Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/56

46 to have settled the country. Its advent thus seems to have been singularly recent.

The question of the origin of the buffalo and its relation to the earliest tribes of people in the Ohio Valley is made still more complicated by the fact that an earlier and closely related species of buffalo, probably coeval with the mammoth and musk-ox, and possibly with the caribou and elk, was living at the time just following the close of the glacial epoch. “I am strongly disposed to think,” writes Professor Shaler, “that in the Bison Americanus we have the descendant of the Bison latifrons, modified by existence in the new conditions of soil and climate to which it was driven by the great changes closing the last ice age.” But he adds that future explorations will probably show that there was an interval of some thousands of years between the two species along the Ohio.

Although the main chain of the Rocky Mountains has been supposed commonly to form the western limit of the range of the buffalo, there is abundant proof of its former existence over a vast area west of it, including a large part of the Utah Basin, the Green River plateau, and the plains of the Columbia, westward to the Blue Mountains of Oregon, and the Sierra Nevada. Evidence of this is found in the bleached skulls, in accounts of early explorers, and in traditions of the Indians. During the very severe and snowy winter of 1836-'37 large herds were lost through starvation; by 1840 they had retreated eastward to the forks of the Yellowstone and been extirpated in the Utah Valley and about the head-waters of the Colorado; and ten years later were never to be found west of the Rocky Mountains, between the British possessions and the Rio Grande del Norte. Westward of this great river it does not seem, within the past two centuries, to have extended itself at all into the highlands of New Mexico; but, farther south, there is proof of its former range over the northeastern provinces of Mexico to at least the twenty-fifth parallel, though it was never abundant there, and abandoned that region before the beginning of the current century.

The great center of buffalo-life in ages past was the vast expanse of treeless plains which stretch uninterruptedly from the Texas coasts almost to the Arctic Circle, and here, in restricted areas, they have survived until the present time.

When Cabeça de Vaca met them in 1530 they ranged throughout nearly the whole of Texas, the higher prairie-lands of northwestern Louisiana and Arkansas, and thence uniformly northward and westward. But soon after 1820 they disappeared altogether from Arkansas, and were not seen in western Missouri and southern Iowa later than 1825; but immense herds still roamed over the northern half of the latter State. Since 1845, however, few have been seen anywhere within Iowa, nor did they linger many years longer in Minnesota.

The stream of emigration across the plains to California about 1859