[Illustration:  Head of buffalo bull From specimen in the National Museum Group.  Reproduced from the Cosmopolitan Magazine, by permission of the publishers.]

“From the observations made on this subject we may conclude that the buffalo inhabited the temperate zone of the New World, and that they inhabited it at all times.  In the north they never advanced beyond the 48th or 58th degree of latitude, and in the south, although they may have reached as low as 25°, they scarcely passed beyond the 27th or 28th degree (north latitude), at least in the inhabited and known portions of the country.”

New Mexico.—­In 1542 Coronado, while on his celebrated march, met with vast herds of buffalo on the Upper Pecos River, since which the presence of the species in the valley of the Pecos has been well known.  In describing the journey of Espejo down the Pecos River in the year 1584, Davis says (Spanish Conquest of New Mexico, p. 260):  “They passed down a river they called Rio de las Vacas, or the River of Oxen [the river Pecos, and the same Cow River that Vaca describes, says Professor Allen], and was so named because of the great number of buffaloes that fed upon its banks.  They traveled down this river the distance of 120 leagues, all the way passing through great herds of buffaloes.”

Professor Allen locates the western boundary of the buffalo in New Mexico even as far west as the western side of Rio Grande del Norte.

UTAH.—­It is well known that buffaloes, though in very small numbers, once inhabited northeastern Utah, and that a few were killed by the Mormon settlers prior to 1840 in the vicinity of Great Salt Lake.  In the museum at Salt Lake City I was shown a very ancient mounted head of a buffalo bull which was said to have been killed in the Salt Lake Valley.  It is doubtful that such was really fact.  There is no evidence that the bison ever inhabited the southwestern half of Utah, and, considering the general sterility of the Territory as a whole previous to its development by irrigation, it is surprising that any buffalo in his senses would ever set foot in it at all.

IDAHO.—­The former range of the bison probably embraced the whole of Idaho.  Fremont states that in the spring of 1824 “the buffalo were spread in immense numbers over the Green River and Bear River Valleys, and through all the country lying between the Colorado, or Green River of the Gulf of California, and Lewis’ Fork of the Columbia River, the meridian of Fort Hall then forming the western limit of their range.” [In J. K. Townsend’s “Narrative of a Journey across the Rocky Mountains,” in 1834, he records the occurrence of herds near the Mellade and Boise and Salmon Rivers, ten days’ journey—­200 miles—­west of Fort Hall.] The buffalo then remained for many years in that country, and frequently moved down the valley of the Columbia, on both sides of the river, as far as the Fishing Falls.  Below