Tales About Our Watershed, Story 2
Braddock Road was once an Indian trail and possibly also a buffalo trace or path. If you accept this then, yes, there were once buffalo that at least crossed through the Little Rocky Run watershed. However, when you start digging for proof that buffalo once lived or roamed through here, contradictory information emerges.
But first, consider a new historical interpretation that some historians have about Indians and buffalo. Specifically, at least a few historians believe now that there were many more millions of Indians in North America than previously believed, probably tens of millions, rather than the conventional 10,000,000 or less. How else can you account for the bounteous arrowheads still littering the ground all over the United States? These same historians believe that the early fur trade, beginning in the late 1400s in the Newfoundland area, brought new diseases that decimated the Indian population from coast to coast, in a truly nightmarish and speedy pandemic, leaving maybe 5,000,000 survivors. What this meant is that the wildlife population, especially buffalo, simply exploded with the absence of Indian predators. (Source: Buffalo Nation - History and Legend of the North American Bison by Valerius Geist. ISBN 0-89658-313-9).
Consider that the vast buffalo herds that Lewis and Clark chronicled were an aberration caused by the pandemic.
Because of population pressures, buffalo herds began migrating eastward and would have gotten to the Atlantic Ocean if more white people hadn't arrived in the 1600s. They did get as far as Goochland County according to a 1947 publication by the Virginia Comission of Game and Inland Fisheries ("Wild Mammals of Virginia" by Charles O. Handley Jr. and Clyde P. Patten). The same report also notes that the last buffalo sighting in Virginia was also a meal for a hunter and was bagged along the New River in 1797.
But were they ever in the Little Rocky Run watershed? A map by Handley and Patton says no and shows that the furthest penetration north was Rockingham County. Likewise, a paper published in February 1961 by the Virginia Place Name Society (UVa.) flatly states that there were few buffalo east of the Blue Ridge, if any. But other descriptions of sightings in this area have been chronicled by early explorers.
According to The Mammals of Virginia (1998, Donald Linzey), one Captain Samuel Argall saw buffalo in 1611 at Little Falls, which is the fall line of the Potomac River. Some believe that he got them confused with elk, but if he saw buffalo there, then it just might be that they got there via crossing the Little Rocky Run watershed. A similar sighting at Little Falls was made in 1631 by Henry Fleet.
So what to believe? Who knows what the real truth is about this, but maybe someday someone will find some fossil remains and prove it once and for all. But it is fun to imagine that these great beasts once walked through our Little Rocky Run watershed.
Whatever the facts really are, it is interesting to note that buffalo east of the Mississippi River were not slaughtered in a wholesale manner like they would be later on the Great Plains. They were simply hunted to extinction over a 200 year period and Linzey says that the last one was killed in the 1830s.
NF, October 2002
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