"Bison" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... too far to go. At that time the short-grass country of the Platte Valley was the great center of the bison herds. The wallows lay in thousands, the white alkali showing in circles which almost touched edge to edge. The influx of emigrants had for the time driven the herds back from their ancient fords and watering places, to which their deep-cut trails led down, worn ineradicably ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Last of its timber,—they couldn't sell 'em, Never an axe had seen their chips, And the wedges flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw, Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue; Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide Found in the pit when the tanner died. That was the way he "put her through."— "There!" said ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... nearer, among the numberless islands, Darted a light, swift boat, that sped away o'er the water, Urged on its course by the sinewy arms of hunters and trappers. Northward its prow was turned, to the land of the bison and beaver. At the helm sat a youth, with countenance thoughtful and careworn. Dark and neglected locks overshadowed his brow, and a sadness Somewhat beyond his years on his face was legibly written. Gabriel was it, who, weary with waiting, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... him, and may in the end, in mere idle sport, throw up some new terrestrial denizens, some new competitor for space to live in and food to live upon, that will sweep him and all his little contrivances out of existence, as certainly and inevitably as he has swept away auk, bison, and dodo during the last ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... to tradition, it was the stamping ground of buffalo as well as deer. The dusk deepened. The shadows were skulking in and out of the wild ravine as the wind rose and fell. They took to his fancy the form of herds of the banished bison, revisiting in this impalpable guise the sylvan shades where they are but a ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... hunt, which is in marked contrast to the same artist's strong figures on the Palace of Machinery. 5. Peace by Sherry E. Fry. This beautifully modeled figure has a classic simplicity that is worthy of study. 6. American Bison by A. ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... stupendous mountains of Thibet. In the immediate vicinity of the sacred bull, whose consecrated life has heretofore been passed in luxurious freedom or insolent enjoyment on the banks of the Ganges or the Jumna—feeds the gaunt and shaggy bison, which crops with sullen tranquillity a herbage more nutritious but less grateful to him than he loved to cull among the stony pastures of the Alleghany range, or of the howling solitudes surrounding Hudson's Bay. Though thousands of leagues have interposed between the arid ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... interpreter, a few trinkets, and something to moisten the old chief's lips. Upon our arrival we were duly presented to the chief, who invited us to sit on the ground upon fur robes made from the pelts of different animals, including the antelope and the buffalo, or American bison, the monarch of the plains, and each one of us in turn took a pull at the pipe of peace. We then made a tour of their lodges. When we returned, the chief called his squaws to whom we presented our gifts, which pleased them greatly. To the old chief I handed a bottle of ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... down. Great wedgy splinters fly and strew the plain like autumn leaves. Then, with massive logs, full six feet long, he feeds the hungry fire until it leaps and roars in might, and glows full red and hot and huge enough to roast him a bison bull for supper, an he should feel ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... foolish savages as they were, in the skins of the Aguara dog, with what not of stuffing, and tails, and so forth, in order to astonish the weak minds of the Caribs, just as the Red Indians dress up in their feasts as bears, wolves, and deer, with foxtails, false bustles of bison skin, and so forth. There are plenty of traces of such foolish attempts at playing 'bogy' in the history of savages, even of our own Teutonic forefathers; and this I suspect to be the simple explanation of the whole mare's nest. As for Raleigh being a fool for believing it; the reasons ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... throw away their earthen pots. All these are now separate exogamous septs. The Deswars are another sept which has been divided in the same manner. They are, perhaps, a more recent accession to the tribe, and are looked down on by the others because they will eat the flesh of bison. The other Dhanwars refuse to do this because they say that when Sita, Rama's wife, was exiled in the jungles, she could not find a cow to worship and so revered a bison in its stead. And they say that the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... Unquestionably because they had none to produce. The beef and the hides were assuredly acquired by hunting the wild American buffaloe or bison.—E.] ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... intelligence of animals for at least 30,000 years. The Cro- Magnons of that far time possessed real artistic talent, and on the smooth stone walls and ceilings of the caves of France they drew many wonderful pictures of mammoths, European bison, wild cattle, rhinoceroses and other animals of their period. Ever since man took unto himself certain tractable wild animals, and made perpetual thralls of the horse, the dog, the cat, the cattle, sheep, goats and swine, he has noted their intelligent ways. Ever since the first caveman began ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... the Republican side to force action, followed by eloquent speeches from time to time, piquing their opponents, left the Democrats bison-like across ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... that summer and Gizur the White with him, but Thangbrand's ship was wrecked away east at Bulandsness, and the ship's name was Bison. ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... father was strong, whom the years lowly bow,— A bison could wallow in the grooves of his brow. He is weak, very old—he can scarcely uptear A young pine-tree for staff since his legs cease ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... through the neck of a big buffalo, and, wheeling, galloped madly away, like the hero of one of his favorite stories? Was not the duke, who "knew a thing or two about shooting" and had hunted the noble bison in Lithuania, almost as much delighted as though he had done it himself? Is it any wonder that these intoxicating pleasures were all-sufficient for the time to Mr. Ramsay? Perhaps Thekla would have been forgotten by her Max, and Romeo would never have sighed and died for love of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... head the soaring eagle screamed; The wolfs long howl rang nightly; through the vale Tramped the lone bear; the panther's eyeballs gleamed; The bison's gallop thundered ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the prairie a few ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... by a strange sound that seemed to cause the very earth under him to tremble. The trample of a thousand hoofs would make such a noise; if one of those old-time mighty herds of bison could have come back to earth again; or a stampede of an immense herd of long-horns ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... smile seems commonly one of hunger merely, though often one of stomach-ache. White's Green Frog smiles broad content and placid felicity. Maintained in comfort, with no necessity to earn his living, this is probably natural; still, the bison enjoys the same advantages, although nobody ever saw him smile; but, then, an animal soon to become extinct can scarcely be expected to smile. In the smile of White's Green Frog, however, I fear, a certain smug, Pecksniffian quality ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... common. A cross has been produced between the he-goat and the ewe; the camel and the dromedary have bred together; and Buffon succeeded in producing a hybrid in which three animals were represented—namely, the bison, the zebu, and the ox. On the other hand, attempts to effect a cross between animals belonging to different families have generally failed; nor is it at all probable that a cross will ever be produced ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... the knights full keen, Proposed with evil forethought / a hunting in the green: The boar within the forest / they'd chase with pointed spear, And shaggy bear and bison. / —What sport to ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... beheld the lion from Bilidulgerid, and the leopard from Hindostan—the rein-deer from polar latitudes—the antelope from the Zaara—and the leigh, or gigantic stag, from Britain. Thither came the buffalo and the bison, the white bull of Northumberland and Galloway, the unicorn from the regions of Nepaul or Thibet, the rhinoceros and the river-horse from Senegal, with the elephant of Ceylon or Siam. The ostrich and ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... whose fierce mustaches and shaggy shoulder-mantle made him look like some grim old northern wolf, held high in air the great bison-horn filled ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... fall before them, All our customs and traditions, All our happy life of freedom, Fade away like smoke before them. Come, my brothers, strike your tepees, Call your women, load your ponies! Let us take the trail to westward, Where the plains are wide and open, Where the bison-herds are gathered Waiting for our feathered arrows. We will live as lived our fathers, Gleaners of the gifts of nature, Hunters of the unkept cattle, Men whose women run to serve them. If the toiling bees pursue us, If the white men seek to tame us, We will fight them off and flee ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... carelessly regard? Trust me, there are more things alive than those that crawl, or fly, or swim. Think you, my lord, there is no sensation in being a tree? feeling the sap in one's boughs, the breeze in one's foliage? think you it is nothing to be a world? one of a herd, bison-like, wending its way across boundless meadows of ether? In the sight of a fowl, that sees not our souls, what are our own tokens of animation? That we move, make a noise, have organs, pulses, and are compounded of fluids and ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... times; and although there are such things as wild tribes now existing, we are not sure whether they were placed where they are with their present characters, or whether all are modifications of one pair, according to circumstances. The most conspicuous among them are the Zebu, the Buffalo, the Bison, and the bulls of various parts of the Old World. Those cattle which roam about in a free state in South America, New Zealand, and Australia, have not very long escaped ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... of a trip which the author took with Buffalo Jones, known as the preserver of the American bison, across the Arizona desert and of a hunt in "that wonderful country of yellow crags, deep canons and giant pines." It is a ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... glistening in the sun—when these began to be revealed, the delight of our Luna-tics knew no bounds—and the whole town went moon-mad! But even these immense pictures were surpassed by the "lunatic" animals discovered. First came the "herds of brown quadrupeds" very like a—no! not a whale, but a bison, and "with a tail resembling that of the bos grunniens"—the reader probably understands what kind of a "bos" that is, if he's apprenticed to a theatre in midsummer with musicians on a strike; then a creature, which the hoax-man ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... buffaloes thundered through when, hunted by the white men, they journeyed into the great unknown. Wise men who are nearing the height of the trail say they can hear the booming of myriad hoofs, and see the tossing of unnumbered horns as the herds of bison yet travel far ahead. This is the Shadow Trail the Northern Lights dance upon, shimmering and pale and silvery. We Indians call them the 'Dead Men's Fingers,' though sometimes they pour out in great splashes of cold blue, of poisonous-looking ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... lying with the bones of animals extinct but more recent, stone implements were found, still rude, but, as a rule, of an improved type; and, finally, in a still higher stratum, associated with bones of animals like the reindeer and bison, which, though not extinct, have departed to other climates, were rude stone implements, on the whole of a still better workmanship. Such was the foreshadowing, even at that early rude Stone period, of the proofs that the tendency of man has been from his earliest ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... peninsula felt the footstep of man. With the southern half, however, it was very different; the "openings," and glades, and watercourses, offering almost as many temptations to the savage as they have since done to the civilized man. Nevertheless, the bison, or the buffalo, as the animal is erroneously, but very generally, termed throughout the country, was not often found in the vast herds of which we read, until one reached the great prairies west of the Mississippi. ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... creatures seem to stand in fear of this formidable beast. Even the huge bison, or buffalo, of the Western Prairies sometimes falls a victim to the grizzly bear, and the very imprint of a bear's foot upon the soil is a warning which not even ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... are hunted for food in this part of the country are the moose and the reindeer, the former termed by the Crees mongsoa, or moosoa, the latter attekh. The buffalo or bison (moostoosh) the red-deer or American stag (wawaskeeshoo) the apeesee-mongsoos, or jumping deer, the kinwaithoos, or long-tailed deer, and the apistat-chaekoos, a species of antelope; animals that frequent the plains above the forks of the Saskatchewan ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... we look to see if the bison at Haggerston are showing their great heads above the low mists on the fields.... The night is cold, there is the first touch of winter in the air. It is time to knock out my pipe and turn in, to dream of India's coral strand, as we roll ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... Sextus rode out foremost: His look was high and bold; His corslet was of bison's hide, 275 Plated with steel and gold. As glares the famished eagle From the Digentian rock[40] On a choice lamb that bounds alone Before Bandusia's[41] flock, 280 Herminius glared on Sextus, And came ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... The bison or buffaloes, of which mention has been made, were found in the open spaces or prairies where there was plenty of grass. No such multitudinous herds were seen as have been gathered in later years on the western prairies, but there ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... av a mile off the rest-camp, powtherin' along fit to burrst, I heard the noise av the men an', on my sowl, sorr, I cud catch the voice av Peg Barney bellowin' like a bison wid the belly-ache. You remimber Peg Barney that was in D Comp'ny—a red, hairy scraun, wid a scar on his jaw? Peg Barney that cleared out the Blue Lights' jubilee meeting wid ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... here, roaming these dark primeval glades? What animals, with the smaller stamp of modernity, were pressing here for supremacy? As I gazed westward I could envisage great herds of bison roaming, a lure to men who might ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... brushed by, seemed to sear their faces with its torrid breath. Suddenly, the dust and smoke clearing to the right, the little girl clutched the biggest brother's arm and pointed out a dark, bulky creature that was in the lead. It was a bison, evidently one of those lonely bachelors that, exiled from their kind, were the first hermits of the plains. His bushy head was lowered and his beard swept the ground. The biggest brother and the little girl could see his naked body gleam ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... the gravel Tertiary mammals including elephas primigenius, elephas Namadicus, stegodon Clifti, and unnamed varieties of bear, deer, bison, ox, horse, rhinoceros, and whale. (Outlines of the Geology ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... this point in the little insurrection it is not easy to condemn the wild Metis of the North-west—wild as the bison which he hunted, unreclaimed as the prairies he loved so well, what knew he of State duty or of loyalty? He knew that this land was his, and that strong men were coming to square it into rectangular farms and to push him farther west by the ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... right; if thou hadst asked for the knife thou mightst have received it, and not in the sandal," he laughed. The laugh welled up from his throat through the heavy black beard like the bubble of a bison bull. ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... separating, deforming, beautifying, improving or multiplying realities, so that the edifice or fabric is but the incongruous grouping of what man has perceived through the medium of the senses. It is as though we should give to a lion the wings of an eagle, the hoofs of a bison, the tail of a horse, the pouch of a kangaroo, and the trunk of an elephant. We have in imagination created an impossible monster. And yet the various parts of this monster really exist. So it is with all the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... species varies in extraordinary and inexplicable fashion in different families of mammals. In the horse family, for instance, the species are not fertile inter se; whereas among the oxen, species seemingly at least as widely separated as the horse, ass, and zebra species such as the domestic ox, bison, yak, and gaur breed freely together and their offspring are fertile; the lion and tiger also breed together, and produce offspring which will breed with either parent stock; and tame dogs in different quarters of the world, ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... owner of a coffee estate near this, and like many other planters employs Burghers. On one occasion he went down the slopes of the hills after bison and other large game, taking some seven or eight Burghers with him as gun carriers (besides other things necessary in jungle-walking—axes to clear the way, knives and ropes, &c.). He found and severely wounded a fine elephant with tusks. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... few individuals have been so buried and preserved as to meet the conditions for the formation of an ideal fossil. To realize how little may be left of even the most abundant of higher organisms, we have only to recall that less than a century ago immense herds of bison and wild horses roamed the Western plains, but very few of their skulls or other bones remain to be enclosed and fossilized in future strata of rocks. When we appreciate all these difficulties, both geological and biological, we begin to see clearly ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... wild are generally brown, and the tame of mixed colours. The next fourteen wall-cases are filled with specimens of the different species of Oxen and the Elephant tribe. Among the former the visitor should notice the white bulls of Scotland and Poland: the splendid Lithuanian bison, with his shaggy throat, a present from the Russian Emperor; the bison of the American prairies; and the elando. The specimens of the elephant tribe, ranged in the upper compartments of these cases, include the tapir of South America; the ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... forces of Nature. The wind, the waves, the sun, the mosquito had set their mark upon him. Down one side of his cheek was a newly healed scar, a scratch from a hippopotamus in its last death-struggle. A legacy from a bison ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... fight, a Homeric fight, a fight against odds, which has become a town tradition. If Jan was formidable, a veritable bison, his opponent was no cringing workman scared out of his wits and too timid to defend himself. John Flint knew his own weakness, knew what he could expect at Jan's hands, and it made him cool, collected, wary, and deadly. He was no more the mild-mannered, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... later on held the place of chief assistant in the Saint-Gaudens studio. He became instructor of the Art Students' League of New York in 1906, holding the position until 1911. He it was who made the new five-cent piece design - the Indian head on one side, the bison on the other. He is particularly interested in personalities, having done a number of very clever portrait busts. It is enough to look at the portrait bust of Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney's boy to realize what he is able to do in the line of portraiture. He has ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... had poured out their lava floods; before the Sacramento river had its birth; and while, if not before, the mastodon, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the horse, the mammoth bull, the tapir, and the bison lived in the land. They are indeed among the most remarkable discoveries of the age, and among the greatest wonders of geology. They deserve some common name, and we have to choose between 'extinct' and 'dead.' We speak of 'extinct volcanoes,' and of 'dead languages,' ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Hohokus, twenty-five miles farther on, four or five days later. By degrees as spring comes on I'll bring him north—right up here into Essex County—a genuine wild man, see, something fierce and terrible. We're giving him long hair like a bison, red eyes, fangs, big hands and feet. He's entirely naked—or will be when he gets here. He's eight feet tall. He kills and eats horses, dogs, cattle, pigs, chickens. He frightens men and women and children. I'm having him bound across lonely roads, look in windows ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... vindicating American art, but in preserving to us, in a permanent and beautiful form, the vivid and veracious figures of a wild fauna which, in the inevitable progress of colonization and civilization, is destined within a few years to vanish altogether. The American bear and bison, the cimmaron and the elk, the wolf and the 'coon—where will they be a generation hence? Nowhere, save in the possession of those persons who have to-day the opportunity and the intelligence to decorate their rooms and parks with Mr. Kemeys's inimitable bronzes. ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of the Himalayas through Assam and Bengal to the far Siwalik range, clothing their lower slopes or scaling their steep sides into Nepal and Bhutan. Deep in its recesses the rhinoceros, bison and buffalo hide, herds of wild elephants roam, tigers prey on the countless deer, and the great mountain bears descend to prowl in it for food. Frank had learned on the way that Ranga Duar was practically situated in it; and the knowledge almost consoled him for his exile ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... Hagen, the passing bold knights, faithlessly let cry a-hunting in the woods, that with sharp spears they would hunt boars and bears and bison. What might be braver? With them rode Siegfried in lordly guise; many kinds of victual did they take along. At a cool spring he later lost his life, the which Brunhild, King Gunther's wife, had counseled. The bold knight then went to where he found Kriemhild. His costly hunting ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... few or no fallen leaves, and actually no leaf-mould? In an English wood there would be a foot— perhaps two feet—of black soil, renewed by every autumn leaf fall. Two feet? One has heard often enough of bison-hunting in Himalayan forests among Deodaras one hundred and fifty feet high, and scarlet Rhododendrons thirty feet high, growing in fifteen or twenty feet of leaf-and-timber mould. And here, in a forest equally ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... of occupation, both indoors and out, and although the days were short, the moon for nearly half the month afforded us light sufficient to move about with as great ease as in summer. Habited in dresses of fur, we hunted often at considerable distances from home, either bison or ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... inconceivably remote, when the hills around were covered with woods, through which the elk and the bison and the wild cow strolled, when men were rare throughout the lands and unlike in most things to the present race—at such a period—and such a period there has been—I can easily conceive that the afanc-crocodile haunted ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... leather-cushioned chairs large enough to hold several people each, and too large for any one person to be comfortable in. There was a map of the continent upon the wall, across which Jim Hegan's railroads stretched like scarlet ribbons. There were also heads of bison and reindeer, which Hegan ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... petty-larceny scoundrel; yes, all my inherent attributes compromised by my position. Oh, Hercules! when I remember my native Africa—when I reflect on the sweet intoxication of my former liberty—the excitement of the chase—the mad triumph of my spring, cracking the back of a bison with one fillip of my paw—when I think of these things—of my tawny wife with her smile sweetly ferocious, her breath balmy with new blood—of my playful little ones, with eyes of topaz and claws of pearl—when I think of all this, and feel that here ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... beauty of the female is mainly that of race. The lioness is a more appreciable working type of feline power than the lion, whose sex-beauty, the mane, is somewhat similar to that of a bison, or ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Ship sailed in by the English or French Pioneers in the Sixteenth Century Frontispiece Icebergs and Polar Bears Indians hunting Bison Indians lying in wait for Moose Caribou swimming a River Great Auks, Gannets, Puffins, and Guillemots Scene on Canadian River: Wild Swans flying up, disturbed by Bear Big-horned ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... fine yaks were grazing about Wallanchoon: there were a few ponies, sheep, goats, fowls, and pigs, but very little cultivation except turnips, radishes, and potatos. The yak is a very tame, domestic animal, often handsome, and a true bison in appearance; it is invaluable to these mountaineers from its strength and hardiness, accomplishing, at a slow pace, twenty miles a day, bearing either two bags of salt or rice, or four to six planks of pinewood slung in pairs along either ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... an early period (1784) the present site of the city of Buffalo had come to be known as the "Buffalo Creek region," either from the herds of buffalo or bison, which, according to Indian tradition, had frequented the salt licks of the creek, or more probably for some ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... foremost, His look was high and bold; His corslet was of bison's hide, Plated with steel and gold. As glares the famished eagle From the Digentian rock On a choice lamb that bounds alone Before Bandusia's flock, Herminius glared on Sextus, And came with eagle speed, Herminius on black Auster, Brave champion on brave steed; In his right hand the broadsword ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... say, but certain it is that no further ceremonies towards making him a red-man were performed though he was allowed to wear his Indian costume. Neither did they allow him to hunt with them, as he had hoped. Whenever they went forth to shoot the bison or deer, or to trap the beavers, or wage war with hostile tribes, they always left him with the squaws, the old men, and the warriors who remained at home to take charge ...
— Po-No-Kah - An Indian Tale of Long Ago • Mary Mapes Dodge
... that the species was a favourite food of the ancient people. But as this animal was seen by Julius Caesar, and survived long after his time, its presence alone would not go far to prove the mounds to be of high antiquity. The Lithuanian aurochs or bison (Bos bison, L., Bos priscus, Boj.), which has escaped extirpation only because protected by the Russian Czars, surviving in one forest in Lithuania) has not yet been met with, but will no doubt be detected hereafter, as it ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... Northwest of Canada. The fascination of the wilderness had got a grip upon him, and he conveys something of the same fascination to the reader, whom he allures through the immense and solemn aisles of the great sub-Arctic forest, makes him a joint-hunter after the bison on the Great Prairie, or after the marten and the beaver on the tributary streams to the Saskatchewan and the Assiniboine rivers. The reader is carried into the fastnesses of the rapidly-disappearing Red Man in mid-winter, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... northwest to southeast. Here lay the white bones of elk in shining crates, ghastly on the fire-blackened sod. Beside the shallow pools, buffalo horns, in testimony of the tragic past, lay scattered thickly. Everywhere could be seen the signs of the swarming herds of bison which once swept to and fro from north to south over the plain, all so ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... and long before that time (When bison used to roam on it) Did Taffy and her Daddy climb That Down, and had ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... to treeless, desolate places. They were used to eating moss and young shoots of the willow. They looked something like sheep and something like oxen. Sometimes they are called musk oxen. They looked something like the bison. Sometimes they are called musk bison. Does it seem strange that the musk sheep should leave their cold home and come to the land where the Tree-dwellers had lived? It was not so strange as it seemed. Many years had passed since the Tree-dwellers lived. It was no longer ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... found an Indian slave, called by the Spaniards El Turco, from his resemblance to the Turks, who said he had come from a rich country in the east, where were numbers of great animals with shaggy manes,—evidently the buffalo or bison, now first heard of. Some time later, being brought into the presence of Coronado, El Turco had a more wonderful story to tell, to the effect that "In his land there was a river in the level country which was two leagues ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... Hennessey of his journey from Boston to Bazine. "An Incident of Early Days," by Mrs. John Cole, is presented in the same attractive reminiscent style which makes her article in The Trail so readable and interesting. We are here told of the times when herds of bison were common sights, and are given a pleasing account of the formation of the Bazine Sunday-School. The articles by Mr. and Mrs. Ira Cole show their appreciation of the amateurs who have visited them, and conclude an ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... toilet. They pounded their maize in huge mortars of wood, hollowed by alternate burnings and scrapings. Their stone axes, spear and arrow heads, and bone fish-hooks, were fast giving place to the iron of the French; but they had not laid aside their shields of raw bison-hide, or of wood overlaid with plaited and twisted thongs of skin. They still used, too, their primitive breastplates and greaves of twigs interwoven with cordage. [ Some of the northern tribes of California, at the present day, wear a sort of breastplate "composed of thin parallel battens ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... and mythological figures. Horn can either be cut, moulded, or turned, its natural elasticity making it very durable and difficult to break. Its source of supply is chiefly from the horned cattle, the buffalo and the bison, the horns of these beasts in their natural state frequently being mounted on shields just as in later years the horns of smaller animals, such as the South African varieties of the ibex, springbok, and similar horned sheep and cattle, are brought over to this country and mounted as ornaments. ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... animal you describe is in truth a species of the bos ferus, (or bos sylvestris, as he has been happily called by the poets,) but, though of close affinity, it is altogether distinct from the common bubulus. Bison is the better word; and I would suggest the necessity of adopting it in future, when you shall have occasion to allude to ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... know, led to the estimate of the number of all bears in the Park to be between five hundred and one thousand. Considering that there are some three thousand square miles of land, that there were nearly sixty thousand elk, besides hundreds of bison, antelope, mountain sheep, and similar animals, this does not seem improbable. I am aware that recent statements are to the effect that there were only forty grizzlies there. This is palpably an underestimate, and probably takes into account only those ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... rod, and with their dainty little brown fingers pin it upon the hunter's coat. With shy curiosity they would smoothe the cloth woven in Paisley, forming in their minds a contrast between its elegance and that of the coats of their own red gallants made of the rough skin of the wolf or the bison. So it came to pass that in due season most of the pretty girls among the Jumping Indians had gone with triumph and great love in their hearts from the wigwam of their tribe to be the wives of the whites ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... and continued the search for his father and his road led him to a dense jungle which seemed to have no end, and in the middle of the jungle he came to a lake and he sat down by it to eat what was left of the provisions he had brought: as he sat, he suddenly saw some cow-bison coming down to the lake: at this he caught up his bow and arrows in a hurry and climbed up a tall sal tree: from the tree he watched the bison go down to the water to drink and then go back into the jungle. And after them tigers and bears came down to the water: ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... nothing of bison. Perhaps there are none now, but in 1884 there were supposed to be still a few on the Llano Estacado or Stakes Plain. I knew one man who used to go hunting them every year and usually killed a few. But the last ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... instructions to his officer. Iberville was told to seek out diligently the best places for establishing pearl-fisheries, though it was admitted that the pearls of Louisiana were uncommonly bad. He was also to catch bison calves, make a fenced park to hold them, and tame them for the sake of their wool, which was reputed to be of value for various fabrics. Above all, he was to look for mines, the finding of which the document declares ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... their consorts gathered near, Wild elephants in sudden fear Rushed to a distant wood, and shed An odour round them as they fled. And every silvan thing that dwelt Within those shades the terror felt, Deer, lion, tiger, boar and roe, Bison, wild-cow, and buffalo. And when the tumult wild they heard, With trembling pinions flew each bird, From tree, from thicket, and from lake, Swan, koil, curlew, crane, and drake. With men the ground was overspread, With startled birds the sky o'erhead. Then on his sacrificial ground The sinless, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... flames raging behind us. We dashed across the more open space, where the grass was for some reason of less height than in her parts. Here many of the animals which had passed us, paralysed by fear, had halted as if expecting that they would be safe from the flames. Deer and wolves, bison, and even a huge bear—not a grizzly, however—and many smaller creatures were lying down or ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... and, as it seldom happens that I have an empty carriage while he is on foot, I asked him if I might not see him home. He was glad to get in. We wrapped him up with spoils of the bear, the fox, and the bison, turned the horses' heads again,—five hours now since they started on this entangled errand of theirs,—and gave him his ride. "I was thinking of you at the moment," said Coram,—"thinking of old college ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... Javanus, Rh. Sumatrensis, Rh. Africanus, Rh. simus, and Rh. ketloa; and that, instead of possibly four, at least twelve, or more probably fourteen, animals of the genus would require, on the hypothesis of a universal deluge, to have been accommodated in the ark. Buffon even held that the bison of America might be identical with not simply the auroch of Europe, which it closely resembles, but with even the European ox, which it does not resemble. But it is now known, that while the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... not been good for some time. The reindeer had gone farther north, and the great herds of bison had not yet come back from the warmer regions, where they ranged in winter. There were wild beasts of many other kinds in the forest, but the hunters of the clan had not brought home meat for several ...
— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... gorings from fierce bulls. For it is a strange but well-known fact in those parts, that the domestic cattle that run wild from the various corrals or enclosures, and take to the plains, are ten times more dangerous than the fiercest bison or buffalo, as they are commonly called, that ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... men and women and the emotions common to us all. Hiawatha conquering the deer and bison, and hunting in despair for food where only snow and ice abound; Evangeline faithful to her father and her lover, and relieving suffering in the rude hospitals of a new world; John Alden fighting the battle between love and duty; Robert of Sicily learning the lesson of humility; Sir Federigo ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... figure standing at a window,—everything had to the human ciphers to whom old Peyrade had intrusted his safety the thrilling interest which attaches in Cooper's romances to a beaver-village, a rock, a bison-robe, a floating canoe, a weed straggling over ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... there are also Real Propositions, whose predicates do not mean the same as their subjects, and whose import consists in affirming or denying one of five different kinds of matter of fact: (1) That the subject exists, or does not; as if we say The bison exists, The great auk is extinct. (2) Co-existence, as Man is mortal; that is, the being subject to death coinheres with the qualities on account of which we call certain objects men. (3) Succession, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... Borneo; when the hippopotamus was as much at home in the waters of the Thames as in the Nile and Niger; when huge bears like the grizzly of the Rockies, cave-lions and sabre-toothed tigers lurked in Devon caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent. Yet this epoch of huge and ferocious monsters, following upon the Age of Ice, is a recent chapter of the great epic of man; there lies far more behind it, beyond the Age of Ice to ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... strangled at birth, like all other bland doctrinaires—and of all the doctrinaires on art, there has none been so blandly egregious since the early morning long ago when the pre-historic artist who drew an elk on the omoplate of a bison was clubbed by the superior person of his day who could not draw for nuts)—in spite of Aristotle and the rest of the theorists, I assert that, as far as my experience goes, in the ordinary wary modern life to which we are accustomed, doom and inevitableness do not ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... theatrical profession. Surely there are here the elements of a play, not to mention a cinema play. Surely a New England village maiden might find herself among the wigwams in the power of the formidable and fiendish 'Little Blue Bison,' merely through her mistaken sympathy with his financial failure as a Film Star. The notion gives me glimpses of all sorts of dissolving views of primeval forests and flamboyant theatres; but this impulse of irrelevant theatrical production must ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... love, farewell; We may not meet to-morrow; who can tell What mighty ills befall our little band, Or what you'll suffer from the white man's hand? Here is your knife! I thought 'twas sheathed for aye. No roaming bison calls for it to-day; No hide of prairie cattle will it maim; The plains are bare, it seeks a nobler game: 'Twill drink the life-blood of a soldier host. Go; rise and strike, no matter what the cost. Yet stay. Revolt not at the Union ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... delighted in that of the wild bull. It is not quite certain what exact species of animal is sought to be expressed by the representations upon the sculptures; but on the whole it is perhaps most probable that the Aurochs or European bison (Bos urus of naturalists) is the beast intended. At any rate it was an animal of such strength and courage that, according to the Assyrian belief, it ventured to contend with the lion. [PLATE CXX., Fig. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... had worn it down far below the surface of the surrounding country. The boy had seen it often, but always by daylight, and never alone, so that he noted many things now which he had not observed before. The huge bison must have gone over that well-beaten track one by one, to judge by its narrowness. He could see it dimly, running into the clearing like a black line beginning far off between the bordering trees; but as he looked, the darkness ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... Muskrat Land the conies leap, The wavies linger in their flight; The jewelled, snakelike rivers creep; The sun, sad rogue, is out all night; The great wood bison paws the sand, In ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... considerable difficulty. The three fragments were from bones which "are among the least characteristic parts of the skeleton." That which was of greatest interest was the fragment of a first rib, resembling the first rib of the extinct bison. Since this fragmentary bovine rib was of a form apparently characteristic of bisons and not seen in the domestic cattle of the United States, Dr. Eaton felt that it could not be denied "that the material examined ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... the animals which he has infected with his society, or depraved by his dominion, are alone diseased. The wild hog, the bison, and the wolf are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably die, either from external violence or natural old age. But the domestic hog, the sheep, the cow, and the dog are subject to an incredible number of distempers, and, like the corrupters of ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... keepers to take their place. In this case the threat of the Zoological Gardens authorities that if the men "came out" the animals should come out also had intensified and precipitated the crisis. The imminent prospect of the larger carnivores, to say nothing of rhinoceroses and bull bison, roaming at large and unfed in the heart of London, was not one which permitted of prolonged conferences. The Government of the day, which from its tendency to be a few hours behind the course of events had been nicknamed the Government of the afternoon, was obliged to intervene with promptitude ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... fizzle or go boom. Pressure of population, war or persecution patterns can cause waves of immigration. Plant and animal species can be wiped out by momentary needs or fashions. Remember the fate of the passenger pigeon and the American bison. ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... in the corners of the walls, and bade them cease their sullenness and come forth to dance in the riot of the hour. And so each shadow found its partner in a ray of firelight, and there they danced. They danced about the tangled front of the big bison's head which hung upon the wall. They crossed the grinning skull of the gray wolf. They softened the eyes of the antelope's head, and made dark lines behind the long-tined antlers of the elk and ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... obliged to listen; and, when they had once begun to do that— what might not follow? She knew her power, and she used it. She supported her weightiest minutes with familiar witty little notes. The Bison began to look grave. It might be difficult—it might be damned difficult—to put down one's head against the white ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... Europe of the Bison Europeans, the survivor of the Aurochs (Bos primigenius), which is supposed to have been the original stock of our horned cattle. Although much worried by the wolf, the bear, and the lynx, the bison is strictly preserved from the hunter, and are not therefore likely to disappear like the Bos Americanus, or buffalo, which has so long been ruthlessly slaughtered ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... danger, sank helplessly into the quagmire. It is supposed that the bones of not less than one hundred mastodons and twenty elephants have been dug up out of the bog, besides which the bones of a stag, extinct horse, megalonyx, and bison, have been obtained. Undoubtedly, therefore, this plain has remained unchanged in all its principal features since the period when these vast extinct quadrupeds inhabited the banks of the Ohio and its tributaries. Here and there the Big-bone Lick is covered with ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... of 5732 square miles, including mountains and forests! You simply can't imagine it; it is a great tract of country, preserved in its natural state, and the haunt of wild things. Here are herds of the buffalo of the West, the bison, a very different fellow from the domesticated Eastern buffalo who so rudely chased you and Joyce. The bison are fine to look at, with their extraordinarily large chests and heads, out of all proportion to the rest of their bodies. ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... described as a "new beef animal," which is a blend of the domestic cow and the North American bison. The resulting prodigy has the ferocious hump and shoulders of the bison, with the mildly benevolent face of the Herefordshire ox. It must not, however, be supposed that the old country is behind-hand in such experiments, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... OWEN has noticed a similar fact regarding the rudiments of the second and fifth digits in the instance of the elk and bison, which have them largely expanded where they inhabit swampy ground; whilst they are nearly obliterated in the camel and dromedary, which traverse arid deserts.—OWEN on Limbs, p. 34; see also BELL on the Hand, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the green table. They seemed to see a frowzy desperado, shaggy as a bison, in a red shirt and jackboots, hung about the waist with an assortment of six-shooters and bowie-knives, and standing against a background of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... were of course buffaloes, or, more correctly speaking, species of the American bison. No other continent was ever blessed with a more magnificent and varied selection of beasts and birds in forests and prairies than was North America. Kansas in particular was fortunate in the possession of thousands of herds of ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... been but a hidden glade in the heart of the beautiful, awful wilderness, with a bountiful spring bubbling up out of the turf, and a stream winding away through the green, valley-bottom to the bright, shady Elkhorn: a glade that for ages had been thronged by stately-headed elk and heavy-headed bison, and therefore sought also by unreckoned generations of soft-footed, hard eyed red hunters. Then had come the beginning of the end when one summer day, toward sunset, a few tired, rugged backwoodsmen ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... way diminishes my esteem for you. A well-considered esteem. I have a profound respect for the bullies who honour me with their custom. There are deformed folks amongst you. They give me no offence. The lame and the humpbacked are works of nature. The camel is gibbous. The bison's back is humped. The badger's left legs are shorter than the right, That fact is decided by Aristotle, in his treatise on the walking of animals. There are those amongst you who have but two shirts—one on his back, and the other at the pawnbroker's. I know that to be ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... regions of Alberta have naturally a varying fauna. The south and central region was the land of the bison, its grasses affording a great pasture ground for tens of thousands of "buffaloes.'' They were destroyed by whites and Indians in 1870-1882 on the approach of the Canadian Pacific railway. Grizzly, black and cinnamon bears are, found in the mountains and wooded districts. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... Conventional Characters. Cretan Writing. Egyptian and Babylonian Writing. The Moabite Stone (Louvre, Paris). Head of a Girl (Musee S. Germain, Paris). Sketch of Mammoth on a Tusk found in a Cave in France. Bison painted on the Wall of a Cave. Cave Bear drawn on a Pebble. Wild Horse on the Wall of a Cave in Spain. A Dolmen. Carved Menhir. Race Portraiture of the Egyptians. The Great Wall of China. Philae. Top of Monument containing the Code ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER |
