelligent stock-growers, some of whom should be willing to take a little trouble to perpetuate the pure race in a domestic state. The attempt can be hardly regarded otherwise than as an enterprise that would eventually yield a satisfactory and profitable result, with the possibility of adding another valuable domestic animal to those we now possess.”

The precise limit of the range of the buffalo when the first Europeans visited America is still a matter of uncertainty, yet its boundaries at that time can be established with tolerable exactness. It was beyond doubt almost exclusively an animal of the prairies and the woodless plains, ranging only to a limited extent into the forested districts east of the Mississippi River. The results of the present exhaustive inquiries seem to show that its extension to the northward, east of the Mississippi, was limited by the Great Lakes. Contrary to the supposition of several recent writers, Mr. Allen has not been able to find a single mention of its occurrence within the present limits of Canada, New England, or New York State, although the name of the city of Buffalo and the neighboring “Buffalo Creek” probably imply that this animal once extended its travels to that point. All the supposed references to its being seen on the St. Lawrence, or in Canada West, turn out to mean the elk—the same indefinite terms being often used for both by early writers—or else to apply to some part of the broad territory then called Canada, but not now included within its limits. Changes in political boundaries have constantly to be borne in mind in studying ancient narratives.

Furthermore, no remains of the bison have been found among the bones in the shell-heaps along the Atlantic coast, and there is no unquestionable evidence, among all the early lists of the natural products of the country, of its occurrence anywhere on the seaboard north of the Potomac for a long period antedating the discovery of the continent by Europeans. The only well-authenticated instances of its being found east of the Blue Ridge are the apparently casual passage