In the pre colonial period, Bison roamed the Eastern half of North America from New York down through Virginia and the Southeast........ In Ohio, the last recorded Bison was killed in Lawrence County in 1800............Had Ohio not been settled by Europeans, it is estimated that there could be as many as 500,000 of the creatures living there today ............. Madison County, Ohio historian Mike Bergman states that the famed Ohio frontiersman Jonathan Alder frequently mentioned bison in his journal.............. Alder was captured by American Indians as a boy in Virginia and was brought back to the Ohio country, where he lived with them in the late 1700s................... He later had a cabin along what is now Rt. 142 in Madison County, Ohio where he wrote in his journal---""Some of the hunters(Indians) went as far south as Big Darby and Paint Creek"......... "Here they killed deer, elk, buffalo and bear in great numbers and dried and jerked the meat and returned with as much as they could carry, which was no small quantity, for an Indian can carry a larger load of provisions than any other people I have ever seen"

Nice to see bison 

back here(In OHIO)

columbusdispatch.com

First, get one thing straight.
 Never call them buffalo.

 They are bison. Their scientific
name is Bison bison. 

That should make it perfectly clear.

Buffalo are the water buffalo that
 live in Africa and 

Asia. Bison are the animals that
now graze at 

Battelle-Darby Creek Metro Park.
There are 16,

 all of them are cows, including the
 biggest one

 that is called Big Mama. She tips the
 scales at 1,400 pounds.

Bison range in North America, circa 1800--

I recently
 attended
 a meeting
 of a natural-history club I belong to during which John Watts, 
the Metro Parks resource manager, talked about bison. I was 
particularly interested in what Watts had to say about the 
historical aspects of bison in North America and what now is
 Ohio. He said that bison once extended over a tremendous
 portion of North America from the East Coast west to the 
Rocky Mountains, south to Texas and New Mexico and north
 to Great Slave Lake in Canada. It's generally thought they
 were 
scattered throughout the Ohio country.

The last bison was killed in Ohio in Lawrence County in 
1800,
and there were only 1,091 in the entire country by 1890, 
Watts
 said. But there could be as many as 500,000 now, he said.

Madison County historian Mike Bergman told me that the
 famed
Ohio frontiersman Jonathan Alder frequently mentioned
 bison in
 his journal.
Alder was captured by American Indians as a boy in Virginia
 and was brought back to the Ohio country, where he lived with
 them in the late 1700s. He later had a cabin along what is now 
Rt. 142 in Madison County.In one part of his journal, Alder said
 the Indians had gone to their winter camp at Hog Creek north of 
what is now Wapakoneta.

"Some of the hunters went as far south as Big Darby and Paint
 Creek," he wrote. "Here they killed deer, elk, buffalo (his word)
 and bear in great numbers and dried and jerked the meat and
 returned with as much as they could carry, which was no small
 quantity, for an Indian can carry a larger load of provisions than 
any other people I have ever seen."

In another part of his journal, he described an incident that
 happened while he was still a boy. He said the Indians had just
 killed a bison and were preparing to carry the meat back to camp.

Without seeing the animal, Alder volunteered to carry the head,
 but when they took him to the bison, the head was so massive that
 he could not even lift it. The Indians delighted in teasing him abou
 that.

The descriptions of bison in Alder's journal show that the animal
 played a part in everyday life when Ohio was still a wilderness. It's
 nice to have them back in one of our Metro Parks.

Retired weather columnist John Switzer writes a Sunday Metro column.