[Note 15:  The American Bisons, Living and Extinct, p. 132.]

It is a curious coincidence that the State of Texas, wherein the earliest discoveries and observations upon the bison were made, should also now furnish a temporary shelter for one of the last remnants of the great herd.

Mexico.—­In regard to the existence of the bison south of the Rio Grande, in old Mexico, there appears to be but one authority on record, Dr. Berlandier, who at the time of his death left in Ms. a work on the mammals of Mexico.  At one time this Ms. was in the Smithsonian Institution, but it is there no longer, nor is its fate even ascertainable.  It is probable that it was burned in the fire that destroyed a portion of the Institution in 1865.  Fortunately Professor Allen obtained and published in his monograph (in French) a copy of that portion of Dr. Berlandier’s work relating to the presence of the bison in Mexico,[16] of which the following is a translation: 

[Note 16:  The American Bisons, pp. 129-130.]

“In Mexico, when the Spaniards, ever greedy for riches, pushed their explorations to the north and northeast, it was not long before they met with the buffalo.  In 1602 the Franciscan monks who discovered Nuevo Leon encountered in the neighborhood of Monterey numerous herds of these quadrupeds.  They were also distributed in Nouvelle Biscaye (States of Chihuahua and Durango), and they sometimes advanced to the extreme south of that country.  In the eighteenth century they concentrated more and more toward the north, but still remained very abundant in the neighborhood of the province of Bexar.  At the commencement of the nineteenth century we see them recede gradually in the interior of the country to such an extent that they became day by day scarcer and scarcer about the settlements.  Now, it is not in their periodical migrations that we meet them near Bexar.  Every year in the spring, in April or May, they advance toward the north, to return again to the southern regions in September and October.  The exact limits of these annual migrations are unknown; it is, however, probable that in the north they never go beyond the banks of the Rio Bravo, at least in the States of Cohahuila and Texas.  Toward the north, not being checked by the currents of the Missouri, they progress even as far as Michigan, and they are found in summer in the Territories and interior States of the United States of North America.  The route which these animals follow in their migrations occupies a width of several miles, and becomes so marked that, besides the verdure destroyed, one would believe that the fields had been covered with manure.

“These migrations are not general, for certain bands do not seem to follow the general mass of their kin, but remain stationary throughout the whole year on the prairies covered with a rich vegetation on the banks of the Rio de Guadelupe and the Rio Colorado of Texas, not far from the shores of the Gulf, to the east of the colony of San Felipe, precisely at the same spot where La Salle and his traveling companions saw them two hundred years before.  The Rev. Father Damian Mansanet saw them also as in our days on the shores of Texas, in regions which have since been covered with the habitations, hamlets, and villages of the new colonists, and from whence they have disappeared since 1828.”