At the museum of Davis Brothers, at Niagara Falls, Mr. B. U. Davis told the writer that he owned 2 mastodon teeth which had been found in digging for the foundations of the Tower Hotel, which faces the Falls park.
Mastodons could have lived where Niagara Falls is now located only after the Wisconsin ice-sheet had retired far enough to permit the waters of Lake Iroquois to fall somewhat below those of Lake Erie, the shrinkage of the latter to its present basin, and the formation of dry land or land not too swampy around the present Niagara Falls.
57. _Hinsdale, Cattaraugus County._—Hall (op. cit., p. 364) stated that at this place a tusk, with some horns of deer, had been found in gravel and sand, 16 feet below the surface. Clarke (Bull. 69, etc., p. 933) mentions this case and suggests that the antlers were possibly those of the elk. The tusk may quite as well have been that of an elephant.
Lyell (Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist., vol. XII, 1843, p. 127) referred to this discovery as showing mastodon bones at the highest elevation known at that time, 1,500 feet above the sea.
58. _Conewango, Cattaraugus County._—In 1908 (60th Ann. Rep. State Mus., p. 60), Clarke reported that part of a mastodon skeleton, consisting of from 40 to 50 bones, mostly vertebræ and foot-bones, had been unearthed in 1906 from the bank of the State ditch along Conewango Creek, close to the boundary between Cattaraugus and Chautauqua Counties. The remains lay on a shelf of hard clay. They were discovered and reported by C. N. Hoard and W. H. Hoard. The locality was probably not far from the town indicated. This animal is to be referred to the last half of the Wisconsin glacial stage; that is, to the Wabash stage.
59. _Buffalo, Erie County._—In 1809 (Phila. Med. and Phys. Jour., vol. II, p. 157), Dr. B. S. Barton reported that a tooth of a mastodon had been found on Buffalo Creek, near its mouth. Of this mastodon one can only say that it lived late in Wisconsin times, not earlier probably than when Lake Iroquois became the immediate predecessor of Lake Ontario.
60. _Jamestown, Chautauqua County._—In 1872 (Amer. Naturalist, vol. VI, p. 178), Mr. T. A. Cheney announced the finding of parts of 2 skeletons of the mastodon, in a swamp about a mile north of Jamestown. One was a small animal, probably a young one, the larger one an adult. Of the latter, 6 teeth in the lower jaw, the tusks, and various other bones were secured. The remains were lying in a soil composed of peat and marl, at a depth of 4 feet. A great mass, 8 or 9 bushels, of broken twigs was found and taken to be the contents of the animal’s stomach. This mastodon belonged to the last half of the Wisconsin glacial stage.