[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]