In the vicinity of the spot where the town of Clarion now stands, in
northwestern Pennsylvania, Mr. Thomas Ashe relates that one of the first
settlers built his log cabin near a salt spring which was visited by
buffaloes in such numbers that "he supposed there could not have been
less than two thousand in the neighborhood of the spring." During the
first years of his residence there, the buffaloes came in droves of
about three hundred each.

Of the Blue Licks in Kentucky, Mr. John Filson thus wrote, in 1784: "The
amazing herds of buffaloes which resort thither, by their size and
number, fill the traveller with amazement and terror, especially when
he beholds the prodigious roads they have made from all quarters, as if
leading to some populous city; the vast space of land around these
springs desolated as if by a ravaging enemy, and hills reduced to
plains; for the land near these springs is chiefly hilly. * * * I have
heard a hunter assert he saw above one thousand buffaloes at the Blue
Licks at once; so numerous were they before the first settlers had
wantonly sported away their lives." Col. Daniel Boone declared of the
Red River region in Kentucky, "The buffaloes were more frequent than I
have seen cattle in the settlements, browzing on the leaves of the cane,
or cropping the herbage of those extensive plains, fearless because
ignorant of the violence of man. Sometimes we saw hundreds in a drove,
and the numbers about the salt springs were amazing."

According to Ramsey, where Nashville now stands, in 1770 there were
"immense numbers of buffalo and other wild game. The country was crowded
with them. Their bellowings sounded from the hills and forest." Daniel
Boone found vast herds of buffalo grazing in the valleys of East
Tennessee, between the spurs of the Cumberland mountains.