weight.

Mr. Turner, a gentleman long resident in America, is of opinion, that
the Bison is superior even to our domestic cattle for the purposes of
husbandry, and has expressed a wish to see this animal domesticated on
the English farms. He informs us, that a farmer on the great Kenhawa
broke a young Bison to the plough; and having yoked it with a steer,
taken from his tame cattle, it performed its work to admiration. But
there is another property in which the Bison far surpasses the Ox, and
this is his strength. "Judging from the extraordinary size of his bones,
and the depth and formation of the chest, (continues this gentleman,) I
should not think it unreasonable to assign nearly a double portion of
strength to this powerful inhabitant of the forest. Reclaim him, and you
gain a capital quadruped, both for the draught and for the plough; his
activity peculiarly fits him for the latter, in preference to the ox."

As there are no Game Laws in America, (except in a very few confined
instances on the Atlantic border,) the consequence is that the Bison is
fast disappearing before the approach of the white settlers. At the
commencement of the eighteenth century these wild cattle were found in
large numbers all throughout the valley of the Ohio, of the Mississippi,
in Western New York, in Virginia, &c. In the beginning of the present
century they were still existing in the extreme western or southwestern
part of the State of New York. As late as 1812 they were natives of
Ohio, and numerous in that State. And now they are not to be seen in
their native state in any part of the United States, east of the
Mississippi River; nor are they now to be found in any considerable
numbers west of that great river, until you have travelled some eighty
or a hundred miles into the interior of the country.

There were no Bisons west of the Rocky Mountains, when Lewis and Clarke
travelled there in 1805. On their return from the Columbia, or Oregon
River, in July of that year, the first Bison they saw was on the day
after they commenced their descent of the Rocky Mountains towards the
east. On the second day after that, they saw immense herds of them on
the banks of the Medicine River. One collection of these animals which
they subsequently saw, on the borders of the Missouri River, they
estimated as being at least 20,000 in number.

In 1823 it was discovered that the Bisons had crossed the Rocky
Mountains, and some were to be seen in th