skirted the banks of Pine
creek, was heaviest on the eastern side. The headwaters of Sugar, Pine
and Mud creeks, being small and narrow, were entirely devoid of trees on
their banks, but as they flowed on and acquired strength and volume, a
skirt of forest appeared.

The Grand Prairie, the home of the ancient Illinois tribe, the Sacs and
Foxes, the Kickapoos, and the prairie Potawatomi, was also the home of
the buffalo, or wild cow of America. No story either of the northwest or
its Indian tribes would be complete without mention of the bison. Think
of the sight that Brigadier General Harmar saw on the early prairies of
Illinois, when marching from Vincennes to Kaskaskia, in November 1787!
With him the Miami chief, Pachan (Pecan) and a comrade, killing wild
game for the soldiers; before him stretching the vastness of the
prairie, "like the ocean, as far as the eye can see, the view terminated
by the horizon;" here and there the herds of deer and buffalo far in the
distance.

For centuries before the advent of the white man the buffalo herds
roamed the plain. The savage, with no weapon in his hands, save rudely
chipped pieces of stone, was unable to reduce their numbers. With the
coming of firearms and the rifle the buffalo passed rapidly away.

In the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries the
buffalo ranged as far east as western New York and Pennsylvania, and as
far south as Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. Father Marquette, in
his explorations, declared that the prairies along the Illinois river
were "covered with buffalos." Father Hennepin, in writing of northern
Illinois, between Chicago and the Illinois river, asserted that "There
must be an innumerable quantity of wild bulls in this country, since the
earth is covered with their horns. * * * They follow one another, so
that you may see a drove of them for about a league together. Their
ways are beaten, as are our great roads, and no herb grows therein."

Of the presence of large numbers of buffalo, that resorted to the salty
licks of Kentucky, we have frequent mention by both Humphrey Marshall
and Mann Butler, the early historians of that state. In the year 1755,
Colonel James Smith mentions the killing of several buffalo by the
Indians at a lick in Ohio, somewhere between the Muskingum, the Ohio and
the Scioto. At this lick the Indians made about a half bushel of salt in
their brass kettles. He asserts that about this lick there were