They are the largest species of bison in the world and once thrived in certain parts of the Southeast.
They were hunted to near extinction in the Great Appalachian Valley of Virginia, but until around 1754, large herds of massive Wood Bison still thrived in Northeast Georgia and Central Tennessee.
Those in Georgia and Tennessee became extinct in a very short period due to cattle diseases introduced by illegal squatters from South Carolina. They were thought to be extinct all over North America, until 1957, one small herd was discovered in Canada. However, the Canadian Wood Bison are smaller than their former cousins in Georgia and Tennessee.
Buffalo wallows in northern Georgia? Yep! Some are still visible today in the Northeast Georgia Piedmont. You see . . . until the arrival of European firearms, which killed off many the wildlife and European diseases, which killed off many of the indigenous humans, that region mainly consisted of rolling grasslands, interlaced with forests along streams. Herds containing hundreds of bison or deer grazed those grasslands.
The number of bison, deer and elk declined from the onslaught of firearms, but the extinction event occurred in the early 1750s. Former and runaway Irish bond servants in South Carolina learned of a location on the Savannah River, near present-day Elberton, GA where wagons and livestock could ford the waters. They poured into the Province of Georgia and squatted on Creek lands. Apparently, many of their cows were diseased. The microbes quickly spread into the bison herds then wiped them out.
The Colony of Georgia always had a livestock quarantine facility in Savannah, so the diseases definitely did not arrive legally. Governor John Reynolds called the squatters “Cracker” . . . a pejorative term, used by the English for Gaelic-speaking Irish. The label stuck.
The Americas Revealed 