Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/55

 of small herds through the mountains from West Virginia into the upper parts of North and South Carolina by way of the New, Holston, and French Broad Rivers. They seem to have been common on the savannas about the heads of the rivers in the western parts of those States; but it is well attested that they never came down to the seacoast. Nor can good evidence be shown that they ever reached any part of Georgia, Florida, or Alabama (although possibly Mississippi), as at present bounded, not appearing habitually to have penetrated south of the Tennessee River—unless just along the bank of the Father of Waters—on account of the thickness of the forest.

The records in general then show, that at the beginning of the seventeenth century the range of the buffalo east of the Mississippi, with the exception of its occasional appearance on the eastern slope of the Alleghanies in the Carolinas and Virginia, was restricted to the area drained by the Ohio River—except over the lowlands at its mouth—and to the eastern tributaries of the Mississippi in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota; also that it was very numerous and uniformly distributed over the prairies of Illinois and Indiana, and also about the upper tributaries of the Ohio, but less numerously and uniformly over Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and the northern portion of Tennessee, being everywhere restricted to the prairies and scantily wooded land along the streams.

In the appendix Professor Shaler offers a short discussion of the probable age of the bison in the Ohio Valley. In the swamps surrounding the “salt-licks” of Kentucky buffalo-bones are found packed in great quantities in the mucky soil, but only about the latest vents of the saline waters, which have from time to time changed their points of escape from the ground. The caverns of Kentucky and Tennessee, which were the homes of the aboriginal people of the region, and receptacles for their dead, and where have been found skeletons of the beaver, deer, wolf, bear, and many other mammals, have never yielded any bones of the bison. Moreover, among all the many figures of animals and birds found on the pottery and ornaments of the prehistoric races of the West, the marked form of the buffalo does not appear, making it presumable that this animal was unknown to the people who built the mounds. Professor Shaler is of the opinion, held by many ethnologists, that the “mound-builders” were essentially related to the Natchez group of Indians, and were driven southward by ruder tribes of red-men from the north and northwest. The Indians north of the Ohio are known to have been much in the habit of burning the forests, and no doubt the invaders alluded to above signalized their advance by such conflagrations. This making of plains by the repeated burning of forests, aided by “the continued decrease of the rainfall, which was “a concomitant of the disappearance of the glacial period,” permitted the buffalo to advance rapidly eastward as far as the Alleghanies, and, coincidently, as far as the mound-building people appear