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Bison   Listen
noun
Bison  n.  (Zool.)
(a)
The aurochs or European bison.
(b)
The American bison buffalo (Bison Americanus), a large, gregarious bovine quadruped with shaggy mane and short black horns, which formerly roamed in herds over most of the temperate portion of North America, but by 1900 was restricted to very limited districts in the region of the Rocky Mountains, and was almost hunted to extinction. Note: Efforts at conservation of the American bison resulted in setting aside several reserves, and by 1990 a few stable herds were established, numbering from hundreds to thousands, roaming certain public areas, such as Yellowstone Park, some reserves in Canada, and some private reserves. Some bison are kept as range animals for food, and the American bison has been bred with domestic cattle to form a cross called the beefalo. The American bison is commonly (though improperly) called a buffalo; an image of the bison appeared on the inverse of the U. S. five-cent coin (nickel) from 1913 to 1937, and that coin was referred to as the buffalo nickel.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Bison" Quotes from Famous Books



... development unheeding him, and may in the end, in mere idle sport, throw up some new terrestrial denizens, some new competitor for space to live in and food to live upon, that will sweep him and all his little contrivances out of existence, as certainly and inevitably as he has swept away auk, bison, and dodo during the last ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... for murder and he says he couldn't of did it because he was over to the Elite jazing when it come off and a little wile later the lawyer asks him where did he say he was at when the party was croked and he forgets what he said the 1st. time and says he was out to Lincoln Pk. kidding the bison or something and the lawyer points out to the jury where his storys don't jib and the next thing you know he is dressed up in a hemp collar a couple ...
— The Real Dope • Ring Lardner

... bustling scene was characteristic of time and place. A score of such outfits, each with its Red River carts and its oxen, its dogs, its women and children, traveled to the plains each spring to hunt the bison. They killed thousands upon thousands of them, for it took several animals to make a sack of pemmican weighing one hundred fifty pounds. The waste was enormous, since only the choicest cuts ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine

... assemblages in family groups about the open fires; apparently the cooking of food and the making of implements and clothing on a small scale were the domestic occupations at this time. Hunting was the chief occupation in procuring food. The bison, the horse, the reindeer, the bear, the beaver, the wild boar had taken the place of the rhinoceros, the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... "I want to show you something;" and he pulled the wet cloth off a breadth of clay which he had set up on a board stayed against the wall. It was a bas-relief representing a female figure advancing from the left corner over a stretch of prairie towards a bulk of forest on the right; bison, bear, and antelope fled before her; a lifted hand shielded her eyes; a star lit the fillet that bound ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells

... 'em, Never an axe had seen their chips, And the wedges flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw, Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue; Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide Found in the pit when the tanner died. That was the way he "put her through." - "There!" said the Deacon, "naow ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... of similar objects, and the habit of seeing them daily, has some such effect on one, as the movement of a crowd in a public thoroughfare, where images pass so incessantly before the eye, as to leave no impression of their peculiarities. Were a solitary bison to scamper through the Rue St. Honore, the worthy Parisians would transmit an account of his exploits to their children's children, while the wayfarer on the prairies takes little heed of ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... and women and the emotions common to us all. Hiawatha conquering the deer and bison, and hunting in despair for food where only snow and ice abound; Evangeline faithful to her father and her lover, and relieving suffering in the rude hospitals of a new world; John Alden fighting the battle between love and duty; Robert ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... published a brief notice of what he supposed to be a fossil bison horn found near Denver, Colorado. Two years later the explorations of the lamented John B. Hatcher in Wyoming and Montana resulted in the unexpected discovery that this horn belonged not to a bison but to ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew

... error. The animal you describe is in truth a species of the bos ferus, (or bos sylvestris, as he has been happily called by the poets,) but, though of close affinity, it is altogether distinct from the common bubulus. Bison is the better word; and I would suggest the necessity of adopting it in future, when you shall have occasion to allude ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... course buffaloes, or, more correctly speaking, species of the American bison. No other continent was ever blessed with a more magnificent and varied selection of beasts and birds in forests and prairies than was North America. Kansas in particular was fortunate in the possession of ...
— My Native Land • James Cox

... sort of buffalo or bison with two very solid, strongly planted horns on its thick-set head. This animal possesses such vigour and agility as to enable it to attack victoriously all other wild beasts. Only the elephant sometimes succeeds, with ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti

... this writer's aim was to visualize the armed Pennsylvanian of earlier days; how he went forth to fight his Indian foe, to slay the bison, moose, elk and smaller game, and on his expeditions to the fields of love: where his firearms and edged weapons originated. To create the living man his arms must be secured, and gradually the present collection ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker

... name of the animal is the bison," suggested Garrison; "they have been slaughtered in pure wantonness. It is a crime, the way in which ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis

... officer—a big man with a neck on him like a bison and a red, broad, menacing face—turned in his saddle and dropped the muzzle of his black automatic on them. They sucked their hisses back down their frightened gullets so swiftly that the exertion well-nigh choked them, and shrank flat against the wall; and, for all the sound that came from ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... remains of the Elephant, Mastodon, and Rhinoceros, and it survived into the earlier portion of the Post-Pliocene period. During this last-mentioned period, it extended its range northwards, and is found associated with the Reindeer, the Bison, and other northern animals. From this fact it has been inferred, with great probability, that the Hippotamus major was furnished with a long coat of hair and fur, thus differing from its nearly hairless modern representative, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... brute mass. Whirled this way and that, as Piegan led, I knew neither east, west, north or south from one moment to another. Betimes we found a stretch of open country, and gave our horses the steel, but always to bring up suddenly against the bison plodding in groups, in ranks, in endless files. They were ubiquitous; stolid obstructions that we could neither avoid nor ride down. Our progress became monotonous, a succession of fruitless attempts to advance; hopeless, like ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... from fierce bulls. For it is a strange but well-known fact in those parts, that the domestic cattle that run wild from the various corrals or enclosures, and take to the plains, are ten times more dangerous than the fiercest bison or buffalo, as they are commonly called, ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn

... record of a trip which the author took with Buffalo Jones, known as the preserver of the American bison, across the Arizona desert and of a hunt in "that wonderful country of deep canons and ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... of the vegetable creation can find no foothold. Meadows or prairies occur nowhere in nature, except in places where the liability to destructive fires over wide areas together crushes out forest trees, or else where goats, bison, deer, and other large herbivores browse them ceaselessly down in the stage of seedlings. Competition for sunlight is thus even keener perhaps than competition for foodstuffs. Alike on trees, shrubs, and herbs, accordingly the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... Exceed us in consequence, fashion, and show? Forbid it, true dignity, honour and pride!— A grand rural fete I will shortly provide, That for pomp, taste, and splendor, shall far leave behind, All former attempts of a similar kind." The Buffalo, Bison, Elk, Antelope, Pard, All heard what he spoke, with ...
— The Elephant's Ball, and Grand Fete Champetre • W. B.

... the hunter's coat. With shy curiosity they would smoothe the cloth woven in Paisley, forming in their minds a contrast between its elegance and that of the coats of their own red gallants made of the rough skin of the wolf or the bison. So it came to pass that in due season most of the pretty girls among the Jumping Indians had gone with triumph and great love in their hearts from the wigwam of their tribe to be the wives of the ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins

... Behind us, dark: lines of living beings streamed down the mountain slopes; around us, dark lines crawled along the plains—westward, westward ever. Who could stand against us? We met the wild asses on the steppe, and tamed them, and made them our slaves. We slew the bison herds, and swam broad rivers on their skins. The Python snake lay across our path; the wolves and wild dogs snarled at us out of their coverts; we slew them and went on. The forests rose in black tangled barriers, we hewed our way through ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce

... by a strange sound that seemed to cause the very earth under him to tremble. The trample of a thousand hoofs would make such a noise; if one of those old-time mighty herds of bison could have come back to earth again; or a stampede of an immense herd of long-horns might cause ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson

... informs us that about the year 1790, the herds of bison disappeared from the plains east of the Mississippi. The deer and the raccoon remained for some years later, but from the time of the disappearance of the buffalo, the power of the tribes was on the wane. The advance of the paleface and the curtailment of the supply of game, marked the ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce

... attributes compromised by my position. Oh, Hercules! when I remember my native Africa—when I reflect on the sweet intoxication of my former liberty—the excitement of the chase—the mad triumph of my spring, cracking the back of a bison with one fillip of my paw—when I think of these things—of my tawny wife with her smile sweetly ferocious, her breath balmy with new blood—of my playful little ones, with eyes of topaz and claws ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... that wound in and out of these very beautiful mountain valleys took the Prince past the enclosures of the National Park, and he saw under the trees the big, hairy-necked bison, the elk and mountain goats that are harboured in this great ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton

... of a man who has been exposed to the forces of Nature. The wind, the waves, the sun, the mosquito had set their mark upon him. Down one side of his cheek was a newly healed scar, a scratch from a hippopotamus in its last death-struggle. A legacy from a bison seared his brow. ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne

... plain, the Great Spirit of whom I shall speak created the world. He made the sparkling lakes and swift rivers, the boundless plains and tangled forests, over which He caused the sun to shine and the rain to fall. He gave life to the kingly elk, the graceful deer, the rolling bison, the bear, the fox—all the beasts and birds and fishes. But He was not content; for nothing He made was perfect in His sight. He created the white man in His own image, and from this first man's rib He created his mate—a woman. He turned them free ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey

... European bison, a species nearly extinct but preserved in the forests of Lithuania and the Caucasus. The ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... division of the artiodactyls includes antelopes, deer, oxen, bison, sheep, and goats,—all of which belong to a common stock which took its rise in Europe in the upper Eocene from ancestral forms akin to those of the camels. In the Miocene the evolution of the two-toed artiodactyl foot was well-nigh completed. Bonelike growths appeared ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... stopping to graze; he would soon have been over a rocky ridge. I nodded to Preble. His rifle rang; the bull wheeled sharp about with an angry snort and came toward us. His head was up, his eye blazing, and he looked like a South African Buffalo and a Prairie Bison combined, and seemed to get bigger at every moment. We were safely hidden behind rocks, some fifty yards from him now, when I got my ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton

... and I carried the packs across a creek on a fallen tree, she taking one end and I the other. We camped there, where the loam was trampled and torn by countless herds of bison, and had only parched corn and the remains of a buffalo steak for supper, as the meal was mouldy from its wetting, and running low. When Weldon had gone a little distance up the creek to scout, Tom relented from the sternness which his vigilance imposed and came and sat down on a log beside ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... congenital defunctive music! Twenty years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never—do. Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How saith Zarathustra? Deine Kuh Truebsal melkest Du. Nun Trinkst Du die suesse Milch des Euters. See! it displodes for thee in abundance. Drink, man, an udderful! Mother's milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk too of those ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... snow covered, and the trees were always green. From the hillside the plains were seen, over which roamed the deer, the antelope, and the bison, feeding on never-failing grasses. Twining through these plains were streams of bright water, beautiful to look upon. A place where none but those who were of ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various

... vitality! Why not possess the physical energy of a young lion? For then you will compel success. You will stand like a wall if need be, or rush with the force of a charging bison towards the desired achievements. This book sends forth a message of paramount importance to those who need added efficiency. Adherence to the principles laid down herein will add to the characteristics that insure splendid achievements. ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden

... to the trapper fair, Painting the gray Veils that the spring moons wear, This our revenge, This one tremendous change: Making new towns, Lit with a star-fire strange, Wild as the dawn Gilding the bison-range. ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay

... the thickets of hemlock they could see the firelight of the Indians and hear the wash of the creek water. Suddenly a wild whooping among the red men, savage as the howl of wolves on the trail of a wounded bison, ran beyond them, far out into the forest, and sent its echoes traveling from hilltop to mountain side. Then came a sound which no man may hear without getting, as Solomon was wont to say, "a scar on his soul which he ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller

... heart in his bosom. "Troy has the kick-off," he said, "the ball is yours, noble Hector." Then he gave him the ball, a prolate spheroid of leather, Much like the world in its shape, if the world were lengthened, not flattened, Covered with well-sewed leather, the well-seasoned hide of a bison, Killed by Lakon, the hunter, ere bisons were exterminated. On it was painted a battle, a market, a piece of the ocean, Horses and cows and nymphs and things too ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various

... Trail that countless buffaloes thundered through when, hunted by the white men, they journeyed into the great unknown. Wise men who are nearing the height of the trail say they can hear the booming of myriad hoofs, and see the tossing of unnumbered horns as the herds of bison yet travel far ahead. This is the Shadow Trail the Northern Lights dance upon, shimmering and pale and silvery. We Indians call them the 'Dead Men's Fingers,' though sometimes they pour out in great ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... thing I saw was a great American bison; and I was so glad to meet with any one from home, that I'd have patted him with pleasure if he had shown any cordiality toward me. He didn't, however, but stared savagely with his fiery eyes, and put down his immense head with a sullen snort, as if he'd have tossed me with great ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott

... and the great boa-constrictor. Upon the plateau and mountain ranges wolves and wild-cats abound, and the coyote is the wild inhabitant of the desert plains most in evidence. There are several kinds of bears, and the wolf, skunk, bison, and tapir are found. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... and Uncle Kit and I in the opposite. We had gone but a short distance, when, looking across a canyon, I saw a herd of some kind of animals and asked Uncle Kit what they were. He told me they were bison, and complimented me on having such ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan



Words linked to "Bison" :   buffalo, Bison bonasus, aurochs, wisent, bovid, genus Bison



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