The Learning Lab at Kump Education Center was full Wednesday evening when Research Forester Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy presented the first lecture in our Woodland Heritage Lecture series.

Her title — “Where the Bison Once Roamed” –struck a chord that brought out a good crowd even on a cold and snowy night.

Most Americans who learned elementary school music can remember singing about, “where the buffalo roam,” and we imagined huge buffalo living in the western or mid-western states, but not in the mountains of West Virginia.

However, Thomas-Van Gundy and other researchers from the U.S. Forest Service have found evidence that buffalo were here 200 years ago.

Old letters and land maps recorded incidents from the early 1800s when buffalo were seen and killed in the Appalachian forests and open spaces. Written evidence indicated that buffalo roamed in small groups along trails that went the same basic routes that we now travel by automobile in West Virginia.

Like humans and other mammals, buffalo needed water, vegetation and salt. They were huge creatures with great bulls weighing almost a ton, but most females were just over 1,000 lbs. Buffalo had massive fur coats that needed to be cared for by wallowing in wet, muddy places. They competed with elk, deer and people for the best watering holes and salt licks.

Native Americans hunted in the Appalachian forests and may have used buffalo meat, hide, and bones here in some of the ways they did out West, but less tangible evidence is available now to show how buffalo were used by native peoples and early European settlers in Appalachia.

The best records have been found in courthouse deed books where surveys of land sold to early settlers are kept. There was a custom of finding “Witness Trees” also known as “Government Trees” that stood near the corner of a property where they could “see the lay of the land.” Such trees were also used to mark areas where there had been forest fires.

When researchers test any hypothesis, they must look for substantial evidence. Botanists have found that there was a particular type of clover where the buffalo roamed, and that the land where they grazed had often been burned over.

As time goes by and human memory fades, researchers look for new ways to verify what has happened to earlier inhabitants of this earth.

The bison are among the many species that have declined and almost gone extinct. They capture our imagination about the past, but we need to be more aware of the environment that supported them and how we can plan for our own future.