Before the 19th century, wild buffalo (bison) dominated the North American continent — with individual herds covering 400 square miles or more and taking days to ride through on horseback. It’s estimated the bison population was more than 60 million at its peak.
But when you come across those stories, they aren’t referring to this part of the country, and that begs the question: Did bison once roam what one day would become the Buckeye State?
According to the journals of frontiersmen and the diaries of pioneers, it’s certain that they did. To tell the story accurately and completely, however, details are needed. So I turned to Ted Franklin Belue, a retired history professor from Murray State University in Kentucky and the author of the compelling book The Long Hunt: Death of the Buffalo East of the Mississippi.
Eastern buffalo herds often numbered 100 head or less, and droves of fewer than 20 were common.
“Buffalo herds in the East were never huge, never teeming, never rivaling the truly vast herds that thundered across the Great Plains until the latter half of the 19th century,” Belue says. “Eastern buffalo herds often numbered 100 head or less, and droves of fewer than 20 were common.”
Bison are the largest land mammals in North America. Males (bulls) could weigh a ton or more, with females (cows) about half that, so if they were living in a particular area of the frontier, they were hard to miss. Even if the animals themselves were not seen, their “sign,” evidence of their presence, was unmistakable.
Most notable were traces, simply another name for game trails. There were some traces that bison had used for untold generations, their hooves packing down the dirt so tightly that the bottoms of the trails were several feet below the surrounding ground. Those traces usually led to salt licks, natural mineral springs seeping from the ground. The buffalo would not only lick and eat the dirt at these licks, but would also wallow in them, caking mud on their bodies during the summer to protect themselves from biting flies, gnats, and other harmful insects.
The story is told of Daniel Boone, as a young man, learning to hunt buffalo from members of the Cherokee tribe of Native Americans. Noticing a few large, fresh, cloven-hoofed tracks one day, Boone was puzzled, not quite sure what animal had made them. One of the older, wiser Cherokee told him they were buffalo tracks; but he also cautioned Boone that their tribal enemies, the Catawbas, sometimes tied buffalo hooves to their feet to make fresh tracks and lead the Cherokees into an ambush.
Duly warned, Boone still insisted on following the tracks, so silently and cautiously he and a couple of the Cherokees crept forward on the trail, their flintlock rifles held ready at half-cock. They remained on high alert until they came around a bend in the trail and nearly stepped in what was unmistakably fresh buffalo dung. Realizing no human could have produced such a large, steaming pile, the hunters had a good belly laugh together, then resumed following the buffalo tracks, quite a bit more relaxed.
The most noticeable evidence that buffalo were present, and in high numbers, was stamping, or stomping, grounds. “At large licks, the earth was so trodden and grubbed up that no grass grew for acres,” Belue says. “Deer and elk browsed bushes bare, and buffalo rubbed sparse, scraggly trees barkless, scratching and knocking the saplings with their horns.” Today, a small village in north-central Kentucky is still known as Stamping Ground.
Long before the era of game laws and hunting seasons, both settlers and Natives pursued buffalo relentlessly for food year-round. The meat reportedly tasted better than even that of domestic cattle, with the tongue and fatty hump considered delicacies. But the endless hunting of the animals and strategic government policies eventually took their toll — buffalo east of the Mississippi were essentially extirpated by the beginning of the 19th century, a harbinger of the fate awaiting the once-massive herds on the Great Plains a century later.
“Hunters shot two of the last buffalo in Ohio in 1800 in Jackson County,” Belue says. “In 1806, a settler at the mouth of the Muskingum River killed a buffalo, and the last known buffalo in Ohio was killed at Buffalo Fork, near Zanesville, in 1808.”
