The Extermination of the American Bison | Page 6

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.
[Note 8: Long's Expedition to the Source of the St. Peter's River, 1823,
II, p. 26.]
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:
[Note 9: Coll. Georgia Hist. Soc., I, p. 117.]
"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]
[Note 10: Ibid., I, p. 51.]
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]
"A great abundance of wild cattle are also found there, which might be
domesticated by rearing up the young calves." Whether these animals
were buffaloes might be considered an open question but for the
following additional information, which affords positive evidence:
"The trade in furs and peltry would be immensely valuable and

exceedingly profitable. We could also draw from thence a great
quantity of buffalo hides every year, as the plains are filled with the
animals."
In the same volume, page 47, in a document entitled "Annals of
Louisiana from 1698 to 1722, by M. Penicaut" (1698), the author
records the presence of the buffalo on the Gulf coast on the banks of
the Bay St. Louis, as follows: "The next day we left Pea Island, and
passed through the Little Rigolets, which led into the sea about three
leagues from the Bay of St. Louis. We encamped at the entrance of the
bay, near a fountain of water that flows from the hills, and which was
called at this time Belle Fountain. We hunted during several days upon
the coast