Cabeza de Vaca, 16th Century Spanish Soldier is the first European to write about Bison in the Americas(He spots them in New Mexico)...His eye is on the potential to tame them and raise them as cattle for the new Spanish Settlements...............This accounting is prior to Indians posessing guns and de Vaca provides an interesting description of how the natives would ambush the buffalo at watering holes with spears and arrows

ACCOUNT OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE
    BUFFALO, 1598

     Next day as he travelled many Indians and Indian women
came out to meet him, bringing pinole.l Most of the men go
naked, but some are clothed with skins of buffalo and some
with blankets. The women wear a sort of trousers made of
buckskin, and shoes or leggins, after their own fashion. He
gave them some presents and told them by means of, the in-
terpreter that Governor Don Juan de Ofiate had sent him
that they might know that he could protect those who were
loyal to his Majesty and punish those who were not.

 All were friendly and very well pleased. They asked him for
aid against the Xumanas, as they call a tribe of Indians who
are painted after the manner of the Chichimecos. The sar-
gento mayor promised them that he would endeavor to insure
peace to them, since he had come to this land for that purpose.

    Bidding them goodby, Cabeza de Vaca left that place and travelled
ten more leagues in three days, at the end of which time he
saw the first buffalo bull, which, being rather old, wandered
alone and ran but little. This produced much merriment
and was regarded as a great joke, for the least one in the
Apalachicola, which it may have been.

    Shortly afterward more than three hundred buffalo were
seen in some pools. During the next day they travelled about
seven leagues, when they encountered as many as a thousand
head of cattle. In that place there were found very good
facilities for the construction of a corral with wings

Its horns are black, and a third of a
vara long, as already stated, and resemble those of the bffalo;'
its eyes are small, its face, snout, feet, and hoofs of the same
form as of our cows, with the exception that both the male and
female are very much bearded, similar to he-goats. They are
so thickly covered with wool that it covers their eyes and face,
and the forelock nearly envelops their horns.

This wool,which is long and very soft, extends almost to the middle of
the body, but from there on the hair is shorter. Over the
ribs they have so much wool and the chine is so high that they
appear humpbacked, although in reality and in truth they are
not greatly so, for the hump easily disappears when the hides
are stretched.

    In general, they are larger than our cattle. Their tail is
like that of a hog, being very short, and having few bristles
at the tip, and they twist it upward when they run. At the
knee they have natural garters of very long hair. In their
haunches, which resemble those of mules, they are hipped and
crippled, and they therefore run, as already stated, in leaps,
especially down hill.

 They are all of the same dark color,
somewhat tawny, in parts their hair being almost black.
Such is their appearance, which at sight is far more ferocious
than the pen can depict. As many of these cattle as are de-
sired can be killed and brought to these settlements, which
are distant from them thirty or forty leagues, but if they
are to be brought alive it will be most difficult unless
time and crossing them with those from Spain make them
tamer.

 The Indians are numerous in all that land. They live in
rancherias in the hide tents hereinbefore mentioned. They
always follow the cattle, and in their pursuit they are as well
sheltered in their tents as they could be in any house. They
eat meat almost raw, and much tallow and suet, which serves
them as bread, and with a chunk of meat in one hand and a
piece of tallow in the other, they bite first on one and then on
the other, and grow up magnificently strong and courageous.

 

Their weapons consist of flint and very large bows, after the
manner of the Turks. They saw some arrows with long thick
points, although few, for the flint is better than spears to
kill cattle. They kill them at the first shot with the great-
est skill, while ambushed in brush blinds made at the water-
ing places, as all saw who went there, and who in company
with the said sargento mayor consumed in the journey fifty-
four days and returned to this camp on the 8th of November,
1598, thanks be to God.