THE AMERICAN BISON, more familiarly known as the 'buffalo,' is a slightly smaller, less mas sive animal than the aurochs, with more slender hind quarters. a shorter tail, and somewhat shorter and more robust horns, but with a higher hump and greater shagginess about the head and shoulders. The females are greatly inferior to the males in bulk. Audubon giving the weight of an old bull as nearly 2000 pounds, while full-grown, fat females will weigh only 1200 pounds. In habits it differs broadly from the auroehs in being highly gregarious, the nature of the country permitting it to gather into enormous herds, and in being almost ex clusively a grazer.
"The habitat of the bison." according to Allen. "formerly extended from the Great Slave Lake on the north, in latitude about (12°, to the north eastern provinces of Mexico, as far south as lati tude 25°. Its range in British North America extended from the Rocky Mountains on the west to the wooded highlands about COO miles west of Hudson's Bay, or about to a line running southeastward from Great Slave Lake to the Lake of the Woods. Its range in the United States formerly embraced a considerable area west of the Rocky Mountains, its recent remains having been found in Oregon as far west as the Blue INIountains, and farther south it occupied the Great Salt Lake basin. extending westward even to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, while less than fifty •ears ago (i.e. until about 1830) it existed over the headwaters of the Green and :nind rivers, and other sources of the Colorado. East of the Rocky :Mountains its range extended southward far beyond the Rio Grande, and east ward throughout the region drained by the Ohio River and its tributaries. Its northern limit, east of the Mississippi, was the Great Lakes, along which it extended eastward to near the eastern end of Lake Erie. It appears not to have occurred south of the Tennessee River. and only to a limited extent east of the Alleghanies, chiefly in the upper districts of North and South Carolina." Restriction of range and decrease in numbers quickly followed the settlement of the interior. By IWO it had disappeared east of the Missis sippi; by 1850 it had been confined to the region of the dry plains; by 1875 it had been swept away from the central plains and limited to the region of northwestern Texas and western Kan sas in the south, and in the north to Montana and northward, where isolated herds survived, with rapid diminution, until 1888, when the last remnant of the southern herd was nearly ex tinguished in the 'Panhandle' of Texas. by the capture of the last specimens by C. J. Jones (consult Inman, Buffalo Jones: Forty Years of Adrenture, Topeka. 1890 ) . Small scattered
bands remained a few years longer in isolated retreats, but the end of the century saw none in freedom south of the North Saskatchewan. There, the extensive and lonely forests south of Great Slave Lake are still tenanted, sparingly. by the forest-ranging, larger and darker variety known as the NVood-Buffalo (subspecies Atha basea•, which is steadily being reduced by the Indians in spite of the efforts of Canadian offi cials. A few hundred also survive under legal protection in the Yellowstone National Park, on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana, and in various parks and zoological gardens in the United States and Europe—probably not more than 500 in all. This is the result of a century of unexampled waste of one of the most numerous. interesting, and valuable animals in the world, and it is an irretrievable national dis grace. For. full particulars, consult Allen's Monnyraph, heretofore cited, and W. T. Horna day's "Extermination of the American Bison," in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institu tion for 1887.
The American bison was preOminently gregari ous, and on the Western prairies and plains as sembled in herds of thousands and even millions of individuals. So numerous were they that the early travelers on the plains might travel for days without losing sight of them; wagon-trains, and oven the first railroad trains, were sometimes compelled to stop and wait for their passage; and the present writer has seen steamboats halted by herds swimming the Upper Missouri. These vast herds were made up of coherent bands, which had the habit of marching in files. and the paths thus made, called 'buffalo-trails,' are still traceable on the arid plains; also the circular 'wallows' where they rolled and spun in taking a dust-bath. Each band was accompanied by bulls which, when alarmed, formed a de fensive circle, with lowered heads, about the cows and calves, to protect them from the attacks of the bands of wolves that followed the herds, preying upon the weaklings, or from onslaughts by a puma or a bear: the grizzly alone was able sometimes to vanquish a buffalo in single com bat. During the midsummer rutting season the bulls were constantly fighting with one an other also. The sexes remained together through out the year, with the exception of an occasional solitary and morose bull. A single calf was the rule, born in spring, after a gestation of about nine months. The molting of the winter's woolly undercoat occurred early in summer, the hair coming off in great flakes; and the hide was in good condition for robes from October till May.