Page:The Extermination of the American Bison.djvu/74

 "To these sinks, the waters lying on the surface of the prairies are continually draining and in them lodging their vegetable deposits, which after a lapse of years fill them up to the surface with a rich soil, which throws up an unusual growth of grass and herbage, forming conspicuous circles, which arrest the eye of the traveler and are calculated to excite his surprise for ages to come."

During the latter part of the last century, when the bison inhabited Kentucky and Pennsylvania, the salt springs of those States were resorted to by thousands of those animals, who drank of the saline waters and licked the impregnated earth. Mr. Thomas Ashe affords us a most interesting account, from the testimony of an eye-witness, of the behavior of a bison at a salt spring. The description refers to a locality in western Pennsylvania, where "an old man, one of the first settlers of this country, built bis log house on the immediate borders of a salt spring. He informed me that for the first several seasons the buffaloes paid him their visits with the utmost regularity; they traveled in sin. gle files, always following each other at equal distances, forming droves, on their arrival, of about 300 each.

"The first and second years, so unacquainted were these poor brutes with the use of this man's house or with his nature, that in a few hours they rubbed the house completely down, taking delight in turning the logs off with their horns, while he had some difficulty to escape from being trampled under their feet or crushed to death in his own ruins. At that period he supposed there could not have been less than 2,000 in the neighborhood of the spring. They sought for no manner of food, but only bathed and drank three or four times a day and rolled in the earth, or reposed with their flanks distended in the adjacent shades; and on the fifth and sixth days separated into distinct droves, bathed, drank, and departed in single files, according to the exact order of their arrival. They all rolled successively in the same hole, and each thus carried away a coat of mud to preserve the moisture on their skin and which, when hardened and baked in the sun, would resist the stings of millions of insects that otherwise would persecute these peaceful travelers to madness or even death."

It was a fixed habit with the great buffalo herds to more southward from 200 to 400 miles at the approach of winter. Sometimes this movement was accomplished quietly and without any excitement, but at other times it was done with a rush, in which considerable distances would be gone over on the double quick. The advance of a herd was often very much like that of a big army, in a straggling line, from four to ten animals abreast. Sometimes the herd moved forward in a dense mass, and in consequence often came to grief in quicksands, alkali bogs, muddy crossings, and on treacherous ice. In such places thousands of buffaloes lost their lives, through those in the lead being forced into danger by pressure of the mass coming behind. In this manner, in the