The Extermination of the American Bison

by William T. Hornaday

VIRGINIA.—Of the numerous references to the occurrence of the bison in Virginia, it is sufficient to allude to Col. William Byrd’s meetings with buffaloes in 1620, while surveying the southern boundary of the State, about 155 miles from the coast, as already quoted; the references to the discovery of buffaloes on the eastern side of the Virginia mountains, quoted by Mr. Allen from Salmon’s “Present State of Virginia,” page 14 (London, 1737), and the capture and domestication of buffaloes in 1701 by the Huguenot settlers at Manikintown, which was situated on the James River, about 14 miles above Richmond. Apparently, buffaloes were more numerous in Virginia than in any other of the Atlantic States.

NORTH CAROLINA.—Colonel Byrd’s discoveries along the interstate boundary between Virginia and North Carolina fixes the presence of the bison in the northern part of the latter State at the date of the survey. The following letter to Prof. G. Brown Goode, dated Birdsnest post-office, Va., August 6, 1888, from Mr. C. R. Moore, furnishes reliable evidence of the presence of the buffalo at another point in North Carolina: “In the winter of 1857 I was staying for the night at the house of an old gentleman named Houston. I should judge he was seventy then. He lived near Buffalo Ford, on the Catawba River, about 4 miles from Statesville, N. C. I asked him how the ford got its name. He told me that his grandfather told him that when he was a boy the buffalo crossed there, and that when the rocks in the river were bare they would eat the moss that grew upon them.” The point indicated is in longitude 81° west and the date not far from 1750.

SOUTH CAROLINA.—Professor Allen cites numerous authorities, whose observations furnish abundant evidence of the existence of the buffalo in South Carolina during the first half of the eighteenth century. From these it is quite evident that in the northwestern half of the State buffaloes were once fairly numerous. Keating declares, on the authority of Colhoun, “and we know that some of those who first settled the Abbeville district in South Carolina, in 1756, found the buffalo there.”[8] This appears to be the only definite locality in which the presence of the species was recorded.

GEORGIA.—The extreme southeastern limit of the buffalo in the United States was found on the coast of Georgia, near the mouth of the Altamaha River, opposite St. Simon’s Island. Mr. Francis Moore, in his “Voyage to Georgia,” made in 1736 and reported upon in 1744,[9] makes the following observation:

“The island [St. Simon’s] abounds with deer and rabbits. There are no buffalo in it, though there are large herds upon the main.” Elsewhere in the same document (p. 122) reference is made to buffalo-hunting by Indians on the main-land near Darien.

In James E. Oglethorpe’s enumeration (A. D. 1733) of the wild beasts of Georgia and South Carolina he mentions “deer, elks, bears, wolves, and buffaloes.”[10]

Up to the time of Moore’s voyage to Georgia the interior was almost wholly unexplored, and it is almost certain that had not the “large herds of buffalo on the main-land” existed within a distance of 20 or 30 miles or less from the coast, the colonists would have had no knowledge of them; nor would the Indians have taken to the war-path against the whites at Darien “under pretense of hunting buffalo.”

ALABAMA.—Having established the existence of the bison in northwestern Georgia almost as far down as the center of the State, and in Mississippi down to the neighborhood of the coast, it was naturally expected that a search of historical records would reveal evidence that the bison once inhabited the northern half of Alabama. A most careful search through all the records bearing upon the early history and exploration of Alabama, to be found in the Library of Congress, failed to discover the slightest reference to the existence of the species in that State, or even to the use of buffalo skins by any of the Alabama Indians. While it is possible that such a hiatus really existed, in this instance its existence would be wholly unaccountable. I believe that the buffalo once inhabited the northern half of Alabama, even though history fails to record it.

LOUISIANA AND MISSISSIPPI.—At the beginning of the eighteenth century, buffaloes were plentiful in southern Mississippi and Louisiana, not only down to the coast itself, from Bay St. Louis to Biloxi, but even in the very Delta of the Mississippi, as the following record shows. In a “Memoir addressed to Count de Pontchartrain,” December 10, 1697, the author, M. de Remonville, describes the country around the mouth of the Mississippi, now the State of Louisiana, and further says:[11]