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THE AMERICAN SPORTSMAN’S LIBRARY

EDITED BY
CASPAR WHITNEY

MUSK-OX, BISON, SHEEP
AND GOAT

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MUSK-OX, BISON, SHEEP
AND GOAT

BY

CASPAR WHITNEY
GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL

AND

OWEN WISTER

RP TAO chee os Os Tega oy

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>

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY?™.!) 0.72.2

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltp.
1904

All rights reserved

ecnes

on0ne

LIBRARY of CONGRESS

Twe Cepies Received

MAR } 1904

,,. Copyright Batry

CopryRIGHT, 1904,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up, electrotyped, and published February, 1904.

Norwood Press
F. 8. Cushing GF Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

oeee

MUSK-OX, BISON, SHEEP
AND GOAT

CONTENTS

THE MUSK-OX

By CASPAR WHITNEY

CHAPTER

Re
II.

My First KILL

THE PROVISION QUESTION .
SEASONS AND EQUIPMENT
METHOD OF HUNTING .

THE MUSK-Ox

THE BISON. By GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL

THE MOUNTAIN SHEEP: HIS WAYS.

WISTER .

THE WHITE GOAT AND HIS WAYS.
WISTER .

INDEX

By OWEN

By OWEN

PAGE

ILE UST RATIONS

THE BEGINNING OF THE SLAUGHTER . ; . Frontispiece

PAGE
IN THE FAR NORTH . 5 : : - : : Pane
AT Bay : : : 2 : : ; . : Pei 2:
OUTNUMBERED_. : : : : : : : eb 45
East GREENLAND MUSK-OX CALF : - : A se
HEAD OF TWO-YEAR-OLD MUSK-OX BULL . : : ene;

MUSK-OXEN ON CAPE MORRIS JESUP, BROUGHT TO BAY

BY Docs - : . : : : - : oh OB
THE AUTHOR’S BARREN GROUND HUNTING KNIFE AND Ax 67
THE BARREN GROUND MUSK-OX — A FULL-GROWN BULL . 71.
FOREFOOT OF BARREN GROUND MUSK-OX . - ; ee iS)

FULL-GROWN EAST GREENLAND Musk-oX— ADULT MALE 77
FOREFOOT OF EAST GREENLAND MUSK-OX . : : atc ag
SKULL OF THE EAST GREENLAND MUSK-OX— FRONT VIEW 82

SKULL OF THE BARREN GROUND MuSK-OX — FRONT VIEW 8&2

SKULL OF THE EAST GREENLAND MuSK-OX — SIDE VIEW. 83

SKULL OF THE BARREN GROUND MuSK-0Ox — SIDE VIEW . 83.
MALE YEARLING OF THE EAST GREENLAND MUSK-OX a) OFY
ADULT FEMALE OF THE EAST GREENLAND MUSK-OX aos ORS
MUuSK-OX CALF. E : : : ° 2 ; - ors
THE LAST OF THE HERD . 4 : . °

: 5 FOS

12 Iilustrations

PROTECTED . c
Rocky MOUNTAIN SHEEP
ALERT .

UNDER A Hot Sky
SURPRISED

THE SADDLEBACK SHEEP

ABOVE TIMBER LINE

THE WHITE GOAT IS AN AGILE CLIMBER .

THE MUSK-OX AND ITS HUNTING

By CASPAR WHITNEY

IN THE FAR NORTH

of

MUSK-OX, BISON, SHEEP, AND
GOAT

2 EE NEU SAO

I
My First KILu

WE had passed through the “Land of Little
Sticks,” as the Indians so appropriately call that
desolate waste which connects the edge of tim-
ber land with the Barren Grounds, and had been
for several days making our way north on the
lookout for any living thing that would provide
us with a mouthful of food. —

We had got into one of those pieces of this
great barren area, which, broken by rocky ridges,
of no great height but of frequent occurrence,
are unspeakably harassing to the travelling snow-
shoer. It was the third twelve hours of our fast,
save for tea and the pipe, and all day we had
been dragging ourselves wearily up one ridge
and down another in the ever recurring and

17

18 The Musk-ox

always disappointed hope that on each we should
sight caribou or musk-oxen. The Indians were
discouraged and sullen, as they usually did become
on such occasions; and this troubled me really
more than not finding food, for I was in con-
stant dread of their growing disheartened and
turning back to the woods. That was the possi-
bility which, since the very starting day, had at
all times and most seriously menaced the success
of my venture; because we were pushing on in
the early part of March, at a time when the
storms are at their greatest severity, and when
none had ever before ventured into the Barren
Grounds. Therefore, in my fear lest the Indians
turn back, I sought to make light of our diff-
culties by breaking into song when we stopped
to “spell” our dogs, hoping by my assumed light-
heartedness to shame the Indians out of showing
their desire to turn homeward.

How much I felt like singing may be imagined.

So the day dragged on without sight of a mov-
ing creature, not even a fox, and it was past noon
when we laboriously worked our way up one par-
ticular ridge which seemed to have an unusual
amount of unnecessary and ragged rock strewn

1 Rest.

My First Kill 19

over its surface. I remember we scarcely ven-
tured to look into the white silent country that
stretched in front of us; disappointment had
rewarded our long searchings so often that we
had somehow come to accept it as a matter
of course. Squatting down back of the sledge in
shelter from the wind seemed of more imme-
diate concern than looking ahead for meat: at
least we were sure of the solace our pipes gave.
Thus we smoked in silence, with no sign of inter-
est in what the immediate country ahead might
hold for us, until Beniah, the leader of my Indians,
and an unusually good one, started to his feet
with an exclamation and, hurriedly climbing on
top a good-sized rock, stretched his arm ahead,
obviously much stirred with excitement. He
shouted, once and loud, “ e¢az,”1 and then con-
tinued mumbling it as though to make his tongue
sure of what his eyes beheld. We all gathered
around him, climbing his rock or on other ones,
in desperate earnestness to see what he saw in the
direction he continued pointing. It was minutes
before I could discern anything having life in the
distance which reached away to the horizon all
white and silent, and then I detected a kind of

1 Caribou.

20 The Musk-ox

vapor arising apparently from some dark objects
blurringly outlined against the snow about four
miles away; it was the mist which arises from a
herd of animals where the mercury is ranging
between sixty and seventy degrees below zero,
and on a clear day may be seen five miles away.
Thoroughly aroused now, I got my field-glasses
from my sledge and searched the dark objects
under the mist. They were not caribou, of that
I was certain; as to what they were I was equally
uncertain, for the forms were strange to my eye.
So I handed the glasses to Beniah, saying, “ e¢hax
zlla.”* Beniah took the glasses, but as it was
the first time he had ever looked through a pair,
their range and power seemed to excite him quite
as much as did the appearance of the game itself.
When he did find his tongue, he fairly shouted,
“ejerrt.’* T had no accurate knowledge of what
“eerre” meant, but assumed we had sighted
musk-oxen. Instantly all was excitement. The
Indians set up a yell and rushed for their sledges,
jabbering and laughing. It seemed incredible
that these were the same men who so shortly
before had sat silent with backs to the wind,
dejected and indifferent.

1 Not caribou. 2 Musk-ox.

My First Kill 21

Every one now busied himself turning loose his
dogs, —a small matter for the Indians, with their
simply sewn harness from which the dogs were
easily slipped, but a rather complex job for me.
My dog train had come from the Post, and its har-
ness was made of buckles and straps and things
not easily undone in freezing weather; so it hap-
pened that by the time my dogs were unhitched,
the Indians and all their dogs were fully quarter of
a mile nearer the musk-oxen than I and running
for very dear life. My preconceived notions of
the musk-ox hunting game were in a jiffy jolted
to the point of destruction, as I now found
myself in a situation neither expected nor joyful.
It was natural to suppose some assistance would
be given me in this strange environment, and
that the consideration of a party of my own
organizing and my own paying should be my
killing the musk-ox for which I had come
so long a distance. But we were a long way
from the Post and interpreters and restraining
influences; and at this moment of readjustment
I speedily realized that it was to be a survival
of the fittest on this expedition, and if I got a
musk-ox it would be of my own getting. It
comforted me to know that, even though some-

22 The Musk-ox

what tucked up as to stomach, due to three days’
hard travel on only tea, I was in fine physical con-
dition, and up to making the effort of my life.

By the time I had run about two miles I had
caught the last of the Indians, who were stretched
out in a long column, with two leading by half a
mile. Within another mile I had passed all the
stragglers, and was running practically even with
the second Indian, who was two or three hun-
dred yards behind the leading one. This Indian,
Seco by name, was one of the best snow-shoe
runners I ever encountered. He gave evidence
of his endurance and speed on many another
occasion than this one, for always there was a run
of four miles or more after every musk-ox herd
we sighted, and invariably a foot-race between
Seco and me preceded final leadership. I may
add incidentally that he always beat me, although
we made some close finishes during the fifty-
seven days we roamed this God-forgotten bit of
the earth.

On this particular day, though I passed the
second Indian, Seco kept well in the lead, with
practically all the dogs just ahead of him. It
was the roughest going I had ever experienced,
for the course lay over a succession of low but

My First Kill 23

sharp, rocky ridges covered with about a foot of
snow, and, on the narrow tripping shoes used in
the Barren Grounds, I broke through the crust
where it was soft, or jammed my shoes between
the wind-swept rocks that lay close together, or
caught in those I attempted to clear in my
stride. It was a species of hurdle racing to test
the bottom of a well-fed, conditioned athlete;
how it wore on a tea diet I need not say.

After we had been running for about an hour,
it seemed to me as though we should never see
the musk-oxen. Ridge after ridge we crossed
and yet not a sight of the coveted quarry. Seco
still held a lead of about one hundred yards, and
I remember I wondered in my growing fatigue
why on earth that Indian maintained such a pace,
for I could not help feeling that when the musk-
oxen finally had been caught up, he would stop
until I, and all the Indians and all the dogs had
come up, so as to more certainly assure the suc-
cess of the hunt: but it was not the first time I
had been with Indian hunters, and I knew well
enough not to take any chances.

In another half hour’s running, as I worked up
the near side of a rather higher and broader
ridge than any we had crossed, I heard the

24 The Musk-ox

dogs barking, and speeding to the top, what was
my disappointment, not to say distress, at behold-
ing twenty-five to thirty musk-oxen just startled
into running along a ridge about a quarter of a
mile beyond Seco, who, with his dogs, was in
full chase after them about fifty yards ahead of
me. What I thought at that time of the North-
land Indian hunting methods, and of Seco and
all my other Indians in particular, did the situ-
ation and my condition of mind scant justice
then —and would not make goodly reading here.
Had I been on an ordinary hunting expedition,
disgust with the whole fool business would, I
doubt not, have been paramount, but the thought
of the distance I had come and the privations
undergone for no other reason than to get a
musk-ox, made me the more determined to suc-
ceed despite obstacles of any and all kinds. So I
went on. The wind was blowing a gale from the
south when I reached the top of the ridge along
which I had seen the musk-oxen run, and the
main herd had disappeared over the northern end
of it, and were a mile away to the north, travelling
with heads carried well out, though not lowered,
at an astonishing pace and ease over the rocks.
Four had separated from the main body and were

My First Kill 25

going almost due east on the south side of the
ridge. I determined to stalk these four, because
I could keep the north side of the ridge, out of
sight, and to leeward, feeling certain they would
sooner or later turn north to rejoin the main
herd. It seemed my best chance. I perfectly
realized the risk I ran in separating from the
Indians; but at that moment nothing appeared
so important as getting a musk-ox, for which I
had now travelled nearly twelve hundred miles
on snow-shoes.

I have done a deal of hunting in my life, over
widely separated and trackless sections, and had
my full share of hard trips; but never shall I
forget the run along that ridge. It called for
more heart and more strength than any situation
IT ever faced. Already I had run, I suppose, about
five miles when I started after those four musk-
oxen; and when the first enthusiasm had passed,
it seemed as though I must give it up. Such
fatigue I had never dreamed of. I have no idea
how much farther I ran,—three or four more
miles, likely,— but I do remember that after a
time the fancy possessed me that those four
musk-oxen and I were alone on earth, that they
knew I was after their heads, and were luring me

26 The Musk-ox

deep into a strange land to lose me; thus in the
great silent land we raced grimly, with death
trailing the steps of each. The dead-white sur-
face reaching out before me without ending
seemed to rise and to fall as though I travelled a
rocking ship; and the snow and the rocks danced
around my whirling head in a grinning, glisten-
ing maze. When I fell, which frequently I did,
it seemed such a long time before I again stood
on my feet; and what I saw appeared as though
seen through the small end of field-glasses.

I was ina dripping perspiration and had
dropped my fur capote and cartridge-belt after
thrusting half a dozen shells into my pocket.
On and on I ran, wondering in a semi-dazed
way if the musk-oxen were really on the other
side of the ridge. Finally the ridge took a sharp
turn to the north, and as I reached the top of it,
there — about one hundred yards ahead — were
two of the musk-oxen running slowly but directly
from me. Instantly the blood coursed through
my veins and the mist cleared from my eyes;
dropping on one knee I swung my rifle into posi-
tion, but my hand was so tremulous and my heart
thumped so heavily that the front sight wobbled
all over the horizon. I realized that this might

Mp First kill 27

be the only shot I should get, —for Indians had
gone into the Barren Grounds in more propitious
seasons, and not seen even one herd, — yet with
the musk-oxen going away from me all the while,
every instant of time seemed an insuperable age.
The agony of those few seconds I waited so as to
steady my hand! Once or twice I made another
attempt to aim, but still the hand was too uncer-
tain. I did not dare risk a shot. When I had
rested a minute or two, that seemed fully half an
hour, —at last the fore sight held true for an in-
stant; and I pressed the trigger.

The exultation of that moment when I saw
one of the two musk-oxen stagger, and then fall,
I know I shall never again experience.

The report of my rifle startled the other musk-
ox into a wild gallop over a ridge, and I followed
as rapidly as I could, so soon as I made sure that
the other was really down. As I went over the
ridge I caught sight of the remaining musk-ox,
and shot simultaneously with two reports on my
left, which I later discovered to have come from
the second Indian whom I had passed in closing
upon Seco on the run to the first view of the
musk-oxen, and who now hove in sight with one
dog, as the second musk-ox dropped.

28 The Musk-ox

I found on returning to my kill that it was a
cow, needless to say a sore disappointment; and
so, although pretty well tuckered out, I again
started to the north in the hope that I might
get wind of the other two of the four after which
I had originally started, or find tracks of strag-
glers from the main herd. Several miles I went
on, but finding no tracks, and darkness coming
down, I turned to make my way back, knowing
that the Indians would follow up and camp by
the slain musk-oxen for the night. But as I
journeyed I suddenly realized that, except for
going in a southerly direction, I really had no
definite idea of the exact direction in which I
was travelling, and with night setting in and a
chilling wind blowing I knew that to lose my-
self might easily mean death. So I turned about
on my tracks and followed them back first to
where I had turned south, and thence on my
back tracks to where the musk-ox lay. It was a
long and puzzling task, for the wind had always
partly, and for distances entirely, obliterated the
earlier marks of my snow-shoes.

Nine o’clock came before I finally reached
the place where the dead quarry lay; and there
I found the Indians gnawing on raw and _half-

AT BAY

My First Kill 31

frozen musk-ox fat. Seco, badly frozen and hardly
able to crawl from fatigue, did not turn up until
midnight; and it was not until he arrived that
we lighted our little fire of sticks and had our
tea.

Then in a sixty-seven degrees below zero tem-
perature we rolled up in our furs, while the dogs
howled and fought over the carcass of my first
musk-ox.

II
THE PROVISION QUESTION

Except in the summer, when the caribou are
running in vast herds, venture into the Barren
Grounds entails a struggle with both cold and
hunger. It is either a feast or a famine; more
frequently the latter than the former. So there
was nothing extraordinary in being upon our
third day without food at the first musk-ox killing
to which I have referred. Yet the lack of nour-
ishment was not perhaps as trying as the wind,
which seemed to sweep directly from the frozen
seas, so strong that we had to bend low in
pushing forward against it, and so bitter as to
cut our faces cruelly. Throughout my journey
into this silent land of the lone North the wind
caused me more real suffering than the semi-
starvation state in which we were more or less
continuously. Indeed, for the first few weeks I
had utmost difficulty in travelling; the wind ap-
peared to take the very breath out of my body

32

The Provision Question 33

and the activity out of my muscles. I was physi-
cally in magnificent shape, for I had spent a
couple of weeks at Fort Resolution, on Great
Slave Lake, and what with plenty of caribou
meat and a daily run of from ten to twenty miles
on snow-shoes by way of keeping in training, I
was about as fit as I have been at any time in
my life. Therefore the severe struggle with the
wind impressed me the more. But the novelty
wore off in a couple of weeks, and though the
conditions were always trying, they became more
endurable as I grew accustomed to the daily
combat.

One of the first lessons I learned was to keep
my face free from covering, and also as clean
shaven as was possible under such circumstances.
It makes me smile now to remember the elaborate
hood arrangement which was knitted for me in
Canada, and that then seemed to me one of
the most important articles of my equipment.
It covered the entire head, ears, and neck, with
openings only for eyes and mouth, and in
town I had viewed it as a great find; but I
threw it away before I got within a thousand
miles of the Barren Grounds. The reason is
obvious: my breath turned the front of the hood

aun The Musk-ox

into a sheet of ice before I had run three miles;
and as there was no fire in the Barren Grounds to
thaw it, of course it was an impossible thing to
wear in that region and a poor thing in any
region of low temperature. After other experi-
ments, I found the simplest and most comfortable
head-gear to be my own long hair, which hung
even with my jaw, bound about just above the
ears by a handkerchief, and the open hood of
my caribou-skin capote drawn forward over all.

I learned a great many things about hunting
the musk-ox on this first effort, and not the
least memorable was the lesson of how very
difficult an animal it is to score on without the
aid of a dog. This is solely due to the lie of
the land. The physical character of the Barren
Grounds is of the rolling or prairie type. Stand-
ing on the first elevation after passing beyond
the last timber, you look north across a great
expanse of desert, apparently flat country dotted
with lakes innumerable, and broken here and
there by rock-topped ridges. When you get
actually into the country, you find these ridges,
though not high, are yet higher than they look
to be, and the travelling in general very rough.
In summer there is no travel over the Barren

The Provision Question 35

Grounds, except by canoe; for barring the gener-
ous deposit of broken rock, it is practically a vast
swamp. In the winter, of course, this is frozen
over and topped by a foot or a foot and a half of
snow. It was a surprise to find no greater depth
of snow, but the fall is light in the very far North,
and the continuous gales pack and blow it so that
what remains on the ground is firm as earth. For
that reason the snow-shoes used in the Barren
Grounds are of the smallest pattern used any-
where. They are from six to eight inches wide,
three feet long, and, because of the dry char-
acter of the snow, have rather closer lacing than
any other shoe. This is the shoe used also
throughout the Athabasca-Slave-Mackenzie River
sections. The snow nowhere along this line of
travel is over a couple of feet in depth, is light
and dry and the “tripping” shoe, so called, is the
very best possible for such kind of going. In
the spring, when the snow is a little heavier,
the lacing is more open, otherwise the shoe is
unchanged.

It is well known, I suppose, that the Barren
Grounds are devoid absolutely not only of trees but
even of brush, except for some scattered, stunted
bushes that in summer are to be found in occa-

36 The Musk-ox

sional spots at the water’s edge, but may not be
depended upon for fuel. From Great Slave Lake
north to the timber’s edge is about three hundred
miles; beyond that is a stretch of country per-
haps of another hundred miles, suggestively
called the Land of Little Sticks by the Indians,
over which are scattered and widely separated
little patches of small pine, sometimes of an acre
in extent, sometimes a little less and sometimes a
little more. They seem to be a chain of wooded
islands in this desert that connect the main tim-
ber line (which, by the way, does not end abruptly,
but straggles out for many miles, growing thinner
and thinner until it ends, and the Land of Little
Sticks begins) with the last free growth; and I
never found them nearer together than a good
day’s journey. About three or four days’ travel
takes you through this Land of Little Sticks and
brings you to the last wood. The last wood that
I found was a patch of about four or five acres
with trees two or three inches in diameter at their
largest, although one or two isolated ones were
perhaps as large as five or six inches. Here you
take the fire-wood for your trip into the Barrens.

I have been often asked why the periods of
starvation experienced in musk-ox hunting could

The Provision Question 37

not be obviated by carrying food. I have been
asked, in a word, why I did not haul supplies.
The patent answer is that, in the first place, I
had none to take; and that, in the second place,
if I had had a car-load at Great Slave Lake to
draw upon, I would have been unable to carry
provisions with me into the Barren Grounds. It
is to be remembered that Great Slave Lake,
where I outfitted for the Barren Grounds, is nine
hundred miles from the railroad, that every
pound of provision is freighted by water usually,
or by dog sledge on emergency. The Hudson’s
Bay Company’s posts, beginning at Athabasca
Landing, are located along the great waterways
— Athabasca, Slave, Mackenzie rivers — about
every two hundred miles. These are small trad-
ing posts, having powder and ball, and things to
wear, and of ornament, rather than things to eat.
Provisions are taken in, but to a limited extent,
and there is never a winter which does not see
the end of the company’s supplies before the ice
breaks up and the first boat of the year arrives.
There is never a plenty even for the usual de-
mand, and an unusual demand, if it is to be met,
means a trimming all round. In snow-shoeing
from the railroad to Great Slave Lake I secured

38 The Musk-ox

fresh sledge-dogs and men and provisions at every
post, which carried me to the next post north,
whence men and dogs returned to their own
post, while I continued north with a new supply.
Although there was comparative plenty at the
time of my trip, so carefully are the stores
husbanded that I never could get supplies more
than just enough to carry me to the next post;
and these were invariably skimped, so that for a
five days’ journey I habitually started with about
four days’ supplies.

Thus it is easy to see why there were no pro-
visions at Great Slave Lake for me to draw on;
and, as I have said, had there been an abundance,
it would have been impossible for me to carry
them (and would be equally so for any one else
venturing into the Barren Grounds at the same
season of the year) simply for lack of transpor-
tation, which, after all, is the great problem of
this North Country. One would think that in a
land where the only means of travel for most
of the year, where almost the very existence of
the people depends so largely on sledge-dogs,
there would be an abundance of them and of the
best breed; yet the truth is that sledge-dogs of
any kind are scarce even on the river thorough-

The Provision Question 39

fares. At the company’s posts there is not more
than one, or at the most two, spare trains; among
the Indians, upon whom, of course, I had to rely
when I outfitted for the Barren Grounds, dogs
are even scarcer. Fort Resolution is one of the
most important posts of the Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany in all that great country, and yet the
settlement itself is very small, numbering per-
haps fifty; the Indians— Dog Ribs and Yellow
Knives —living in the woods from six to ten
days’ travel from the post. I found it not only
extremely difficult to get Indians to go with me,
but secured seven dog teams only after widest
search. This reads strange, I am sure, yet it was
all but impossible for me to secure the number
of dogs and sledges required for my trip.

But, some of my friends have asked, with seven
sledges and twenty-eight dogs, surely there was
room to carry enough provision to insure against
starvation in the Barren Grounds? Not at all.
There was not room to carry more than tea,
tobacco, our sleeping-furs, and moccasins and
duffel socks. Moccasins and duffel and tobacco
and tea are the highly essential articles in the
Barren Ground outfit. The duffel is a light kind
of blanket which is made into leggings and also

40 The Musk-ox

into socks. You wear three pairs inside your
moccasins, and at night, if you have been well
advised, you put next to your feet a slipper mocca-
sin of the unborn musk-ox, hair inside. It must
be remembered that in the Barren Grounds you
have no fire to thaw out or dry frozen and wet
clothing. The tiny fire you do have is only
enough to make tea. Therefore abundant duffel
and moccasins are necessary, first, to have a dry,
fresh change, and second, to replenish them as
they wear out, as they do more than elsewhere,
because of the rocky going. As for tea and to-
bacco, no human being could stand the cold
and the hardship of a winter Barren Ground trip
without putting something hot into his stomach
every day, while the tobacco is at once a stimu-
lant and a solace. The space left on the sledge
after the tea and tobacco and moccasins and
duffel have been stowed must be filled with the
sticks that you cut into pieces (just the width of
the sledge) at the last wood on the edge of the
Barren Grounds proper. The sledge is a toboggan
about nine feet in length and a foot and a half in
width, made of two or three birch slats held to-
gether by crosspieces lashed on to them with
caribou thongs, turned over and back at the front

The Provision Question 41

into a dasher, which is covered by a caribou apron
(sometimes decorated in crude painting), and held
in its curved position by strings of babiche, —as
the thongs of caribou skin are called, — the same
material which furnishes the snow-shoe lacing.
On this sledge is fitted a caribou-skin body,
about seven feet in length, the full width of the
sledge, and a foot and a half deep. Into this is
stowed the load. Then the top sides are drawn
together, and the whole lashed firmly to the
sledge by side lines. This must be done with
the care and security bestowed upon the dia-
mond hitch used on pack-animals; for the
sledge in the course of a day’s travel is roughly
knocked about.

It requires no further explanation, I fancy, to
show why it is not possible to carry provisions.

One of my friends on my return from this trip
suggested the possibility of shipping dogs into
the country; of doing, in a word, somewhat as
do the pole-hunting expeditions. That might be
possible to a wealthy adventurer, but, even so, I
should consider it an experiment of very doubt-
ful results, simply because of the impossibility of
feeding the dogs after they had arrived in the
country, or of providing for them after you had

42 The Musk-ox

started into the Barren Grounds. There is a
period in the summer at Great Slave Lake when
any number of dogs could be sufficiently fed on
the quantities of fish that are then to be caught
in the lake; and no doubt enough fish could be
stored to feed them in the season when the lakes
are frozen, if the dogs remained at the post. Even
so, that would keep busy a number of especially
engaged fishermen. But when you started for
the Barren Grounds with all these dogs, your
feeding problem would be an overwhelming one
indeed, for only in the midsummer, when the
caribou are to be found in large herds, would it
be possible to kill meat for a great many dogs;
and in midsummer you would not, could not,
use dogs at all; at that season the Barren
Grounds are invaded by means of the chain of
lakes and short portages which begin at the
northeastern end of the Great Slave Lake.
Even travelling along the river the question of
dog feed is a serious one, and you are obliged to
carry the fish which have been caught the pre-
vious summer and stored at the posts in great
frozen heaps. It is obvious, therefore, that there
is no easy or comfortable way of getting into
the Barren Grounds. It would be impracticable

The Provision Question 43

to do other than rely on the resources at hand
and go into the silent land just as do the Indians.
It is simply impracticable to do other than to
depend on the caribou and the musk-oxen for
food for both men and dogs.

III
SEASONS AND EQUIPMENT

MIpsuMMER is the season when the hunter
may visit the Barren Grounds with the least dis-
comfort and least danger, for at this time you go
by canoe. The caribou are plentiful and the
thermometer rarely goes below freezing-point.
But even then trials are many, and there is con-
siderable danger of starvation. The mosquitoes
are a pest almost beyond endurance, and the
caribou, although abundant, are down toward the
Arctic and of very uncertain movement. Their
course of migration one year may be fifty to one
hundred miles east or west of where it was the
preceding year. In the 350,000 square miles of
the Barren Grounds one may easily go days
without finding caribou even at such a time of
plenty; and not to find them might easily mean
starvation.

The most extensive trips into the Barren
Grounds for musk-oxen previous to my venture

44

OUTNUMBERED

Seasons and Equipment 47

had been made by two Englishmen, Warburton
Pike and Henry Toke Munn. Mr. Pike (a hunter
of experience whose book, “Barren Ground of
Northern Canada,” published in 1892, still stands
as one of the most interesting and faithful con-
tributions to the literature of sport and adven-
ture) spent the better part of two years in this
country, and made several summer and autumn
trips into the Barren Grounds. He made one
summer trip solely for the purpose of killing and
cacheing caribou, which he might draw upon in
the next autumn musk-ox hunt when the caribou
were scarce. Yet, notwithstanding all this prepa-
ration, he had a very hard time of it in the autumn
hunt and was unable to accomplish all that he
set out todo. He did get, however, the musk-ox
he went after. On Munn’s autumn trip, although
there were yet to be had some fish in the lakes,
he and his party and their dogs had a starving
time of it indeed. I particularize these two trips
to instance the difficulties of hunting in the
Barren Grounds, even when the conditions are
the most favorable that may be had.

The Indians time their hunting trips into the
Barren Grounds by the movement of the caribou, —
in the early summer, about May, when the caribou

48 The Musk-ox

begin their migration from the woods down to
the Arctic Ocean; and in the early autumn when
the caribou are fairly well distributed and are
working back toward the wood again. Caribou
are absolutely essential to penetration of the
Barren Grounds, because from the woods to
where musk-oxen are found is a considerable dis-
tance, and no possible meat except that supplied
by these members of the deer family. Nor is a
trip into the Barren Grounds always rewarded
with musk-oxen. Many Indian parties have gone
in and failed to see even a track, and many others
have skirmished along the edge, dreading to
plunge into the interior, and hopeful perhaps of
a stray ox. The Indians, who do not now hunt
musk-oxen as much as formerly owing to the les-
sened demand for the pelt, usually go in parties
of four to six; never less than four, because they
would be unable to carry a wood supply adequate
to getting far enough into the Barren Grounds for
reasonable hope of securing the game; and rarely
more than six, because when they have got as far
into the country as six sledges of wood will per-
mit, they have either got what they want, or
they have had enough of freezing and starving
to impel a start homeward. Only the hardiest

Seasons and Equipment 49

make the trip; to be a musk-ox hunter and an
enduring snow-shoe runner, is the dearest ambi-
tion of and the greatest height to which the Far
Northland Indian can attain.

Before I started on my trip I heard much of
pemmican, and fancied it procurable at almost
any northern post, as well as supposing it a
reliable source of provender. The truth is, how-
ever, that pemmican is a very rare article these
days in that section of the country, and in fact
is not to be found anywhere south of Great
Slave Lake, and only there on occasion. This
is largely because the caribou are not so numer-
ous as formerly, and the Indians prefer to keep
the grease for home consumption, when at ease
in their autumn camps. Even among the Indians
around Great Slave Lake pemmican is used but
very little in the ordinary tripping (travelling).
It has been substituted by pounded caribou
meat, which is carried in little caribou-skin bags
and eaten with grease. One can never get too
much of grease in the Northland, where it is
eaten as some consume sugar in the civilized
world. And this is to be accounted for by the
burning up of the tissues in cold dry climate
and the absence of bread and vegetables; for

50 The Musk-ox

meat and tea are the sole articles of food.
Coffee, by the way, is a luxury to be found only
occasionally on the table of a Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany post factor.

There is so much to be told, if one is to
give an adequate idea of what hunting the musk-
ox implies, that I find it somewhat difficult,
without going to considerable length, to cover the
entire field. I suppose it is because the musk-ox
is the most inaccessible animal in the whole wide
world, that there is so much curiosity concerning
the conditions of hunting it, and so much interest
in the recital of one’s experience. From time to
time a great many letters come to me filled with
questions, and I am and shall always be happy
to add in personal letters any data I may have
overlooked here. I am trying, however, to make
this chapter thoroughly practical and intelligible
to those with any thought of ever seeking the
musk-ox in this region. The easiest way, as I
have said, is to go by Hudson’s Bay Trading
boat, which leaves Athabasca Landing as soon
as the ice breaks, down to Resolution. If you
have arranged beforehand by letter with the
factor at Resolution, you will arrive there in
time to make a summer hunt into the Barren

Seasons and Equipment 51

Grounds, which is reached, as I have shown, by
means of short portages and a chain of lakes,
starting from the northeast corner of Great Slave
Lake, and following Lockhart’s River. If you
are not delayed and do not get too far into the
Barren Grounds, you would stand a chance of get-
ting out and back to Athabasca Landing on the
water; but everything would have to go your
‘way and the trip be most expeditious in order
to do this. If you were not out in time to go
by open water, it would necessitate a nine hun-
dred mile snow-shoe trip, or laying over until the
following spring when the ice broke up again.

The Canadian government has protected musk-
oxen for several years, and in order to hunt, one
must be provided with a special permit from that
government. The protection of the musk-ox
seems scarcely necessary, for although the polar
expeditions have slaughtered a great many on
Greenland and on the Arctic islands, the killing
of them in the Barren Grounds proper never has
been, and never will be, sufficiently large to give
concern to the Canadian government. The musk-
ox is of a genus that seems to be a declining type
among the world’s animals, but if extinction
comes to those in the Barren Grounds, it cer-

52 The Musk-ox

tainly will never be through their killing by white
men or Indians. If any great value attached
to the hide, it might be another story; but the
truth is that the musk-ox robe is not a valuable
fur, is sought after, indeed, but very little. It is
too coarse to wear, and the only use to which it
seems admirably adapted is as a sleigh-robe.
There is no difficulty in getting Indians for
the summer hunt, for then the labor is slight as
compared with snow-shoeing, and there need be
no considerable worry about provisions. Nor
would there be but very little trouble in secur-
ing Indians for the early autumn. The great
difficulty I encountered in organizing my party
was due solely to the time of year in which I
made the venture. I was not particularly seeking
hardship, but I had to go when I could get away
from my professional duties, and that brought
me to Great Slave Lake the first of March.
February and March are the two severest months
of the entire year in the Barren Grounds. It is
the time when the storms are at their height and
the thermometer at its lowest. No one had ever
been into the Barren Grounds at that period,
and the Indians, who are very loath to venture
into an unknown country or at an unusual season,

Seasons and Equipment 53

were disinclined to accompany me. Indeed it
was only by diplomatic handling of the leader
and through the extremely kind offices of the
Hudson’s Bay Company post factor, Gaudet,
that I ever succeeded in getting started.

Perhaps it will serve those contemplating such
a trip one day, to record here my personal equip-
ment.

One winter caribou-skin robe, lined with a pair
of 4-point Hudson’s Bay Company blankets.

One winter caribou-skin capote (coat with hood).

One heavy sweater.

Two pairs of moose fur-lined mittens.

One pair moose-skin gloves. (Worn inside of
mittens.)

One pair strouds (loose-fitting leggins).

Three silk handkerchiefs.

Eight pairs of moccasins.

Fight pairs of duffel socks.

One copper kettle (for boiling tea).

One cup.

45-90 Winchester half magazine rifle.

Hunting-knife. (See cut page 45.)

Compass.

Spirit thermometer.

10 pounds of tea,

54 The Musk-ox

12 pounds of tobacco.

Several boxes of matches.

Flint and steel and tinder.

Two bottles of mustang liniment (which
promptly froze solid and remained so; it was
fortunate I did not have occasion to use it).

In addition I carried, in case of emergency,
such as amputation of frozen toes or other
equally unpleasant incidents, —a surgeon’s knife,
antiseptic lozenges, bandages, and iodoform. Of
this outfit no two articles were more important
perhaps than the moose-skin gloves and the
strouds. The gloves are worn inside the mittens
and worn always; one never goes barehanded in
the Barren Grounds at any time, day or night,
if one is wise. The strouds (reaching above the
knee and held up by a thong and loop attached
to waist belt) catch the flying and freezing
snow dust from the snow-shoes, thus protecting
the trousers. I forgot to add, by the way, that
I wore Irish frieze trousers, cut small at the
bottoms so as to be easily tied about the ankles.
My underwear was of the heaviest, and I carried
a pair of moccasin slippers made of the unborn
musk-ox calf, fur inside. If you ever make a trip
after musk-oxen, do not bring in anything from

Seasons and Equipment 55

the outside, except your rifle, ammunition, and
knife. Everything else you should secure at the
outfitting post. There is nothing in this world
that equals the caribou-skin capote for travel in
the Northland; it is very light and practically
impervious to the wind. You will also carry
with you a tepee, made of caribou skin. This
tepee, or lodge, is not carried for your comfort
or protection against inclement weather, but
entirely for the protection of your camp-fire; be-
cause the furious wind that sweeps the Barren
Grounds in winter would not only blow out your
flame but blow away your wood as well. The
poles for your lodge you cut at the last wood
and lash to the side of the sledge.

In summer time the question of transportation
is much simpler; you go by canoe and you do
not need strouds or the winter caribou-skin
capote. There is a very great difference between
the winter and the summer caribou pelts, and
the latter is used for the summer trips. Nor do
you need a tepee in summer.

IV
MetTHop or HuntTING

Amonc the Indians that live south and west
of the Barren Grounds (no Indian lives in the
Barren Grounds), the method of hunting the
musk-ox is practically the same, and, as I have
shown in the early part of this paper, it is be-
cause the Indians lack high hunting skill and
because their dogs are neither trained nor coura-
geous that bigger kills are not made. White
hunters and trained dogs could practically wipe
out every herd of musk-oxen they encountered ;
for while it is true that musk-oxen give you a long
run once you have sighted them, yet when you get
up to them, when the dogs have brought them to
bay, it is almost like shooting cattle in a corral.
There is always a long run. I think I never had
less than three miles, and in the first hunt which
I have described, I must have run nine or ten.
But, as I say, when you get up to them it is easy,
for they will stand to the dogs so long as the

56

EAST GREENLAND MUSK-OX CALF

Collected at Fort Conger by Commander R. E. Peary, U.S.N. (From a photograph
provided by the American Museum of Natural History)

HEAD OF A TWO-YEAR-OLD MUSK-OX BULL

Killed and photographed in the Barren Grounds by the author. The horns are just
beginning to show a downward tendency. Hair over forehead is gray, short, and
somewhat curly. The background is the tepee referred to in the text.

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Method of Hunting 59

dogs bay them. And all this running would be
unnecessary if the Indians exercised more hunt-
ing skill and judgment.

Although the prairie form of the country is
not altogether the best for stalking, yet one could
stalk comparatively near a herd before turning
the dogs loose. The Indians never do this, and,
in addition, the dogs set up a yelping and a howl-
ing the moment they catch sight of the quarry.
This, of course, starts off the musk-oxen, which
invariably choose the roughest part of the coun-
try, no doubt feeling, and rightly, too, that their
pursuers will have the more difficult time follow-
ing. Indian dogs are not always to be relied
upon, for they have a disposition to hunt in a
group, and your entire bunch of dogs is apt to
stop and hold only three or four stragglers of
the herd while the remainder of the musk-oxen
escape. Sometimes when they stop practically
the entire herd, the dogs are very likely, before
you come up to them, to shift, leaving their
original position and gradually drawing together ;
perhaps, the whole pack of dogs finally holding
only half a dozen, while the rest of the musk-oxen
have run on. Musk-oxen, when stopped, invaria-
bly form a circle with their sterns in and their

60 The Musk-ox

heads out; it matters not whether the herd is
thirty or half a dozen, their action is the same.
If there are only two, they stand stern to stern,
facing out. I have seen a single musk-ox back
up against a rock. Apparently they feel safe
only when they get their sterns up against some-
thing.

Hunting musk-oxen on the Arctic Coast or
the Arctic islands after the manner of the polar
expeditions, is a much simpler proposition.
There the hunters are always comparatively near
their base of supplies, and, from all accounts, the
musk-oxen are more numerous than they are in
the interior. According to Frederick Schwatka,
the Innuits hunt musk-oxen with great skill.
They hitch their dogs to the sledge differently
from the method of the Indians to the south.
The southern Indians hitch their four dogs in
tandem between two common traces, one on each
side; while each Eskimo dog has his own single
trace, which is hitched independently to the
sledge. When the Innuits sight the musk-oxen,
each hunter takes the dogs of his sledge, and
holding their traces in his hand, starts after the
game. The wisdom of this method is twofold:
in the first place it immeasurably aids the running

Method of Hunting 61

hunter, for the four or five straining dogs practi-
cally pull him along; indeed, Schwatka says that
when these Innuits come to a hill they squat
and slide down, throwing themselves at full
length upon the snow of the ascending bank, up
which the excited dogs drag them without any
effort on the part of the hunter. I should like
to add here that if such a plan were pursued in
the Barren Grounds over the rocky ridges, the
remains of the hunter would not be interested
in musk-ox hunting by the time the top of a
ridge was reached. Seriously, the chief value of
hunting in this style is that the hunter controls
his four to six dogs, the usual number of the
Eskimo sledge. When they have caught up with
the musk-ox herd, he then looses them and he is
there to begin action. The Eskimo dogs are
very superior in breed to those used by the
Indians farther south, and are trained as well
to run mute.

The chances of getting musk-oxen in the Barren
Grounds are not so good in summer as in winter,
because travelling by canoe you are, of course,
bound to keep to the chain of lakes, and your
course is therefore prescribed, it being impossible
to travel over the land at will as it is in winter

62 The Musk-ox

when all is frozen. One day’s hunting is about
like another. There is nothing to kindle the
eye of the nature lover. In winter it is like
travelling over a great frozen sea; in summer
it is a great desolate waste of moss and lichen,
dotted with lakes and rock-topped ridges, which
observe no one or special form of direction.
There is a black moss that the Indians sometimes
burn if they can find it dry enough, and a little
shrub that furnishes a bitter tea if the tea of civili-
zation has run out. Nearly all of the lakes have
fish, and a hunter ought really, with experience
and judgment, to go in and out in summer time
without suffering any excessive starvation. War-
burton Pike, who has studied the Barren Grounds
in summer time more thoroughly than any other
man living, reports spots covered with wild
flowers that grow to no height but in compara-
tive profusion and some beauty.

The distance you make in a summer day of
Barren Grounds travel may depend entirely on
your inclination, for with the fish and the moving
caribou you are fairly well assured against hunger,
and the weather is comparatively warm and per-
mits of lingering along the route. It is quite
another story in the winter, for then food is always

Method of Hunting 63

a problem, and every day draws on your slender
supply of wood. Of course the farther you pene-
trate, the nearer you get to the Arctic Coast,
the more likely you are to see musk-oxen; and
the faster you travel, of course, the farther you
can penetrate. We averaged about twenty
miles a day. That means that we kept busy
every hour from the time we started until we
camped. The hour of starting depended very
largely upon whether or not there was a moon.
If there was a moon, we would get started so
as to be well under way by daylight, which when
we first entered the Barren Grounds would be
about nine o'clock. If there was no moon, we
waited for daylight. There always was a moon
unless it stormed; but it stormed most of the
time. When there was a moon, however, it was
always full. Travelling from Lac La Biche to
Great Slave Lake on the frozen rivers, where it
was a mere question of getting from one post to
another, we used to start about two o’clock in
the morning, the sun coming up about ten
o'clock and setting at about three, and darkness
falling almost immediately thereafter. In this
river travelling I averaged a full thirty-five miles
a day for the (about) nine hundred miles.

64 The Musk-ox

I think the most trying hour of the twenty-four
in the Barren Grounds day was at the camping
time in the afternoon. Beniah invariably chose
the highest and most exposed position to be
found, that our tepee might be the more visible
to the scouts, kept out all day on either side look-
ing for caribou, or musk-oxen; and there was
always the delaying discussion of the Indians
amongst themselves, while I, chilled to the bone
by the inaction, stood around awaiting the close
of the argument before it was possible to get to
the business of camp-making. Because the snow
was packed so hard as to be impossible to shovel
away with the snow-shoe, a rocky site was always
sought, where we fitted our bodies to the uneven
ground as best we could. With the camp site
definitely chosen, a circle was made of the sledges,
touching head and tail; then three lodge poles,
tied together at the top, were set up in the form
of a triangle, with the ends stuck into the sledges
to give them firm footing, and the four remaining
poles placed so as to make a cone of the triangle.
Over and around this was stretched the caribou-
skin tepee, with the bottom edge drawn down
and outside the sledges. Blocks of snow were
then cut and banked up around the outside of

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Method of Hunting 67

the tepee and against the sledges; all this by
way of firmly anchoring the tepee, which set so
low that one’s head and shoulders would be in
the open when standing upright in the centre;
but that was of no consequence, the lodge being
set up merely as a protection to the fire A
short pole, also carried along from
the last wood, was lashed from
side to side of the tepee, on to the
lodge poles proper, and from this,
attached by a piece of babiche and
a forked stick, hung the kettle.
Then, all being ready, four or five
sticks were taken from the sledges
equally, and split into kindling
wood with the heavy knife one
needs to carry in musk-ox hunt-

ing. Of course the fire furnished een eee
no warmth; it was not built for Knife and Ax (14
that purpose; it was simply to boil "es '°"8)
the tea, and perhaps I can best give an idea of
its size in saying that by the time the snow in
the kettle had been melted to water and the
water begun to boil,—the fire was exhausted.
While it blazed and the tea was making, always
the close circle of seven hungry men, shoulder

68 The Musk-ox

to shoulder, squatted around the light in the
fancy that some heat must come from that little
jumping flame. Outside that other circle of
sledges, the dogs snuffed and sniffed and
howled. Once I took off my gloves, with the
thought of warming my fingers. I made no
second experiment of the kind.

Having drunk the tea, we rolled up in our
fur robes, lying side by side around the tepee,
with feet toward the fire and head against the
sledge, knees into the back of the man next
you, and snow-shoes under your head, away
from the dogs that would eat the lacing. This
was only preparation for sleep; actual sleep,
even to men as tired as we were, never came
until the dogs had finished fighting over us;
for so soon as we were rolled in our robes the
dogs invariably poured into the tepee. As there
were twenty-eight dogs, and the lodge about
seven feet in diameter at its base, I need not
further describe the situation. Truth is, that no
hour in the day or night was more miserable than
this, when these half-starved brutes fought over
and on top of us before they finally settled down
upon us. In extreme cold weather a dog curled
up at your feet or at your back is not unpleas-

Method of Hunting 69

ant; but to have one lying on your head, an-
other on your shoulders or hips, or perhaps a
third on your feet, and you lying on your side
on rocky, uneven ground —take my word for it,
the experience is not happy. Of course you are
entirely wrapped up, head and arms as well, in
your sleeping robe; if you rise up to knock
the dogs off, you open your robe to the cold:
and the dogs would be back on top of you again
just as soon as you had lain down.

It is all in the Musk-ox game; and so you
endure.

V
Tue Musk-ox

ALTHOUGH there is nothing in the appearance
or in the life of the musk-ox to suggest romance,
yet the Indians and the Eskimo surround it with
much mystery. They say it is not like other
animals, that it is cunning and plays tricks on
them, that it is not safe to approach, that it under-
stands what is said. The Indians among whom
I travelled have a tradition that long years ago a
woman wandered into the Barren Grounds, was
lost, and finally turned into a musk-ox by the
“enemy.” Perhaps this accounts for the occa-
sional habit these Indians have when pursuing
musk-oxen of talking to them, instructing them
as to the direction of their flight, etc. Several
authors maintain that these Indians, when hunt-
ing, do not talk to other animals; but I have
heard them jabbering while hunting caribou after
the same manner they do when running after
musk-oxen. Why the Indians should consider

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The Musk-ox 73

the musk-ox tricky or ferocious, appears to
me to be the only mysterious element in the
discussion; a less ferocious looking animal for
its size would, it seems to me, be impossible
to find. Several Arctic explorers who have
written on the musk-ox also refer to it as “for-
midable” appearing and “ferocious,” but those
are the last adjectives that I should apply to the
creature. The Indians and some of the Arctic
authors also say that it is dangerous to approach,
especially when wounded. My experience does
not indorse that statement. We encountered
about one hundred and twenty-five musk-oxen,
killing forty-seven, and I did not see one that
even suggested the charging proclivities for which
it is given credit. They stand with lowered heads,
making a hook at the dogs that are nearest, and
on occasion making a movement forward, prac-
tically a bluff at charging, but I never saw one
really charge a dog, much less a man. I do not
believe they can be induced to break the circle
they invariably form, as they would, of course, do
in charging. On one occasion I wounded a musk-
ox badly enough to enable me to run him over
and around a series of short ridges finally to a
standstill. He was entirely alone, and I was

74 The Musk-ox

without a dog, and when I had got to within
seventy-five feet of him he suddenly stopped
running and faced me, setting his stern against a
rock — or, rather, over it, for it was quite a small
rock. I walked up to within about thirty or forty
feet of him, and took a head shot. I thought
to see if I could reach his brain, but the boss of
his great frontal horn protects it, except for the
small opening of an inch where the horns are
divided. Then with an idea of putting a ball
back of his shoulder or back of his ear, I tried
to get on his side, but as I moved, he moved,
always keeping his head straight at me, and we
made several complete circles; yet, in that time,
—I suppose ten or fifteen minutes —he never
offered to charge. If a straggling dog had not
come my way and attracted the bull’s attention,
I probably never would have got the chance of
a shoulder shot. Mr. Pike, whom, of living men,
I consider to have made the most extended study
of the musk-ox, agrees entirely with my view of
the animal so far as its charging is concerned.
Perhaps the musk-ox might charge if you walked
up and pulled his ear, but I doubt if he would
under less provocation, and really, I do not feel
so certain that he would even then. Heseems a

The Musk-ox 75

’

stupid, mild creature, — anything but “ ferocious.’
In one little band of eight which we had sepa-
rated from the main herd and killed, a yearling
calf ran against my legs, seemingly seeking pro-
tection from the dogs precisely as a young sheep
would.

The musk-ox appears, in fact, to be a veritable
link between the ox and the sheep. It has the
rudimentary tail, the molar teeth structure, the
hairy muzzle, and the intestines of the sheep;
while its short and wide canon-bones are like
those of the ox, and differ widely from either
sheep or goat. The hoofs are large, with curved
toes and somewhat concave underneath, like the
caribou hoof, which facilitates climbing rocky
ridges and scraping away the snow from their
only food, the lichen and the moss, for which
purpose their horns are also admirably adapted.
Mr. Rhodes has advanced the theory of the
existence of a transition between the musk-ox
and the bison, but the structure of the molar
teeth and the rudimentary tail convince Profes-
sor R. Lydekker, perhaps the foremost scientific
authority, of the impossibility of there being any
manner of relationship between the two groups.
Scientifically, the musk-ox is of the genus Ovt-

76 The Musk-ox

Bus, divided into O. moschatus, the Barren Grounds
and Greenland type, the O. wardz (Lydekker),
and O. bombifrons, otherwise known as the Har-
lan’s musk-ox, an extinct type that, in a word,
differed from the present living type largely in

Forefoot of Barren Grounds Musk-ox. % actual size

shape of the horns, which did not have the down-
ward curve of those in existence, nor did the
curve of the horns come closely to the head as
they do now. Until 1898 O. moschatus was the
only existing type known to either hunters or
scientists. In that year, however, Lieutenant
Peary, the Arctic explorer, killed in Bache Pen-

(Ai10}S1H] feanyeNy JO winesnyy ueolMeuy ay} Aq peptaoid ydessojoyd e wo1y) ‘oyew ynpy
(ip.wm sogag) —XO-ASNW GNVINEaSND LSVA NMONO-TINA

The Musk-ox 79

insula, Greenland, a series of specimens which, on
being sent to the Museum of Natural History of
New York, were decided by Professor J. A. Allen
as having sufficient distinction to warrant classi-
fication. Meantime Rowland Ward, the Lon-

Forefoot of East Greenland Musk-ox. % actual size

don taxidermist, had secured, by purchase, a couple
of similar specimens from East Greenland which
Professor Lydekker recognized as a new variety,
and in honor of Mr. Ward named O. moschatus
wardt. Mr. Ward’s specimens were secured from
whalers who, in turn, got them from trading with
natives in East Greenland. Lieutenant Peary’s
specimens, however, were collected on the ground

80 The Musk-ox

by himself, and he is certainly entitled to the
honor of the new variety bearing his name. So
Professor Allen rightly thinks, and though he
has adopted Professor Lydekker’s name, he re-
serves O. pearyt (Allen) as a provisionary one
which may be accepted for the Grinnell Land
animal in case it should prove to be separable.
This, however, does not appear likely. The
most distinguishing difference between the O.
wardi, as called, or O. pearyz, as it should be
known, and the O. moschatus, is in the head.
The entire front of the new variety head is more
or less gray instead of wholly brown, as is the
O. moschatus; while the horn base of the new
variety is much narrower and slightly different in
shape from those of the old variety. The skulls
of the two varieties are practically alike; at least
there is very slight difference. The general color
of the fur of the new variety is a little lighter, and
the animal itself is not so large or heavily built.
How either variety of musk-ox ever got to
Greenland has been a subject of much discussion
among scientists who seem now, however, to have
finally decided that they reached the island from
the west by crossing Smith Sound from Elles-
mere Land, and by crossing Robeson’s Channel

SKULL OF THE EAST GREENLAND MUSK-OX —( Ovibos Ward?)

SKULL OF THE BARREN GROUND MUSK-OX— (Ovibos
moschatus )

SIDE VIEW — (Ovibos Wardt)

SIDE VIEW — (Ovibos moschatus)

The Musk-ox 85

from Grinnell Land, thence along the low Green-
land Coast to East Greenland. Outside of the
Arctic islands and of Arctic America so far south
as the 62d parallel, the musk-ox is unknown.
There was a time, however, when its range included
all that part of the northern hemisphere between,
roughly speaking, the Arctic Circle and the North
Pole. It seems even possible that in the dim
ages, the musk-ox had a. wider and much more
southern distribution, for the skull from which
the extinct type domdzfrons was named, was found
in Kentucky, another having been found also in
Arkansas. Fossil remains of musk-oxen have
been unearthed in Siberia, Alaska, Grinnell Land,
and Northern Europe. There is no authentic
data of their having been found in Alaska
within the memory of present living man, and
they do not range within two hundred miles of
the Mackenzie River, which is laid down as their
western limit. Much has been said of their being
of recent existence in Alaska. I made careful
search for authentic data concerning their western
range, but secured no information at all trust-
worthy of even a tradition of them in Alaska;
while nothing more certain than hearsay handed
from father to son did I find as to their being

86 The Musk-ox

seen near the Mackenzie River. From time to
time statements find their way into print of a
musk-ox found in Alaska. Such misleading
information is based on the tales of traders who
may perhaps have got a musk-ox skin at some
Alaskan post. Mr. Andrew J. Stone, who has
spent several years in the Far North collecting
for the Museum of Natural History, and who
knows Alaska and all that great stretch of coun-
try west of the Mackenzie River thoroughly, has
covered this question in a statement published
in an American Museum bulletin in 1gor. It
touches finally upon a question much agitated,
and it seems to me sufficiently important to
make permanent record here. Therefore I
reproduce it.

AS TO THE WESTERN RANGE OF MUSK-OXEN.

Febr’y 28, 1gotr.
My pear Dr. ALLEN : —

In response to your inquiry in reference to the existence of
the musk-ox (Ovibos moschatus) west of the Mackenzie River,
or in Alaska, I will state there are none of these animals in any
part of Arctic America west of the Mackenzie. Previous to
my departure for the North in the spring of 1897, I had for
several years carefully searched for information upon this sub-
ject, and from what I had gathered I had a faint hope of
finding some of these animals in the mountains west of the

(As0}S1H{ TeANJEN Jo wunesny uvoieury ay} Aq papraosd ydessojoyd e wo14)

XO-MSNW GNVINESYD LSVA AHL dO ONITAVAA SIVAN

The Musk-ox 89

Mackenzie, just south of the Arctic Coast. These mountains
are known, respectively, as the Richardson, Buckland, British,
Romanzof, and Franklin Mountains, but in reality they are the
western extension of the main Rocky Mountain range that
bends west from the Mackenzie along the Arctic Coast. On
reaching the neighborhood of these mountains, however, in the
winter of 1898-99, all hope of finding living specimens of
musk-ox in them was destroyed.

The Romanzof Mountains, from which specimens of musk-
ox are reported to have recently been brought, by way of
Camden Bay, are about one hundred and seventy-five miles
west of Herschel Island. The Pacific Steam Whaling Com-
pany, with offices at No. 30 California Street, San Francisco,
have maintained a whaling station at Herschel Island for a
number of years; there has also been established there for
a number of years a Church of England Mission, under the
direction of the Rev. I. O. Stringer. I visited Herschel Island
in November and December, 1898, for the purpose of collect-
ing all possible information relative to the animal life of those
regions. On my way to and from Herschel Island I sledded
the very base of the Davis Gilbert, Richardson, and Buckland
Mountains. I stopped over night on both journeys with a lot
of Eskimo, at that time hunting the Davis Gilbert Mountains
and living in what is known as Oakpik (willow camp), in the
extreme western part of the Mackenzie delta, very near the
foot of the mountains. Specimens of Ovzs dali (white sheep)
and of caribou and fur-bearing animals were plentiful in their
camp, but there was no sign of musk-ox.

At Shingle Point, on the Arctic Coast, near the Richardson
Mountains, I spent several days with a man who was trading
with the Eskimo who were hunting the Richardson Mountains.
There were several Eskimo in his camp at the time, and he
had in his possession skins of the white sheep, caribou, and a
variety of fur-bearing animals, but there was no sign of musk-

go The Musk-ox

ox, and I learned on careful inquiry through my interpreter
that the natives seemed to know nothing of them, with the
exception of one young man who had been to the eastward
on one of the whaling ships. The Tooyogmioots, a tribe of
Eskimo who once lived along this coast and hunted these dif-
ferent mountains, are now almost extinct. I found between
the mouth of the Mackenzie and Herschel Island a very few
individuals living in snow houses, but I did not find in or
around their places of residence any sign of musk-ox skins,
bones, or heads.

I remained at Herschel Island from Nov. 24 to Dec. 14,
visiting the Rev. I. O. Stringer and Capt. Haggerty of the
steam-whaler, J/ary Dehume. Both men were able to con-
verse readily with the Eskimo in the Eskimo tongue, and they
gave me every possible assistance in making my inquiries.
This whole coast far to the westward of Herschel Island is now
occupied by the Noonitagmiott tribe of Eskimo. There were
a large number of these people at the island, and among them
were parties who hunted all the mountains of the mainland
mentioned, living in the mountains a great part of the time.
Many skins of caribou, sheep, and fur-bearing animals were
seen in the possession of these people, but none of them pos-
sessed any part of the musk-ox, and the only members of the
tribe who knew anything of the musk-ox were those who had
been carried to the east by whaling ships. The Rev. Mr.
Stringer takes great interest in the natural resources of the
country and travels extensively among these people, but he
had no knowledge of the existence of any musk-oxen west
of the Mackenzie. Capt. Haggerty had wintered along this
coast for a number of years, trading extensively with the
natives, but he had never secured or heard of a musk-ox skin
west of the Mackenzie.

All the whaling ships, which have wintered here for years,
sometimes as many as fifteen at the same time, keep Eskimo

The Musk-ox gt

hunters in the field continually for the purpose of securing
fresh meat for the crews, sending white sailors in charge of
dog sleds to visit the Eskimo camps to bring in the meat. It
is not uncommon for these sleds to go one hundred and fifty
to two hundred miles for meat, and all the mountains to the
north and west of Herschel Island have been visited many
times by these hunters and sledding parties, without obtaining
any trace of musk-ox. Collinson, who wintered near Camden
Bay in 1853-54, does not mention the musk-ox. The U. S.
Government Survey party, which wintered on the Porcupine
several years ago and visited Rampart House, a Hudson Bay
trading post at the Ramparts on the Porcupine River, and who
went from there with Mr. John Firth, the Hudson Bay Com-
pany’s trader, north through these mountains to the Arctic
Coast and returned, did not find musk-ox. Several white
men have travelled back and forth through these mountains
from Fort Yukon, on the Yukon River, to Herschel Island, for
the purpose of securing sled dogs of the Eskimo on the Arctic
Coast, to be used on the Yukon, without securing or learn-
ing anything of the musk-ox. Mr. Hodgson and Mr. Firth,
both in the service of the Hudson Bay Company, have been
stationed at Fort Yukon at the mouth of the Porcupine, at
Rampart House on the Porcupine, and at Lapierres House on
Bell River, a tributary of the Porcupine, during a period of
over thirty years, trading with the Loucheaux Indians, several
tribes of which hunt north of these places into the mountains
mentioned, without ever obtaining any knowledge of the exist-
ence of musk-ox; and the Hudson Bay Company have never
secured at any of these posts any skins of the musk-ox.
Previous to the advent of the whalers on this coast, the
coast Eskimo also traded at these Hudson Bay posts. The
country between the Porcupine River and the Arctic Coast, in
which district the mountains above mentioned are situated, is
entirely accessible from the north or south, and every part of it

92 The Musk-ox

has been hunted for years by the Eskimo and Indians. Barter
Island, near Camden Bay, has been the rendezvous of the
north coast Eskimo for years, where they meet every summer
to barter and trade with each other. At one of these mid-
summer festivals there may be seen spotted reindeer skins
from Siberia, walrus ivory and walrus skins from Bering Sea,
or the stone lamps from the land of the Cogmoliks (the far-
away people) of the East, and it is not impossible, though
hardiy probable, that musk-ox skins might be found there.

I also travelled through the country of the Kookpugmioots
and Abdugmioots of the Arctic Coast, east of the Mackenzie.
The first people encountered along the coast east of the Mac-
kenzie are the Kookpugmioots— they hunt the coast country
as far east as Liverpool Bay, but many of their best hunters
never saw a musk-ox. The Abdugmioots originally hunted
the Anderson River country, but now live around Liverpool
Bay, and most of them have hunted musk-ox. The Kogmo-
liks, who once lived around Liverpool and Franklin Bays, but
who are now practically merged with the Kookpugmioots,
along the shores of Allen Channel, have been musk-ox killers.

A good many of the Port Clarence natives, living near
Bering Straits, have killed musk-oxen, but only around the
head of Franklin Bay and on Parry Peninsula, they having
been taken there by whalers. Nearly all the whaling ships
pick up Port Clarence natives, on their way north and east to
the whaling grounds, and keep them with them until their
return, perhaps thirty months later. Some of these vessels
have wintered at Cape Bathurst and in Langton Bay at the
head of Franklin Bay. Four of these vessels wintered in
Langton Bay in 1897-98, and during the winter their Eskimo
and sailors killed about eighty head of musk-oxen, most of
which were taken on the Parry Peninsula. When I was at
Herschel Island, in the winter of 1898, I saw forty of these
skins in one of the warehouses of the Pacific Steam Whaling

The Musk-ox 93

Company. ‘They were the property of Capt. H. H. Bodfish of
the steam whaler Beluga.

The range of the musk-ox at the present time does not
extend westward to within three hundred miles of the Mac-
kenzie delta. Any information concerning the musk-ox gath-
ered around Point Barrow and thence south to Bering Straits
and Port Clarence, has been obtained from natives who have
accompanied whaling ships to the East; and all the musk-ox
skins that find a market in San Francisco have been purchased,
directly or indirectly, from the whaling ships.

Very truly yours,
ANDREW J. STONE.

Wherever explorers have gone into Eastern
Arctic North America they have found the musk-
ox. Lieutenant Peary, who has spent more time
in the Arctic than any other living man, writes
that he has killed musk-oxen at Cape Bryant on
the Northwest Coast, and at the extreme northern
end of Greenland Archipelago, north latitude
83° 39,and it appears from lack of records to the
contrary that they are found on all the Arctic
islands except, curiously enough, the Islands of
Spitzbergen and Franz Josef Land, where they are
unknown. That the musk-ox does not seem to
migrate on the ice from island to island as the
reindeer do, is another curious fact.

Frederick Schwatka, who hunted along the
Arctic Coast, and one or two of the scientists,

94 The Musk-ox

place the southerly range of the musk-oxen at the
6oth parallel, but this is fully two, if not four,
degrees too far south to correctly represent their
present range. Hearne saw tracks in latitude 59°,
and musk-oxen in latitude 61°, in 1771, but I have
never heard of musk-oxen being killed within
recent years so far south as the 62d parallel. It
is conceivable, however, that they might stray so
far south, though in my opinion highly improbable.
Pike records a musk-ox killed at Aylmer Lake, in
the Barren Grounds. This is the most southerly
killing that I have heard of, and the most south-
erly one of which Mr. Pike makes record. Aylmer
Lake is just above the 64th parallel. I saw no
musk-oxen below the 65th degree, and it was my
experience, as well as Pike’s, that musk-oxen are
not what you may, comparatively speaking, call
plentiful until the 66th parallel.

Some writers persist in calling the musk-ox
migratory, but there is no reason for doing so.
When fully grown, it is about the size of the
English black cattle, its height being 4 feet 2
to 4 inches at the shoulder, and its girth very
large for its height. Indians estimate the flesh of
a mature cow musk-ox equal to that of about three
Barren Grounds caribou, which would be from

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i

The Musk-ox 97

three hundred to three hundred and fifty pounds;
the bull may go as much as two hundred pounds
heavier. They travel in herds varying from half
a dozen to thirty or forty. Some authors have
referred to “vast herds,’ no doubt confusing
musk-oxen with caribou. Fifty would be a large
herd, and I suppose from ten to twenty would
fairly represent the size of the average herd. As
a rule, such a sized herd would have one or two
bulls. I found herds that were all bulls, others
that were all cows.

The robe is of a very dark brown, which seems
black against the snow, and the hair all over
the body is coarse and long, reaching down
below the belly to the knees (especially long
on the rump, where I measured some that was
fifteen to twenty inches), and under the throat
it hangs down as a thick mane. There appears
to be a decided tendency to a hump, which is
emphasized by the shorter stiffish hair that
covers shoulders and the base of the neck.
And there is a saddle mark of a dirty grayish
white. Underneath this hair and over all the
body grows a coat of mouse gray wool of fine
texture, which protects the animal in winter and
is shed in the summer. No wool grows on the

98 The Musk-ox

legs, which are massive, and although short,
appear to be shorter than they are because of the
long hair that falls over them. In running, they
have a rolling, choppy kind of a gait, and I
noticed when they fell from a rifle wound they
could not get on their feet again.

The growth of the horn is very interesting. It
begins exactly as with domestic cattle by a straight
shoot out from the head. For the first year,
it is impossible to tell the difference between the
sexes by the horns. In the second year, the bull
horn is a little whiter than that of the cow; the
forehead of a two-year musk-ox I killed showed a
forehead covered with short, curlish hair. In
this year the cow’s horn begins to show a down-
ward turn, and is fully developed at its third year.
The bull’s horns, on the contrary, are just begin-
ning to spread at the base in the third year. They
continue spreading toward the centre of the fore-
head until they meet in the bull’s fifth year, but in
the sixth year they begin to separate, leaving a
crevice in the centre which widens as the bull
ages until it is from an inch to an inch and a half
wide. In the cow these crevices also open by age
to even a greater extent than in the bull. The
horns of both bull and cow darken as they reach

The Musk-ox 99

their full development, until they are quite dark
from six to eight inches toward the base; and
as the animal ages the extreme darkness of horn
disappears, until finally in the old animal of either
sex there remains only a black tip about a couple
of inches on the very point of the horn. As the
crevice between the horns in both sexes widens,
the base of the boss on each side thickens to at
least three inches in the bull and two or less in the
cow. On the boss the horn is corrugated, but at
the turn it becomes smooth, and is polished like
an ox horn on the point.

The largest horns of which I believe there
is record are owned by a taxidermist who pur-
chased them; but the locality from which they
came is unknown. Their breadth, measured up
and down at the crevice of the boss, or, tech-
nically speaking, the breadth of palm, is 132
inches ; the length of horns on outside curve, 304
inches. The next largest pair is in the British
Museum and measures 13 inches in breadth and
264 in length. The third is 122 by 26%, presented
to the British Museum by J. Rae, an old time
Hudson’s Bay Company factor, and got on the
Barren Grounds. The next is 124 by 274, the
property of the Earl of Lonsdale, who picked up

Eat 6,

100 The Musk-ox

the head on his way down the Mackenzie River,
several years ago. Warburton Pike holds the
two next heads, one 11 by 26%, and the other
11 by 243. The largest head I killed is rather
remarkable in respect to length of horn and thick-
ness of the boss. Indian hunters who saw it, at
all events, considered it most unusual. It meas-
ures 114 by 274; width of crevice, 14 inch; thick-
ness of boss at crevice, 3# inches.

The flesh of the musk-ox is exceedingly tough,
and by no means pleasing to the taste, especially
in the rutting season (August and September),
when it is practically uneatable. There is a cer-
tain musky odor, but it is not so pronounced as
generally said to be. In fact the only distinct
musk-ox odor is got from breaking and crushing
the dry dung. As indicative of this queer crea-
ture, I may add that musk-ox dung is but very
little larger than and of very near the shape and
color as that of the large hare. The flesh of the
cow is by no means choice, but it is not bad;
the flesh of the calf I found to be rather tasteless.
The unborn calf is considered quite a delicacy,
of which my Indians did not deny themselves
merely because we had no cooking fire. They ate
it raw, just as they took it from the mother's

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The Musk-ox 103

stomach. Cows never give birth to more than
one calf at a time, born in June.

On only two occasions have musk-oxen been
brought alive into captivity in North America.
One of these was an eighteen months’ old female
caught east of Lady Franklin Bay, about thirty
miles inland, by a party sent out by Captain H.
H. Bodfish, of the whaler Leluga. This was
exhibited at the Sportsmen’s Show in New York,
where it was purchased by the Hon. William C.
Whitney and presented to the Zoological Society
of New York in March, 1902. The other was a
younger specimen caught in Northeastern Green-
land by Lieutenant Peary and brought out and
presented to the Zoological Society by him in
October of the same year. Both specimens, how-
ever, died within a few months. Up to now I
believe something like a dozen live specimens
have been taken out to the civilized world. All,
however, at this writing, have died, except two or
three. One is in a zoological garden at Copen-
hagen, another in a zoological garden at Berlin,
and another is in England, owned by the Duke
of Bedford, but exhibited, I am told, in London.

104 The Musk-ox

MUSK-OX
(OvIBOS MOSCHATUS')

In spite of its name this Arctic ruminant has
no near affinity with the members of the ox tribe,
the cheek teeth being more like those of the
sheep and goats, the muzzle, except for a small
strip between the nostrils, hairy, and the tail
reduced to a mere stump concealed among the
long hair of the hind quarters. On the other
hand, the resemblance to the sheep is not very
close, the horns, which in old males nearly meet
in the middle line of the forehead, being of a
totally different form and structure, and the skull
likewise very distinct. In the males the horns
are much flattened and expanded at the bases,
after which they are bent suddenly down behind
the eyes, to curve upward at the tips. In the
females they are much smaller, less expanded,
and not approximated at their bases. In both
sexes their texture is coarse and fibrous, and their
color yellow. The long coat of dark brown
hair, depending from the back and sides like a
mantle, affords an adequate protection against

1 “ Records of Big Game,” Rowland Ward, third edition.

The Musk-ox 106

the rigors of an Arctic winter; and the broad,
spreading hoofs, with hair on their under surface,
give a firm foothold on snow and ice. Two races
are known—the typical Canadian and the Green-
land (O. moschatus ward:). The latter is charac-
terized by the presence of a certain amount of
white on the forehead and the smaller expansion
of the horns. Height at shoulder about 4 feet;
weight of one weighed in parts, 579 pounds
(D. T. Hanbury).

Distribution.— Arctic America, approximately
north and east of a line drawn from the mouth of
the Mackenzie River to Fort Churchill on Hud-
son Bay, Greenland, and Grinnell Land, in latitude
32° 27°; approximate southern limit, latitude
40° N.

106 The Musk-ox

MEASUREMENTS OF HORNS

gave BREADTH] Typ ae L O
Oursine OF OCALITY WNER
Curve | Patm a
—30} 132 301 fy W. W. Hart
273 10 274 | Barren grounds of David T. Hanbury
northern Canada
—27} I1¢ 23 Barren grounds of Caspar Whitney
northern Canada
271 12} 27 Barren grounds of Earl of Lonsdale
northern Canada
—27} 103 273 | Barren grounds of Imperial Museum,
northern Canada Vienna
261 II 27 Barren grounds of Warburton Pike
northern Canada
26} 12% 4 North America British Museum
(J. Rae)
261 134 275 | North America British Museum
—253 Ke) 25 North America Dr. Albert von
Stephani
243 II 253 | Barren grounds Warburton Pike
244 74 19 Barren grounds J. Talbot Clifton
243 102 26 Barren grounds Hon. Walter Roths-
child
24 of 23¢ | North America Sir Edmund G. Loder,
Bart.
—24 30 25 ? Major W. Anstruther
Thomson
234 6 22} ? A. Barclay Walker
—214 9 27 ? Dublin Museum
— G21} 4% 203 ? Imperial Museum,
Vienna
2 183 44 .. | North America British Museum
(A. G. Dallas)
Q17 43 9% =| North America Dr. Albert von
Stephani

MUSK-OX ( Ovibos moschatus wardt)

4 224 | Greenland Rowland Ward

8
244 7t 27 Greenland Rowland Ward

THE BISON

By GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL

THE SEAST OR DoE) ERD

the -BLSON

Tue buffalo was the largest and economically
the most important of North American mammals.
It was also one of the most numerous, and over
a great area of the continent was practically the
sole support of its aboriginal inhabitants. Within
the memory of men who as yet are hardly middle-
aged, it roamed the country between the Missouri
River and the Rocky Mountains, in multitudes
so vast that it was commonly stated that its num-
bers could not be materially reduced, that it would
exist long after the speakers had died. Yet,
within thirty years it has so absolutely disap-
peared that the number of living wild buffalo
existing to-day is probably not greater than the
herd of European bison—commonly, but erro-
neously, called aurochs—so carefully preserved
in the forests of Lithuania by the Russian Czar.

The history of the buffalo’s extermination has
been many times written, and the cause of its dis-
appearance is not far to seek. It was killed in

III

112 The Bison

great numbers by the Indians, who used its flesh
for food, its skin for clothing and for their shelters.
Yet, under natural conditions, the destruction
which they wrought was never very extensive,
and was more than compensated for by the annual
increase. Wolves, bears, and other wild animals
which were found in great numbers throughout
the buffalo’s range in old days, devoured many of
them; but these were largely the aged, wounded,
and crippled, or those which were drowned in the
rivers, or mired in quicksands and mud-holes.
All this destruction by natural enemies did little
more than keep the race in good condition, by
cutting off the sickly and the feeble.

When, however, the white man appeared on
the scene, new conditions arose. The buffalo
had a robe which was as useful to the white man
as to the Indian. A trade speedily sprang up in
these robes, which the Indians were glad to kill
and tan for a cupful of sugar, or a few charges of
powder and ball, or a drink or two of alcohol.
Now, the Indians had a motive for killing which
heretofore they had not had. They killed more
buffalo and made more robes than before, but
still they made no impression on the wandering
millions which swayed to and fro under the influ-

The Bison 113

ence of the seasons. Steamboats might pass down
the Missouri River loaded to the guards with
bales of robes, but the vast herds of buffalo showed
no diminution. The early white explorers, or
trappers, or traders, did not themselves take the
trouble to collect buffalo hides; there were more
valuable furs in the country, beaver and otter and
bears, which brought better prices, and —more
important than this —did not require to be tanned
before they became marketable. For a buffalo
skin untanned was never shipped; it was only
after some Indian woman had expended on it
days of patient labor, that it would bring at the
trading post the pitiful reward which the white
man gave.

At last, however, — and that was less than forty
years ago, —a railroad began to push its way out
on to the broad plains lying between the Missouri
River and the Rockies, and to thrust itself into
the very region where the buffalo fed. Over the
shining rails of this railroad trains began to pass,
carrying passengers; and among these were many
white men eager for gain. These at once saw
the possibilities of the buffalo. At first they
killed them for meat, but soon the hides began to
be shipped also. And other men, learning that

114 The Bison

the buffalo hides brought $2.00 each, and that
buffalo were to be had for the trouble of shooting
them, crowded into the range.

Then there began along the Platte Valley in
Nebraska, a scene of slaughter which has seldom
been equalled. The country was full of buffalo
skinners. Each hunter had his teams, and his
gangs of skinners which followed him about from
place to place, and cared for the hides of the
beasts which he killed. In some places the only
water accessible was the Platte River, and here
the buffalo came to drink. Here, too, the hunters,
concealed in ravines or in rifle-pits that they had
dug, shot down the beasts one by one, as they
came to water, and, indeed, formed so complete a
cordon along the river’s banks, that the buffalo
could not get through and turned back into the
hills. When at night the thirsty herds tried to
approach the river under cover of darkness, they
found that the hunters had built along the bottom
great fires, which they kept up all night, and
which the scared buffalo did not dare to pass.

It took but a little time to split the herd which
for centuries had passed across the valley north
and south with the seasons. It was about 1870
when this work began, and in 1874 the buffalo

The Bison es

were last seen in the valley of the Platte. The
herd had been split.

As other railroads to the southward pushed
into the buffalo country, the same scenes were
enacted. The buffalo country swarmed with
hunters who came in constantly increasing num-
bers, so that none of them earned any money
by their butcher’s work. The price of hides fell,
but the buffalo continued to be slaughtered. Hun-
dreds of thousands of hides went to market, but
these were only a small proportion of the buffalo
killed. Colonel Dodge has expressed the belief,
that of the buffalo killed, only one-fourth or one-
fifth reached a market. It is conceivable that
the proportion was even less. A very large num-
ber of the hunters knew nothing about hunting,
or shooting, or skinning a buffalo, or curing its
hide. The number of maimed and crippled ani-
mals that went off to die was very large. The
number of hides ruined in skinning was large,
and the number improperly cured was still larger.

By the latter part of 1874, buffalo to the south-
ward of the Platte River began to be very scarce,
and in 1876 they were almost gone. After that
none were found in the southern country except
a few in the southern portion of the Indian

116 The Bison

Territory and in the waterless country of the
pan-handle of Texas. There, protected by the
drought, and so few in number as to present little
attraction to the skin hunter, a few lingered for
some years, until finally captured or destroyed by
Buffalo Jones in his expeditions after calves for
domestication.

In the northern country the buffalo lingered
longer. The Northern Pacific Railroad, built as
far west as Bismarck on the Missouri River in
1873, stopped there for six or seven years, and it
was not until it had been continued well beyond
the Missouri that it again entered the buffalo
range and brought with it, as was inevitable, the
buffalo skinner. When he came, he did the work
he had done in the South, and did it as effec-
tively. But as the number of buffalo left in the
northern herd was small, it took only two or
three years to destroy them.

After 1883, except for a band of about five
thousand which had been overlooked on one of
the Sioux reservations, there were no buffalo left
in the northern country except a few scatter-
ing individuals, which, hidden in out-of-the-way
places, had been overlooked by the hunters and
Indians, and so for a year or two were preserved

The Bison 117

from slaughter. In the arid region about the
heads of the Dry Fork and Porcupine Creek in
Montana, one of these little groups was left,
which yielded to expeditions sent out by the
National Museum and the American Museum
of Natural History, a series of specimens, proba-
bly the last of this species ever to be collected for
science. They were brought together just in
time, for since then there have been no buffalo.

A small herd of the so-called wood bison still
inhabits the vast wilderness between Athabasca
Lake and Lesser Slave Lake, but their numbers
are few. In the year 1900 there were two little
bunches of wild buffalo in the United States, per-
haps neither of them numbering more than fifteen
or twenty head. In the summer of Igor one of
these bunches, which had long ranged in Lost
Park, Colorado, was wiped out by poachers, while
for some years nothing has been heard of the
other little band which ranged in Montana, and
which, in 1895, numbered forty or fifty head, no
less than thirty-two of which were killed a year
or two later by Red River half-breeds who made
a special trip to their range. At present the only
important band of buffalo in the United States is
that ranging within the confines of the National

118 The Bison

Park, and it is altogether probable that this does
not number more than twenty-five or thirty.

No doubt the extraordinary abundance of the
buffalo had something to do with the wasteful-
ness of the slaughter which followed the railroad
building into the buffalo range. Many people no
doubt really believed that in their time the buffalo
could not be exterminated. They seemed to rea-
son that as there always had been “millions of
buffalo” there always would be. Men killed buf-
falo for any foolish, childish reason that might
come into their heads, — to try their guns, to see
whether they could hit them, for fun !

How wantonly even some of the first traders
destroyed them is often shown by the few writ-
ings that have come down to us from those early
days. Henry, in his Journal of August, 1800,
tells of the way in which he and some of his men
passed the time while waiting for others of his
people to come up. He says, “ We amused our-
selves by lying in wait, close under the bank, for
the buffalo which came to drink. When the poor
brutes came to within about ten yards of us, on a
sudden we would fire a volley of twenty-five guns
at them, killing and wounding many. We only
took the tongues. The Indians suggested that

The Bison 119

we should all fire together at one lone bull which
appeared, to have the satisfaction, as they said, of
killing him stone dead. The beast advanced till
he was within six or eight paces, when the yell
was given, and all hands let fly; but instead of
falling he galloped off, and it was only after sev-
eral more discharges that he was brought to the
ground. The Indians enjoyed this sport highly,
— it is true, the ammunition cost them nothing.” |

There has been much misunderstanding as to
the former distribution of the buffalo over the
North American continent, and the extent of
territory through which it was found. Many
respected authorities have declared that it oc-
curred in Eastern Canada, and generally along
the Atlantic slope; in portions of New England,
the Middle states, and south even into Florida.
It was said in general terms that the buffalo
occurred over the entire continent of North
America, from Florida to the 5oth degree of
north latitude.

These loose statements were corrected by Dr.
J. A. Allen, in his most important monograph on
the American bisons, and it is now well under-
stood that the range of the buffalo included only
about one-third of the continent; that, while it was

120 The Bison

found on the Atlantic slope, this was only in the
southeastern portion of its range; while in Can-
ada, New England, and Florida, it was probably
unknown.

The error into which early writers were led on
this subject undoubtedly arose from the terms
used by the earlier explorers, who spoke constantly
of vaches, or vaches sauvages, and less frequently
of buffu or buffle. But the term zwz/d cows, used
by the early French Jesuits and English explorers,
referred to the elk (Cervus canadensis), while the
words buffu or buffie were used to designate moose
(Aces). In some of the narratives of the journeys
of the Jesuit travellers, there appear on almost
every page references to the herds of vaches
sauvages, and many of these writers, at one time
or another, describe these wild cows in such
unmistakable language as to show beyond ques-
tion that they were the elk or wapiti.

Dr. Allen assigns the Alleghany Mountains as
the general eastern boundary of the range of the
buffalo, although explaining that it frequently
passed beyond that range, and showing conclu-
sively that it occurred in the western portions
of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North and
South Carolina and Georgia. Mr. Hornaday

The Bison 121

cites some evidence to show that it occurred in
the District of Columbia, and quotes Francis
Moore, in his “ Voyage to Georgia,” to prove that
there, at least, buffalo were found close to the salt
water.

While Dr. Allen gives the Tennessee River as
the southern boundary of the buffalo’s range, west
of the Alleghanies and east of the Mississippi
River, Mr. Hornaday quotes a number of refer-
ences to show that it occurred in some numbers
in what is now the state of Mississippi, and gives
a tradition of the Choctaws, narrated by Clay-
borne, in regard to the disappearance of the
species from that section. This tradition is to
the effect that during the early part of the
eighteenth century a great drought occurred
there by which the whole country was dried up.
For three years not a drop of rain fell. Large
streams went dry, and the forest trees all died.
Up to that time, it is said, elk and buffalo had
been numerous there, but during this drought
these animals crossed the Mississippi River and
never returned.

In the eastern portion of its range, the Great
Lakes formed a barrier on the north which the
buffalo did not pass; but from western New York

122 The Bison

westward, it was found in numbers along the
southern shores of these lakes, and in the territory
now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wis-
consin. Audubon tells us that in the first years
of the nineteenth century there were buffalo in
Kentucky, but declares that about 1810, or soon
after, they all disappeared. This disappearance
was due chiefly to their actual destruction by
white men and by Indians, and not, as is com-
monly stated, to the retiring of the great herds
before the advance of settlement and civilization.
It seems that the last buffalo were killed east of
the Mississippi River about the year 1820, al-
though it may be that in Wisconsin and Minne-
sota they lasted somewhat longer.

West of the Great Lakes, and turning sharply
northward so as to run nearly northwest, the east-
ern border of the buffalo’s range west of the Mis-
sissippi was a line running very near the western
extremity of Lake Superior, up through the Lake
of the Woods, west of Lake Winnipeg, and thence
northward to and beyond the Great Slave Lake.
There this border line turned to the west, and
then sharply to the south, and meeting the Rocky
Mountains not far from where Peace River leaves
them, followed the range south, about to the 49th

The Bison 123

parallel; and then turning southwestwardly and
including Idaho, a part of eastern Oregon, the
northeast corner of Nevada, the greater portion of
Utah, and most of New Mexico, the line passed
down south well into Mexico, turning eastwardly
just north of the 25th parallel of latitude, and run-
ning north to the coast, which it followed around
again to the mouth of the Mississippi.

As it has been known in our day, the buffalo
in the southern portion of its range was a trans-
Missouri animal. North of the parallel of 45
degrees it was found in equal numbers on both
sides of the Missouri River, and in its north-
ern extension reached, and possibly even to-day
reaches, north to Great Slave Lake; for, as already
stated, the only considerable band of wild buffalo
to-day is the wood bison of the north, estimated
to number four hundred or five hundred.

Besides the boundaries thus set forth, it is prob-
able that in early days there was a considerable
extension of the buffalo’s range northward and
westward, into portions of what is now Alaska.
Certain it is that in that territory buffalo remains
have been found in great numbers. Some of these
skulls belong to species long extinct, and much
larger than the American bison ; but, on the other

124 The Bison

hand, there are many which are closely similar to
that species.

The range of the buffalo to the west of the
Rocky Mountains began to contract not very
long after the narrowing of its range on the
east. The earlier explorers in the West, from
Pike downward, report buffalo in abundance.
Yet, as already stated, the westernmost point at
which their remains have been found is among
the foot-hills of the eastern side of the Blue
Mountains of Oregon. In 1836, it is reported,
buffalo were abundant in Salt Lake Valley, but
there nearly all were soon afterward destroyed
by deep snows, which covered the ground for a
long period of time. This corresponds well with
statements made to me by John Robinson, better
known in early days as Uncle Jack Robinson,
one of the old-time trappers, who died between »
1870 and 1880. In 1870 he told me that the
buffalo on the tributaries of the Green River and
on the Laramie Plains had all perished nearly
forty years before, during a winter when very
deep snows fell, followed by a thaw and subse-
quent cold, which crusted the snow so that the
buffalo could not get through it, and starved to
death. This statement was confirmed by the

The Bison 125

small number of remains, most of them extremely
old and weathered, which we found in this region
at that time. On the other hand, on upper tribu-
taries of the Green River buffalo were found
much later, and it is possible that these may have
been animals which wintered in narrow valleys
of the mountains, where, during this deep snow,
food was accessible. Fremont states that in the
spring of 1824 buffalo were abundant as far west
as Fort Hall, while Bonneville reported them in
extraordinary abundance in the Bear River Valley.
The mere fact that buffalo were not seen by
an explorer who passed through any given terri-
tory does not necessarily show that they did not
range in that country. I have travelled for
months through a buffalo range without seeing
buffalo or any evidence of their very recent
presence, yet the signs found showed conclu-
sively that a short time before they had been
there in vast numbers. It would have been per-
fectly possible for two honest reports, made a few
months or years apart by explorers who were not
prairie men, absolutely to contradict each other.
Although the buffalo disappeared from the
country west of the Green River, and even from
the Laramie Plains, a long time ago, it lin-

126 The Bison

gered much later on tributaries of the Platte
River further to the northward. There were
buffalo on the Sweetwater and its tributaries
between 1870 and 1880, and on certain other
tributaries of the North Platte River between
1880 and 1890. About this same time there
was a small band ranging in what is called the
Red Desert Country, south of what is now the
National Park. But the last of these disap-
peared about 1890.

The color of the buffalo is well understood to
be a dark liver brown over most of the body,
changing to black on the long hair of the fore
legs, muzzle, and beard. The long hair on the
hump is yellowish, faded from sunburn, and often
much the color of the hair of a “tow-headed
child.” The mountain bison, which lives largely
in the timber, and is scarcely or not at all ex-
posed to the sun, is much darker, sometimes
almost black, throughout.

Very rarely buffalo of unusual color were seen.
These were sometimes roan, sometimes gray or
spotted with white, or even pure white through-
out. A hide taken on the upper Missouri about
1879 was white on the head, legs, and belly, and
elsewhere of normal color; the result was that

The Bison 127

when the animal was skinned and the hide
tanned there was a fine robe of the ordinary
color bordered with a wide band of white. If I
recollect aright, this particular hide was sold on
the river to an Englishman for $500.

Buffalo of unusual color, being so seldom seen,
were regarded by the Indians with great reverence.
Among the plains tribes, the buffalo, on which
they depended for food, shelter, and clothing, was
sacred. Its skull was usually placed on the ground
near the sweat lodge, prayers were made, and the
pipe was offered to it, in a petition to the buffalo
to remain with them, to be abundant, and even to
run over smooth ground, so that their horses
should not-fall during the chase. If buffalo
in general were sacred, how much more should

the white one receive reverence. The Pawnees /'

cherished their skins as sacred objects, and kept
them in their medicine bundles, or used them to
wrap about these bundles. The Blackfeet re-
garded white buffalo as especially dedicated to the
Sun, and hung up the white robe as a votive offer-
ing to that deity. In the same way, the Chey-
ennes, in old times, sacrificed the hide of a
white buffalo to the Sun, although later, after
their habits had been measurably changed by

128 The Bison

contact with the whites, they sometimes sold
such robes.

My friend George Bent —son of Col. William
Bent, one of the historic characters of the early
West — tells me that during a long course of trad-
ing among the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, he has
seen but five robes that could fairly be called
white. One of these was silver-gray, another,
white, a third, cream color, the fourth, dapple
gray, and the fifth, yellowish fawn color. He tells
me that in ancient times the white buffalo was
regarded by the Cheyennes as sacred, and that, if
one of them killed a white buffalo, he left it where
it fell, taking nothing from it, and not even putting
a knife into it. The Cheyennes believe that any
white buffalo belongs far to the north, and comes
from that region where, according to their tradi-
tion, the buffalo originally came out of the ground.

A great many years ago a war party of Chey-
ennes went up north against the Crows. One day
they came to a hill, and when they looked over it
they saw before them great herds of buffalo lying
down, and among them a cow, perfectly white.
When the buffalo stood up to go to water, the
white cow also stood up, and went with them, and
it was observed that none of the other buffalo

The Bison 129

went very close to her. They did not appear to
fear her, but they did not crowd close about her;
they gave her plenty of room, as if they respected
her. This led the Cheyennes to think that the
white buffalo was a chief among other buffalo.
The women of the Cheyennes did not dress a
white buffalo’s hide. When occasion arose for
such work, it was commonly done by some captive
woman; for example, a Kiowa, or a Pawnee, —
some one who was not bound by Cheyenne cus-
toms and Cheyenne fears. Rarely, a Cheyenne
woman went through a certain ceremony, being
prayed over by a medicine-man, and painted in
a peculiar fashion; this ceremony removed the
tabu, and she might then dress the white robe.
The habits of the buffalo were in most respects
those of domestic cattle. They fed in loose herds
as cattle do, the members of a family —that is
to say, the old cow and her progeny, sometimes
up to three or four years old — keeping together ;
the old bulls, lazier, heavier, and less active than
the cows and the younger stock, were usually
on the outskirts of the herd, and if it was slowly
moving in any direction, were likely to be behind.
Much has been written concerning the intelligence
of the buffalo, and the manner in which the bulls

130 The Bison

stood sentry over the herd, constantly on the
watch for danger. There is not and never was
any foundation for these stories, which were mere
creations of the writer’s imagination. As a mat-
ter of fact, the cows were much more alert and
watchful than the bulls, were always the first to
detect danger and to move away from it, while the
bulls were dull and slow, and often did not start
to run until the herd at large was in full flight.
Moreover, the cows and younger animals of the
herd were much swifter than the bulls, and so
pressed constantly to the front, while the bulls
brought up the rear. The disposition of the
males had nothing to do with any desire to pro-
tect the herd, but resulted from the fact that they
were slower than the others. The earlier writers
on the habits of these and other animals, credited
them with human motives and aspirations, which
of course they do not possess. A somewhat simi-
lar fashion of writing about animals is current at
the present day, but is false and unnatural, and
will pass.

The hides of the buffalo are in their best
condition in the early part of the winter, and it
was the practice of the Indians to collect their
robes at that time of the year, — namely, between

The Bison 131

November and January. Soon after January,
however, the hair begins to grow loose, and it
is shed during the spring and early summer,
though often great patches cling to the body
until late summer or early fall. I have seen
buffalo in the month of July still clad in what
looked like a loose robe, the old hair hanging to-
gether in an almost complete mat, covering the
body. Usually, however, by rubbing against trees,
rocks, and banks of dirt, and by rolling on the
prairie, the loose hair is got rid of by early summer.
In very old animals the moult takes place later and
less easily than in those in good condition, and
sometimes old and lean buffalo do not seem to
shed their coats completely.

The rutting season begins in July and lasts
about two months. During this time frequent
battles take place among the bulls, apparently
fierce on account of the size and activity of the
combatants, but usually without important re-
sults. These fights are much like similar con-
tests between domestic bulls; they paw up the
ground, kneel down and thrust their horns into
the earth, mutter and bellow and grunt; but
although they charge on each other with fury,
and come together with a tremendous shock, the

132 The Bison

contest usually ends in nothing more important
than the driving off, for a time, of the weaker
bull. From their great activity at this season,
the bulls rapidly lose flesh; but after the rut is
over, they regain it, so that by the beginning
of the cold weather they, like the cows, are fat
and in good order.

The buffalo cow produces, usually, a single
calf, which may be born during the months of
March, April, May, or June. The usual time
for the calves to be born is in April and May.
Shortly before that time the mother separates
herself from the herd, which, however, she rejoins
not long after the birth of the calf. Like many
other ruminants, the mother hides her calf when
it is small and weak, but does not wander far from
it. After it has gained some strength it joins
other calves, and these usually keep together a
little apart from the main herd, their mothers
coming to them from time to time in order that
they may nurse.

When first born, the calves are reddish yellow
in color, do not possess any noticeable hump, and
look very much like ordinary domestic calves,
except that possibly the tail is slightly shorter.
Before very long, however, they commence to

The Bison 133

grow darker in color, and I have seen calves
in August that at a little distance seemed almost
as dark as the adult buffalo.

The cow is devoted to her calf, and is ready
to fight for it against any enemy except man.
Usually, in the buffalo chase, the cow, thoroughly
frightened, paid no attention to the calf. But, on
the other hand, cases have occurred, where men
have been capturing calves to rear in captivity,
in which the cow refused to desert her offspring,
but turned upon the captor of the calf and
charged him with the utmost boldness.

Colonel Dodge instances a case where a num-
ber of bulls devoted themselves to protecting a
calf against wolves. He says, “I have seen evi-
dence of this many times, but the most remark-
able instance I ever heard of was related to me
by an army surgeon who was an eye-witness.
He was one evening returning to camp after
a day’s hunt, when his attention was attracted
by the curious actions of a little knot of six or
eight buffalo. Approaching sufficiently near to.
see clearly, he discovered that this little knot
were all bulls, standing in a close circle with
their heads downward, while in a concentric
circle, at some twelve or fifteen paces distant,

134 The Bison

sat, licking their chops in impatient expectancy,
at least a dozen large gray wolves —except man,
the most dangerous enemy of the buffalo. The
doctor determined to watch the performance.
After a few moments the knot broke up, still
keeping in a compact mass, and started on a
trot for the main herd some half mile off. To
his very great astonishment, the doctor now
saw that the central and controlling figure of
this mass was a poor little calf, so newly born
as scarcely to be able to walk. After going fifty
or one hundred yards, the calf lay down; the
bulls disposed themselves in a circle as before,
and the wolves, who had trotted along on each
flank of their retreating supper, sat down and
licked their chops again. This was repeated
again and again, and although the doctor did not
see the finale (it being late and the camp distant),
he had no doubt that the noble fathers did their
whole duty by their offspring, and carried it safely
to the herd:

We may imagine that this was an unusual
occurrence; at the same time, it is true that
a group of buffalo, if one of their number is
attacked or threatened by wolves while they
are close together, will all rally to the general

The Bison 135

defence, and will stand by each other. But that
the bulls make it their business to defend calves,
or systematically preserve anything except their
own skins, I do not believe.

Few people who have seen the buffalo only
in captivity, few even of those who have hunted
them on the level plains, have any idea of the
agility of this clumsy, heavy creature, or of
the disposition that it shows to reach elevated
points, so difficult of access that a horse might
find it a hard matter to climb them. In old
times, one might see buffalo ascending steeps
that were nearly vertical; or, on the other hand,
throwing themselves down the sides of mountains
so sharply sloping and rough that a horseman
would not dare follow them. Like many other
animals, wild and tame, they often liked to
seek elevated points from which a wide view
might be had, and I have found their tracks
and other signs on points high up in the
mountains, where only sheep or goats would
be looked for. The mountain bison, so-called —
and by many hunters regarded as a species quite
distinct from the buffalo of the plains — was
especially given to frequenting the peaks in sum-
mer; no doubt in part to avoid the attacks of

136 The Bison

flies, but also in part —as I believe — from sheer
love of climbing.

Like most other herbivorous animals, the
buffalo was subject to panics, and was easily
stampeded, and when thoroughly frightened, a
herd ran for a long way before stopping. When
alarmed, they huddled together as closely as pos-
sible, running in a dense mass. The result of
this was that only the animals on the outskirts
of the herd could see where they were going;
those in the centre blindly followed their leaders
and depended on them. This very fact was a
source of danger, for the leaders, crowded upon
by those that followed, even if they saw peril
in front of them, could not stop, and often could
not even turn aside, but were constantly forced
on to a danger that they would gladly have
avoided. This is the entirely simple explanation
of a characteristic often wondered at by writers
about this species; that is, their habit of running
headlong into danger, — plunging over cut banks
into the pens prepared for them by the Indians,
or rushing into quicksands or places where they
mired down, or into deep water, which might
have well been avoided, or even up against such
obstacles as a train of cars or a steamboat in the

The Bison 137

river. The simple fact is that the animals which
saw the danger were unable to avoid it on ac-
count of the pressure from behind, and those that
were pressing the leaders on were ignorant of the
danger toward which they were rushing.

I have already adverted to the popular but
erroneous belief that the buffalo performed exten-
sive migrations in spring and fall. This is not
true. There were, unquestionably, certain sea-
sonal movements east and west, and north and
south, yet these movements were never very ex-
tended, and constituted nothing more than the
very general shiftings which are made by many
ruminants between a summer and a winter range.
Throughout the country lying between the Sas-
katchewan and the Missouri River, the buffalo, in
summer, moved up close to the mountains and
even into the foot-hills; and at the coming of
winter, with its snows and its bitter winds, they
moved to the eastward again, seeking the lower
ground and such shelter as the ravines and buttes
and timbered river valleys of the prairie might
afford.

On the other hand, buffalo, in their journeys to
water, usually travelled to the nearest streams, and
as on the plains the streams usually run from west

138 The Bison

to east, and the buffalo travelled in single file, their
trails ran at right angles to the course of the
rivers, or north and south. It is quite possible
that the directions of these trails, deeply worn,
and showing the passage of great numbers of ani-
mals, may have given rise to the popular belief in
this north and south migration.

At the same time, it is true that the buffalo
herds were more or less constantly in motion.
As they were very numerous, it was obviously
essential that they should move constantly, to
reach fresh grazing grounds. Often, too, they
were disturbed by hunters, red or white, who
stampeded the herds, which then rushed off in a
close mass, perhaps not to stop for ten or a dozen
miles. Besides that, frequently, the prairie was
burned, so that they were deprived of food, and
long journeys must be made to reach fresh graz-
ing grounds.

Not very much is known, and very much less
has been written concerning the tendency in ani-
mals, wild and domestic, to confine themselves to
particular localities; yet all people who live much
out of doors understand, even though they may
not reason much about it, how very local in habit
many birds and animals are. The ranchman, of

FROTECTED

The Bison 141

course, knows that the horses and cattle which
feed on his range divide themselves up into little
bunches, each of which selects some special area
where they spend all their time, rarely moving far
from it, except to make journeys to water; or, at
some change of the seasons, to migrate from sum-
mer to winter range or back again. In domestic
stock this attachment to locality is strongly
marked, and it is a common thing for animals
that have been driven to a range hundreds of
miles distant from that on which they have been
accustomed to feed, to travel back toward their
old haunts as soon as they are turned loose. I
have known cases where one-third of a large
bunch of horses, driven to a new range four or
five hundred miles away, were a year later gath-
ered again on their old home range. It is a mat-
ter of common experience for horses that escape
from owners, travelling at a distance from the
home range, to take the back trail and return
to it.

Among our larger game animals a similar con-
dition of things prevails. White-tail deer are
greatly attached to particular localities, and when
undisturbed, confine their wanderings within
very narrow limits. Even if thoroughly fright-

142 The Bison

ened, and driven to a considerable distance, they
soon return. If an old white-tail buck is run
with dogs, he may make a long chase, and cover
a wide stretch of country, but to-morrow he will
probably be found in his old home. In the same
way, mule deer, mountain sheep, white goats,
and antelope show their attachment for localities,
and unless persistently disturbed, wander but
little.

The same thing is true with regard to non-
migratory birds. Ruffed grouse attach them-
selves to certain pieces of woodland, or to
particular swamps, and the birds may be found
there all through the season. In like manner,
quail establish themselves on certain small
pieces of ground, and after their haunts have
been learned, may be started there with unfailing
regularity.

During many years’ experience with big game,
I have often had these facts thrust on my atten-
tion, and have seen much to warrant the belief
that, like other wild animals, the buffalo feels
attachment for a particular range of country,
which it does not desert except for good reason,
or when the change from summer to winter, or
back again, leads to a migration that may fairly

The Bison 143

be called seasonal. The buffalo’s attachment to
locality, and its natural inertia, is well exempli-
fied by an experience of Major G. W. H. Stouch,
U.S.A., retired, a veteran soldier of more than
thirty-five years’ experience on the plains, of which
he told me many years ago. I give it as nearly
as possible in his own words : —

“In the fall of 1866 I was directed to proceed
with Company C, Third Infantry, to reéstablish
old Fort Fletcher on the north fork of Big Creek,
sixteen miles below the present Fort Hays,
Kansas. When on October 16th we marched
down to the site chosen, and went into camp, I
noticed half a mile above us on the creek bottom
a considerable herd of buffalo feeding; there
were perhaps eight or nine hundred of them.
As soon as I saw them, it occurred to me that I
would leave them undisturbed, and that so long
as they remained there they might furnish us
a supply of beef at very little cost of time or
trouble. I therefore ordered the men not to
hunt up the creek, or disturb these buffalo in
any way, instructing them to do all their hunt-
ing down the stream.

“In order to put my idea in practice at once,
I detailed one of the soldiers as hunter and

144 The Bison

butcher of the company, and told him to go up
the creek and kill a buffalo, but not to show
himself either before or after firing the shot —
merely to kill a fat cow and then to remain un-
der cover until I joined him with a wagon. He
did so. At the report of the rifle the buffalo
fired at ran a few steps, and then lay down, while
those nearest to it made a few jumps, looked
around, saw no one, and then went on feeding.
From the camp we were watching the result of
the shot, and as soon as fired, I went with a
wagon to bring in the meat. As the wagon ap-
proached the carcass, the nearest buffalo moved
out of the way, without showing any special fear,
and the wagon returned to camp with its load.
This was repeated daily, the buffalo never being
frightened either by the shot or the wagon, and
seeming to become more tame as time went on,
often approaching within a few hundred yards
of where we were at work erecting the buildings.

“About November ist, Troop E, Seventh
Cavalry (under Lieutenant Wheelan) arrived to
reinforce the post; and about November roth
Company B, Thirty-seventh Infantry (under Lieu-
tenant Phelps) also arrived. I explained my
plan of operation to these officers, and requested

The Bison 145

them to detail hunters from their companies, and
to order their men to hunt down the creek, and
not to disturb what I had come to regard as the
post beef herd. They did so, and the herd still
remained with us.

“One morning in February, ’67, a sergeant,
whom I had sent the day before with a small
detail to make a scout, rapped at my door, and
reported his return. Among other things, he
said: ‘ Lieutenant, I met our buffalo herd travel-
ling up the creek, about fifteen miles from here,
They were moving slowly; just feeding along.’

“JT determined to see if they could not be
brought back, and taking twenty-five men (ac-
companied by Lieutenant Cooke, Third Infantry,
Adjutant, Assistant-Surgeon Fisk, and Mr. Hale,
the post trader) rode up the creek, and entered the
valley above the herd. Then, forming a skirmish
line across the bottom, we very slowly advanced
toward the buffalo. When they first noticed us,
the leaders seemed uncertain what to do; but as
they had been accustomed to seeing large parties
of us, instead of running, as I feared they might,
they at length turned about and began slowly to
work backward in the direction from which they
had come. By nightfall the herd was on its old

146 The Bison

feeding ground, and there we left it, and there it
remained until spring, and would, no doubt, have
remained longer, but, unluckily, the Seventh Cav-
alry, under General Custer, rode in upon it, as
they came down the creek to the post for sup-
plies, after their unsuccessful chase after the
Cheyennes, who had run away from General
Hancock. General Custer detailed two troops
with orders to secure meat for the command.
After chasing it, and killing forty-four head, the
herd was scattered, and never returned. The
herd supplied the post (consisting of about three
hundred officers and men) with fresh beef from
October 16, 1866, until about April 20, 1867.”
The buffalo calf, when captured very young,
was easily tamed. Indeed, nothing more was
needed at times than to permit the calf to suck
the fingers for a moment or two, when it would
follow the rider into camp, and seemed to be
wholly without fear of man. As already stated,
when very young it is hidden by its mother, and,
like the young of deer, elk, antelope, and other
ruminants, it can then be captured, and makes
no effort to escape. This, by many writers, has
been denounced as stupidity and dulness. As
a matter of fact, it is merely following out the

The Bison 147

protective instinct which is common to the young
of many large mammals, at a time when they are
without weapons for self-protection, and without
strength or speed to save themselves by flight.
At various times during the last two hundred
years, attempts have been made to domesticate
the buffalo, and with entire success. But these
attempts have never been continued long enough
to be productive of any economic results. Never-
theless, buffalo were kept in captivity from the
beginning of the eighteenth century, and toward
the end of that century were actually domesti-
cated, bred, and crossed with domestic cattle in
Virginia, and somewhat later in Kentucky. The
very full account given to Mr. Audubon by Mr.
Robert Wycliff, of Lexington, Kentucky, in 1843,
has often been quoted, and all the experiments
since made have confirmed the conclusions then
stated. It was proved, and is now well known,
that the buffalo, in domestication, are easily
handled, respect fences, and are but little more
difficult to control than domestic cattle; that the
male buffalo crosses readily with the domestic
cow; that the progeny of the two species are
fertile with either species and among themselves.
It has also been demonstrated that the cross-bred

148 The Bison

animal is larger than either parent, and so makes
a better beef animal. Besides, its hide yields a
robe which, if not equal to that of the buffalo, is,
at least, vastly superior to the hide of the ordinary
beef. More important than either the beef or the
robe, is the very greatly increased hardiness of the
cross-bred animal, which enables it to endure ex-
tremes of cold and snow, which would destroy
the ordinary domestic cattle.

From the days of Robert Wycliff, almost to the
time when Mr. C. J. Jones, of Kansas, began experi-
ments in breeding buffalo, little or nothing had
been done in this direction. A few years earlier
Mr. S. L. Bedson, of Stony Mountain, Mani-
toba, set to work at the same problem, and both
men met with abundant measure of success. Both
bred pure buffalo in considerable numbers, and
both succeeded in breeding the buffalo with the
domestic cow, and securing a progeny which was
remarkable for size and for the robes produced.
Indeed, Mr. Hornaday quotes Mr. Bedson as say-
ing that the three-quarter bred animal produces
“an extra good robe which will readily bring
forty to fifty dollars in any market where there
is a demand for robes.”

It is altogether possible that the time for

The Bison 149

establishing a race of buffalo cattle has past.
The buffalo are extinct, and the number of ani-
mals in captivity to be drawn on, very small.
Nevertheless, the great preponderance of bulls
among these domesticated buffalo, makes it pos-
sible that something in this direction might be
done, though the chances now are much against it.
The buffalo has often been broken to the yoke.
Robert Wycliff says of this animal, “He walks
more actively, and I think has more strength
than an ox of the same weight. I have broken
them to the yoke and found them capable of
making excellent oxen; and for drawing wagons,
carts, or other heavily laden vehicles on long
journeys, they would, I think, be greatly prefer-
able to the common ox.” Under the yoke, how-
ever, they are said to be somewhat difficult to _
control, and cases are cited where broken buffalo
have, for various causes, run away, to the great
detriment of the load they were hauling. In the
year 1874 a settler on Trail Creek, in Montana,
told me that he had a pair of bulls broken to the
yoke, and declared that they would haul more
than “any two yoke of cattle on the place.”
There is another reason besides the lack of
buffalo for thinking that no systematic attempt

150 The Bison

to cross these animals with domestic cattle will
ever be attempted. The days of free ranging,
where the cattle are turned out on the prairie to
look after themselves, winter and summer, are
almost over, and year by year the area of the free
range is becoming more and more contracted.
The advantages of great size and a valuable robe
would still be an attraction to the farmer; but the
hardiness which enables the half-breed animal to
endure almost any winter weather will soon cease
to be required, because the cattle of almost all
the western country will be kept under fence, and
fed on hay during the winter.

From time immemorial the buffalo furnished
food to the Indians, and with the coming into the
land of the white man it supported him also.
What the primitive method was by which the
Indians hunted buffalo we do not know, but at
the time the redmen became known to the
whites, when they were footmen, the only
method of securing this animal was by the sur-
round, or by driving it into pens from which the
buffalo could not escape, and where they were
easily destroyed. Such pens were built at the
foot of cut bluffs or low cliffs, over which the
buffalo were driven; or, in the more open and

The Bison 151

flat country, where ravines with steep sides were
not found, a long fenced causeway was often
built, on which the buffalo were driven, and
when reaching its end, the leaders, by reason of
the pressure of those behind, were forced to jump
into the pen, and the others followed, until all
were captured. Often, if the drive was made
over a high bluff, the fall killed many of the
beasts, and even when this did not take place,
many of the younger and weaker animals were
destroyed by their fellows in the tremendous
crush which took place within the pen.

No sooner did the buffalo find themselves con-
fined, than they began to race about the en-
closure, and the men standing on the logs which
formed its sides, shot them with their stone-
headed arrows as they ran by, until at length all
had fallen.

The principle of the foot surround was not
different from this. When a herd of buffalo
was found, the Indians waited for a day when
the wind did not blow, and then, creeping toward
the buffalo, they surrounded them on all sides.
When the line was fairly complete, one man
would show himself, and perhaps frighten the
buffalo by waving his robe at them. They

152 The Bison

would start to run, when the men stationed at
the point of the circle toward which they were
directing their course would show themselves,
toss their robes in the air, and turn them in
another direction. Thus, whichever way they
ran, they found people standing before them, and
soon they began to run around in a circle within
the ring of men, and continued to do this until
they became exhausted. Little by little the men
drew closer together, making the circle smaller,
and soon the buffalo were running near enough
to them for them to be shot by their arrows.

It did not always happen that the hunt was
successful. Sometimes in the pen a strong bull
might find a place where no one was standing,
and might leap over the barrier, or at least leap
on it, throwing his whole weight against it. Very
likely he would be followed by others, and per-
haps a number would succeed in surmounting
the wall; or they might even break it down, and
then the whole herd would stream out of the pen
and be lost. Sometimes, too, in the surround,
especially if the herd of buffalo was large, it was
found impossible to turn them, and they would
break their way through the ring of men. In
like manner, when, as sometimes happened, the

The Bison re3

Indians set up their lodges all about the herd,
the buffalo might yet find a way to break through
and escape.

If, however, all went well, and a good part of
the herd was killed, there was great rejoicing all
through the camp. Everybody was happy, since
now, for some days, food would be abundant,
and every one would have enough to eat; and
there is nothing that the Indian dreads so much

as hunger.

Later, after the Indians obtained horses and
iron-pointed arrows, and, later still, repeating
rifles, these old methods were all given up. It
was easier to chase the buffalo on horseback, and
their packhorses gave them a ready means for
bringing the spoils of the chase back to the camp.
Now, too, they used the lance in hunting, driving
the horse close up on the buffalo’s right side,
holding the lance across the body, and, with a
mighty two-handed thrust, sending the keen steel
deep into the animal’s vitals.

Perhaps no more exciting scene could be wit-
nessed than one of the old-time buffalo chases by
the Indians. Naked themselves, they rode their
naked horses, carrying their quivers of arrows on
their backs or by their sides, and their bows in

ioe The Bison

their hands. The good buffalo horses were swift
of foot to catch the cow, admirably trained for
running over the rough prairie, often dangerous
from badger holes or burrows of the prairie dog,
and knowing how to approach the buffalo, and;
also how to avoid its charge —trained, in fact,
just as well as the cow-pony is trained, which ,
knows exactly what is expected of him when
he is cutting cattle out of a bunch. The chase
>was conducted in silence, and the only sound
heard was the rumble of a thousand hoofs — dull
where the ground was soft, and sharp if it hard-
ened. If the herd was large, the scene was one
of great confusion. Buffalo and horses with their
riders were dimly seen amid the cloud of dust
thrown up by the fleeing herd. Horses were
constantly overtaking the buffalo, riders were
bending down, horses were sheering off, buffalo
were falling. The old bulls, passed by the swift
riders, were turning off and fleeing, singly or in
little groups, to right and to left, while the swifter
cows, with heads down and tails in air, were press-
ing forward in flight to escape the Indians, who
were riding with their rearmost ranks.
Not greatly differing from this, save that guns
were used and there was much yelling and noise,

The Bison 155

were the hunts of the wild Red River half-breeds.
These were pursued on horseback, and the men
were armed with the old Hudson Bay smooth-
bore flint-lock guns. Powder was carried in a
horn and balls in the mouth. When he had
discharged his gun, the hunter poured the powder
from the horn directly into the barrel, guessing
at the quantity, slipped a ball from the mouth
into the barrel, the gun was given a jar on the
saddle to settle the load, a little priming was
poured into the pan, and he was ready for
another shot.

On such hunts the Red River half-breeds
transported their families and their property
almost entirely in the well-known Red River
carts, each drawn by a single horse, and con-
taining, besides a load of baggage, a woman and
perhaps two or three children.

Besides these wholesale methods of taking
buffalo, of course they were killed singly by men
who crept close enough to them to drive even a
stone-headed arrow deep enough into the sides to
reach the life. Often, when the buffalo were in
situations where it was impossible to approach
them, men disguised as wolves crept in among
the herd, and killed buffalo with their arrows.

156 The Bison

Catlin and others have described and figured this
method of approach, which at the present day is
traditional only among the Indians; yet an old
friend, who died a few years ago, almost a hun-
dred years old, has told me that he had many
times killed buffalo in this way, either alone or
in company with some Indian friend.

Indians and_ half-breeds alike preserved the
flesh of the buffalo by drying it. The strips or
wide flakes of meat were cut about one-quarter
of an inch thick and hung on scaffolds exposed
to sun and air. In a day or two the meat was
thoroughly dried, when it was bent into proper
lengths, and either tied in bundles or done up in
parfleches. It was from this dried meat that the
well-known pemmican was made. The dried
meat was roasted over a fire of coals, and then
broken up by pounding with sticks on a hide, or
by pounding between two stones. This pulver-
ized flesh was mixed with the melted fat of the
buffalo, and after the whole mass had been thor-
oughly stirred, was packed in sacks made of
buffalo skin, which were then sewed up with
sinew, and as the mass gradually cooled the sack
became hard, and would keep for a very long
time.

The Bison 157

The killing of buffalo, as described, was in no
sense sport; instead, it was work of the hardest
kind. The swift ride over the dry plains through
the clouds of dust, the killing of the buffalo, and
finally the cutting up of the animals was physical
labor far harder than most of that performed by
civilized man. Usually, the buffalo were killed
far from water, and the severe work that the man
had been doing and the summer heat made him
very thirsty. It is not strange, then, that he
slaked his thirst by devouring the liver, sprinkled
with gall, or by eating raw the gelatinous nose of
the buffalo.

_ The description of a butchering, given by Au-
dubon in his “ Missouri River Journal,” is very
graphic, and is worth quoting here: —

“The moment that the buffalo is dead, three
or four hunters, their faces and hands often cov-
ered with gunpowder, and with pipes lighted,
place the animal on its belly, and, by drawing out
each fore and hind leg, fix the body so that it
cannot fall again; an incision is made near the
root of the tail, immediately above the root in
fact, and the skin cut to the neck, and taken off
in the roughest manner imaginable, downward
and on both sides at the same time. The knives

158 The Bison

are going in all directions, and many wounds
occur in the hands and fingers, but are rarely
attended to at this time. The pipe of one man
has perhaps given out, and with his bloody hands
he takes the one of his nearest companion, who
has his own hands equally bloody. Now one
breaks in the skull of the bull, and with bloody
fingers draws out the hot brains and swallows
them with peculiar zest; another has now
reached the liver, and is gobbling down enor-
mous pieces of it; while perhaps a third, who
has come to the paunch, is feeding luxuriously
on some — to me — disgusting-looking offal.
But the main business proceeds. The flesh is
taken off from the sides of the boss, or hump
bones, from where these bones begin to the very
neck, and the hump itself is thus destroyed.
The hunters gave the name of ‘hump’ to the
mere bones when slightly covered by flesh; and
it is cooked, and is very good when fat, young,
and well broiled. The pieces of flesh taken
from the sides of these bones are called leds,
and are the best portion of the animal when
properly cooked. The forequarters, or shoulders,
are taken off, as well as the hind ones, and the
sides, covered by a thin portion of flesh, called

The Bison 159

the dépouillé, are taken out. Then the ribs are
broken off at the vertebrae, as well as the boss
bones. The marrow-bones, which are those of
the fore and hind legs only, are cut out last.
The feet usually remain attached to these; the
paunch is stripped of its covering of layers of fat,
the head and backbone are left to the wolves.
The pipes are all emptied, the hands, faces, and
clothes all bloody, and now a glass of grog is
often enjoyed, as the stripping off the skin and
flesh of three or four animals is truly very hard
work. ... When the wind is high, and the buf-
faloes run toward it, the hunters’ guns often snap,
and it is during their exertions to replenish their
pans that the powder flies and sticks to the mois-
ture every moment accumulating on their faces;
but nothing stops these daring and usually pow-
erful men, who, the moment the chase is ended,
leap from their horses, let them graze, and begin
their butcher-like work.”

The Indian and the half-breed killed the buf-
falo for their support, — for food, clothing, shelter,
and many of their implements. The civilized
buffalo skinner exterminated it for its hides.
There was another class which did something
toward wiping out the buffalo, yet the numbers

160 The Bison

killed by them were inconsiderable in comparison
with those killed for commercial purposes. This,
class comprised those who ran buffalo for sport.
Buffalo-running was not a difficult art, nor es-
pecially exciting, except so far as it is exciting
to chase and overtake some creature that is try-
ing to escape. Provided a man had a good
horse and was fairly accustomed to riding, there
was little difficulty and little danger in the buffalo
chase. At the same time, the combination of the
swift ride, the rough country, the dust and dirt
thrown up by the flying herd, and the close prox-
imity of the great beasts have reduced many a
buffalo runner on his first chase to a pitch of
nervousness which made him do precisely the
wrong thing. There have been cases, not a few,
where riders, trying to kill buffalo with a pistol,
have shot their own horses instead of the buffalo ;
and at least one case came to my knowledge
where the excited hunter, riding up on the right
instead of the left side of the bull, and shooting
across his own body, managed to shoot himself
in the left arm.

There was something rather exhilarating in
the headlong ride after buffalo, a game not un-
like “follow my leader,” which boys play, where

The Bison 161

the leader chooses the roughest and most difficult
ground over which he can pass, and the follower
is obliged to take the same route. But buffalo-
hunting is now a sport of the distant past, and it
is needless to speak of it at any length.

In the days of its abundance the buffalo was a
most impressive species, and their enormous num-
bers have been a theme on which many writers
have delighted to linger. Adjectives have failed
them to describe the multitudes of buffalo seen,
and it was not unusual for men to travel long
distances among great herds, which made slow
way for them as they passed along. Many cal-
culations have been made of the numbers of
buffalo seen at one time; but, after all, these
can be little more than guesswork. Terms like
thousands and millions, so commonly used, have
little or no meaning, for we have no standard of
comparison by which to measure them. All the
earlier writers, however graphic their descriptions
of their numbers, fail to impress the reader, be-
cause no one could comprehend such numbers
except by seeing them. Dr. Allen, Mr. Horna-
day, Colonel Dodge, and many of the old explor-
ers, give much matter bearing on this subject.
A few lines from the Journal of Alexander Henry

162 The Bison

give some idea of their numbers on the Red
River. He says, under date of September 18,
1800: “I took my usual morning view from the
top of my oak, and saw more buffalo than ever.
They formed one body, commencing about half a
mile from camp, whence the plain was covered
on the west side of the river as far as the eye
could reach. They were moving slowly south-
ward, and the meadow seemed as if in motion.
This afternoon I rode a few miles up Park River.

The few spots of wood along it have been rav-

aged by buffalo; none but the large trees are
standing, the barks of which are rubbed perfectly
smooth, and heaps of wool and hair lie at the
foot of the trees. The small wood and brush

are entirely destroyed, and even the grass is not.

permitted to grow in the points of the wood.
The bare ground is more trampled by these cat-
tle than the gate of the farm yard.”

Even in recent times one might journey for
days at a time through herds, which to the eye
seemed absolutely to cover a blackened prairie,
and I myself have travelled for weeks through the

Northwest without, at any time during the day, |

being out of sight of buffalo. How many millions
there were in the great herds through which we

The Bison 163

used to pass, it is useless now to compute. They
have all gone. But over a vast extent of the
western country they have left memorials still
visible and long to endure in the deep trails
which furrow the prairie in all directions.
Other mementos still to be seen, and stirring
the heart of the old-timer, though to the man of
to-day they are without a meaning, are the huge
erratic boulders which lie here and there over
the prairie where they were dropped by the great
ice mass in its passage down from the highland.
(Against such boulders the buffalo used to rub
uv their bodies, and such masses of granite or of
flinty quartzite, polished and with their sharp
angles worn away by the rubbing against them
of the tough hides, may often be seen. About
such a rock, deep worn in the ground, is the
trench, where the bulls and the cows and the
younger animals once marched as they pushed
their sides against the hard rock, their hoofs
cutting the soil into fine dust to be blown away
by the wind. The angles of these old rubbing-
(stones are still discolored by the grease left on
them from the buffalo’s skins, and looking at
them, one might fancy that they had been used
only yesterday.

164 The Bison

Here, then, are monuments of imperishable
granite, fashioned by a race of dumb creatures,
and telling to him who can read their sculpturing
a long story of life and power and multitude for-
ever gone. From earliest time man has set up
all over the earth his enduring memorials to hold
the wonder of later ages; but of the races of
the beasts, which one has done this, save only the
bison ?

The Bison 165

AMERICAN BISON
(Bos Bison !)

The great elevation of the fore quarters, the
mass of long hair clothing the head, shoulders,
and fore part of the body, together with the pecul-
iar form of the head and horns, the latter of which
are cylindrical, serve at once to distinguish the
bison from the other members of the ox tribe.
Some of the points distinguishing the American
bison from its European cousin are that the mass
of hair on the fore quarters is longer, the form
of the skull is different, the horns are shorter,
thicker, blunter, and more sharply curved. In
the skull of the American animal the sockets
of the eyes have a more tubular form.

Height at shoulder about 6 feet; weight from |
15 to 20 hundredweight; an adult bull weighed
by W. T. Hornaday scaled 1727 pounds.

Distribution. — The greater portion of western
North America, ascending to the Great Slave Lake,
and descending to New Mexico and Texas; now
nearly exterminated. American writers recognize
two races (or species), the prairie bison (B. dzsonz
typicus) and the larger wood bison (2. dzsox atha-
basc@) of the forest highlands of the northwest.

1“ Records of Big Game,” Rowland Ward, third edition.

166

LENGTH

ON

OuTSIDE

CuRVE
—21}

7
203

CIRCUM-
FERENCE

1
15g

£5

The Bison

MEASUREMENTS OF HORNS

Tip To

Tip

21

WIDEST
INSIDE
SPREAD

LocaLity

35 Northern
outside Montana
304 | Wyoming

>
Western
Montana
163 Western
Montana
29 Sioux Country

Montana

Southwestern
Montana
254 | Wyoming

?

17} ?
BG Yellowstone,
Montana
Bighorn Mts.,
Wyoming
Colorado

?
Colorado
193 | Wyoming

Indian Terri-
tory, near Texas
North Park,
Colorado
?
?

1 Wood Bison.

OwNER

W. F. Sheard

Hon. F.
Thellusson

W. H. Root

P. Liebinger

The late
J. S. Jameson
Sir Greville
Smyth, Bart.
F. Sauter
H.R.H. the
Duke of Saxe-
Coburg and
Gotha
Theodore
Roosevelt
H.R.H. le Duc
d’Orléans
Viscount
Powerscourt
British Museum
Count E. Hoyos

Moreton
Frewen

Sir Edmund G.
Loder, Bart.

Duke of
Portland

Sir Edmund G.
Loder, Bart.

St. George
Littledale

Prince Henry of
Liechtenstein

Col. Ralph
Vivian

G. Wrey

Hon. Walter
Rothschild

tat MOUNTAIN SHEEP: HIS WAYS

By OWEN WISTER

oe

ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHEEP

THE MOUNTAIN SHEEP:
HIS WAYS

Upon a Sunday morning, the roth of July
1892, I awaked among my scanty yet entan-
gling Pullman blankets, and persuaded the broken-
springed window-shade of my lower berth to slide
upward sufficiently for a view of Livingston,
Montana. Outside I beheld with something
more than pleasure a fat and flourishing moun-
tainram. He was tethered. to a telegraph pole,
and he scanned with an indifference bred by
much familiarity our sleeping-car, which had
come from St. Paul, being dropped last night
from the coast-bound train, because it was this
morning to trundle its load of tourists up the
Yellowstone Park branch to Cinnabar. The
ram had been looking at Eastern tourists and
their cars long enough for the slow gaze of his
eye to express not a kindred but the same con-
tempt which smouldered in the stare of the
Indians at Custer station, of the cow punchers

171

172 The Mountain Sheep

at Billings, of every Rocky Mountain creature,
indeed, beneath whose observation the Eastern
tourist passes. Dear reader, go stand opposite
the lion at the zoo if you don’t know what I
mean. So patent was the stigma cast that it
fantastically came into my head to step down and
explain to the animal that I was not a tourist,
that I had hunted and slain members of his
species before now, and should probably do so
again. And while thus I sat speculating among
the Pullman blankets, the ram leaped irrelevantly
off the earth, waved his fore legs, came down, ran
a tilt at the telegraph pole as though at a quintain,
and the next instant was grazing serene on the
flat with an air of having had no connection
whatever with the late disturbance.

What had started him off like that? Extreme
youth? No; for when I came to hear about
him, he was five years old—a maturity corre-
sponding in us men to about thirty. It was
simply his own charming temperament. No
locomotive had approached; moreover for loco-
motives he, as I was later to observe, did not
care a hang; no citizen old or young of either
sex had given him offence; nor was there stir of
any kind in Livingston, Montana, this fine early

The Mountain Sheep 173

Sunday morning. When I presently stood on
the platform, only the wind was blowing down
from the sunny snow-fields, and that not bleakly,
while from high invisible directions came thinly
a pleasant tankling of cow-bells.

Not two minutes had I been on the platform
when the ram did it again. Yes, it was merely
his charming temperament; and often since,
very often, when encompassed with ponderous
acquaintance, have I envied him his blithe and
relaxing privilege. I was now thankful to learn
that the branch train had still some considerable
time to wait for the train from Tacoma, before it
could take me from the ram’s company; no such
good chance to watch a live healthy mountain
sheep on his own native heath was likely again
to be mine, and after breakfast I sought his
Owner at once.

“Tt’s a fine dy,” said the owner.

“ And a very fine ram,” I assured him.

“He’s quite tyme,” the owner went on. “ You
can have him for five hundred.”

“You're a long way from London,” was my
comment; and he asked if I, too, were English.
But I was not, nor had I any wish to bear away
the ram, skipping and leaping into civilization.

174 The Mountain Sheep

Three hundred pounds would, I suppose,
have been a little heavier than he was, but not
much; he stood near as high as my waist, and
he had at some period of his long, long ancestry
marched across to us from Asia upon his lengthy
un-sheeplike legs—skipped over the icy straits
before Adam (let alone Behring) was in the
world, and while the straits themselves waited for
the splitting sea to break the bridge of land be-
tween Kamchatka and Alaska. This is the
best guess which science can make concerning
our sheep’s mysterious origin. Upon our soil,
none of nature’s graveyards hold his bones pre-
served until late in the geological day; earlier
than the glacial period neither he nor his equally
anomalous comrade, the white goat, would seem
to have been with us; and we may comfortably
suppose that sheep and goat took up their jour-
ney together and came over the great old
Aleutian bridge which Behring found later in
fragments. Having landed up there in the well-
nigh Polar north, they skipped their way east
and south among our Pacific and Rocky Moun-
tains, until, by the time we ourselves came over
to live in the North American continent, they
had —the sheep especially —spread themselves

The Mountain Sheep 175

widely, and were occupying a handsome domain
when we met them.
“Among other things we procured two horns

of the animal . .. known to the Mandans by
the name of ahsahta ... winding like those
of a ram.”

This, so far as I know, is the first word of the
mountain sheep recorded by an American. Thus
wrote Lewis on December the twenty-second,
1804, being then in winter camp with the Mandan
Indians, not many miles up the river from where
to-day the Northern Pacific’s bridge joins Bis-
marck to Mandan. We find him again, on the
twenty-fifth of the May following, when he has
proceeded up the Missouri a little beyond the
Musselshell, writing, “In the course of the day
we also saw several herds of the big-horned
animals among the steep cliffs on the north, and
killed several of them;” as to which one of his
fellow explorers correctly comments in his own
record, “But they very little resemble sheep,
except in the head, horns, and feet.” It is not
worth while to quote a later reference made when
the party was near the Dearborn River, north,
sixty miles or so, of where now stands the town
of Helena.

176 The Mountain Sheep

Thus it is to be seen that Meriwether Lewis,
private secretary to President Jefferson and
commander of that great expedition, met the
mountain sheep in Dakota, and from there to
the Rocky Mountains grew familiar with him;
though not so familiar as to prevent his later
making a confusion between sheep and goats,
which, being handed down, delayed for many
years a clear knowledge of these animals. To
this I shall return when goats are in ques-
tion. |

Until very lately, until the eighties, that is to
say, sheep were still to be found in plenty where
Meriwether Lewis found them among the Bad
Lands of Dakota; and they dwelt in most ranges
of the Western mountains from Alaska to Sonora.
They had not taken to the peaks exclusively
then; the great table-land was high enough for
them. I very well recall a drive in July, 1885,
when, from the wagon in which I sat, I saw a
little band of them watching us pass, in a country
of sage-brush and buttes so insignificant as not to
figure as hills upon the map. That was between
Medicine Bow and the Platte River. To meet
the bighorn there to-day would be a very ex-
traordinary circumstance; and as for Dakota,

ALERT — (Ovis stoner)

ns at eve
TS aS tie
‘ = 4 ¢ x a,
- pe -

2 va bd ru
as ee oS eS
Ave

°
Se a \
=

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-
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e i nd
¥ 7 =
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7 a re

The Mountain Sheep 179

there too has civilization arrived; and you will
find divorces commoner than sheep —and less
valuable.

It is Gass whom I have cited above as to the
scant likeness between this wild so-called sheep
and the usual sheep of our experience; and it
was Gass whose word I remembered this Sun-
day morning at Livingston, while I stood taking
my fill of observation. The ram, as his owner
had assured me, was in all truth quite “tyme”;
and you could examine him as near as you
wished. I took hold of his rope and pulled him
to me, and rubbed his nose. Like a sheep?
I have already spoken of his long legs. I now
looked him over carefully for a sign of anything
in the nature of fleece. There was no sign.
Short hair, in texture not unlike the antelope’s
and in color not far from that gray we see in
fishing-line, covered him close and thick. Upon
his neck and shoulders it merged with a very
light reddish brown, and on his rump it became
a patch much lighter, though not white. In fact,
the hue of his coat varied subtly all over him;
and I am tempted to remark in this connection
that in describing the color of wild animals most
of us have been apt to make our assertions far

180 The Mountain Sheep

too rigid. Animals there are, of course, com-
pletely white, or black, and so forth; but many,
the more you scrutinize them, the more reveal
gradations, as this ram did; gray fishing-tackle
is only a rough impression of his tint upon the
10th of July; on December the 1st of that same
year I saw him again, and his hair had darkened
to something like a Maltese cat’s. Furthermore,
I have seen other sheep in summer that struck
me, some as lighter, and some as darker, than the
gray of fishing-tackle. And what, shall we infer,
do these variations import? Adjustments to
climate and environment, state of the individual’s
age and health, or several distinct species of
sheep? I think I should be shy of the last in-
ference unless I were prepared to accept a differ-
ence in the color of the eyes and hair of two
brothers as being a basis sufficient to class them
as separate subspecies of man. It is a dear
thought to many of us that some mountain, some
lake, some river, some street, or even (rather than
nothing at all) some alley, shall be labelled with
our name, and thus bear it down the ages; and
from this very human craving our zodlogists are
not wholly exempt; but I have been taught to
doubt that of the mountain sheep, the Ovzs cana-

The Mountain Sheep 181

densis' (or Ovzs cervina, as some books still have
it), more than one or two subdivisions will prove,
in the end, valid enlargements of our knowledge.
These are Ovzs dallz,? a white variety in central
Alaska, north of latitude 60°, and (perhaps) Ovzs
stone2, a dark variety with horns more slender
and outward curving, in Alaska and North British
Columbia. The four other would-be subspecies
have been set down as Ovzs canadensis audu-
dont, Ovis nelsoni’ Ovits mexicana, and Ovzs

1 Dark brown, shading to tan and ecru, tinged with grayish blue;
large, heavy boned; massive horns curved close to head, well flat-
tened, deeply corrugated on upper rim, usually battered at the points
in the older rams. Range the Rocky Mountains north from the
Colorado River to the head waters of the Peace River, British
Columbia. Range in upper edge of timber line.

2 White. Summer coat of a rusty hue. Not so large as Cana-
densis. Horns white, curved well away from head; not so deeply
corrugated, less massive than Canadensis. All of Rocky Mountains
north of 60° N. L., and Alaskan Mountains in Western Alaska Range,
above timber line.

8 The darkest of all the sheep, shading from light to very dark
gray tinged with brown. Horns long and graceful but slender,
spreading farther from the head than those of any species. Range
the Rocky Mountains between 55° and 60° N. and in the Cassiar,
Campbell, and Simson mountains farther west and north to 62° N.

4 Light brown to ecru tinged with drab. Horns similar to Cana-
densis. Range the semi-desert country in Southern states from
Texas to California.

5 Darker than /Ve/sonz, but not so dark as Canadensis. Size
large. Horns broad and massive; molar teeth larger than in any
known American sheep; tail vertebra long. Range Chihuahua
Mountains in Northern and Western Mexico.

182 The Mountain Sheep

fannint.. These four may be considered not so
much varieties of sheep as works of fiction.

As to the general name, all are agreed to let
him pass conveniently as a sheep, — conveniently,
but with a number of reserves which science can
state. He has, for instance, some things in com-
mon with the goat family. Indeed, science can,
in final analysis, hardly separate sheep from goat.
Relatives in this continent our Ovzs possesses
absolutely none; but there are cousins to be
found in ‘Kamchatka, Tibet, and Indias@and
I have been told by one hunter that the moufflon
of Corsica resembles him not a little. I’ve for-
gotten to mention that he hasn't any tail to
speak of. So now at length, you, who have
never looked upon him, see him, if you can,
through my unscientific vision, as I rubbed his
nose at Livingston, Montana: tall almost as a
deer, shaped almost like a heavy black-tail deer,
close haired, grayish, tailless, with unexpected
ram’s horns curving round his furry ears and
forward, with eyes dark yellow and grave, and
with the look of a great gentleman in every line

1 White and gray. In size about that of the Dald and Stonez.
Horns white; curved closer to head than Daddi and Stonez. Range
Upper Yukon River. Range more in the timber than Szomez or
Dalii ; habits very much those of Canadenszs.

The Mountain Sheep 183

of him. The tame sheep is hopelessly dourgeozs ;
but this mountain aristocrat, this frequenter
of clean snow and steep rocks and silence, has,
even beyond the bull elk, that same secure, un-
conscious air of being not only well bred, but
high bred, not only game but fzze game, which
we still in the twentieth century meet sometimes
among men and women. What gives distinc-
tion? Who can say? It is to be found among
chickens and fish. What preserves it we know;
and our laws will in the end extirpate it. Many
people already fail to recognize it, either in life
or in books. But nature scorns universal suf-
frage; and when our houses have ceased to con-
tain gentlefolk, we shall still be able to find them
in the zodlogical gardens.

During my interview with the sheep, freight
trains had passed once or twice without disturb-
ing him or attracting his notice; but as I walked
away and left him grazing, there came by a
switching-engine that made a great noise. This
didn’t frighten him, but set him in a rage. Once
again he leaped into the air waving his fore legs
and eccentrically descended to charge with fury
his telegraph pole. Yes, he was “tyme,” if by
that word one is to understand that he was shy

184 The Mountain Sheep

neither of men nor locomotives; but just here
there is a hole in our dictionary. Do you
imagine that five years of captivity are going to
tame the blood and the nerves of a creature that
came over the Aleutian bridge from Asia during
the Pleistocene, and has been running wild in the
mountains until 1887? He was “tame” enough
to pay you no attention — until he wanted to kill
you; and this was what he did want when I saw
him on the first day of the following December.
Then was his rutting time; he was ready to
attack and destroy with his powerful horns any-
thing in Livingston; and so it was in a stable
that I found the poor fellow, took a peep through
the quarter-opened door, where his owner had
shut him and tied him in the dark, away from
his natural rights of love and war. I noted his
winter coat of maltese, I heard his ominous
breathing, I saw the wild dangerous lustre in
his rolling eye; and that was my farewell to
the captive.

So good a chance to study a live ram I have
never had again. Upon the other occasions when
I have been able to approach them at all, study
has not been my object, and the distance between
us has been greater; but on one happy later day,

The Mouniain Sheep 185

I watched a ewe with her lamb for the good part
of a morning.

In the summer of 1885, as I have said, the
mountain sheep had not yet forsaken quite acces-
sible regions in Wyoming; and very likely he still
came down low in most of his old haunts. The
small band which I saw was not many miles from
one of the largest ranches in that country, and
the creatures stood in full sight of a travelled
road, — not at that time a stage-road, but one that
might be daily frequented by people riding or
people driving on their way north from Medi-
cine Bow into the immense cattle country of the
Platte and of the Powder River still farther
beyond, all the way to the Bighorn Mountains.
Those very mountains that bear the sheep’s
name and were once so full of sheep as well as
of every other Rocky Mountain big game are
now sacked and empty. Hidden here and there,
some may exist yet, but as fugitives in a sanctu-
ary, not as free denizens of the wild. I saw three
years bring this change which thirty years had
not brought; and in 1888 you would have
looked_in_ vain, I think, for sheep on the road
from Medicine Bow to Fetterman. I found
them that year at no such stone’s throw from

186 The Mountain Sheep

the easy levels of the earth, but up in the air a
great distance.

The Washakie Needle, for steepness, is truly a
heartrending country, and that is why the sheep
|are there. In it rise Owl Creek, Grey Bull, and
certain other waters tributary to the Bighorn;
and I have never gone with pack-horses in a
worse place. A worse place, in fact, I have never
seen; though they tell me that where Green
River heads on the Continental Divide (in plain
sight from the Washakie Needle across the inter-
vening Wind River country) you can, if you so
desire, enmesh yourself, lose yourself among
cleavages and cafons that slice and slit the
mountains to a shredded labyrinth. From the
edge of that rocky web I stepped back, discour-
aged, a year later; and for vertical effects the
Washakie Needle remains, as they say, “good
enough” for me. We struggled to it through
a land of jumping-off places, a high, bald, bris-
tling clot of mountains that, just beyond the
southeast corner of the Yellowstone Park, come
from several directions to meet and tie themselves
into this rich tangle of peaks, ledges, and descents.
You really never did see such a place! and my
memory of it is made lurid by an adventure with

UNDER A HOT SKY — (Ovis nelsont)

The Mountain Sheep 189

a thunder-storm which cannot be chronicled here
because it happened on one of the days when we
found elk, but most lamentably missed our sheep.
Missing a sheep, let me say, is of all missing the
most thorough that I know.

Encouragement, false encouragement, had come
to us after our very first night in camp by the
Washakie Needle. The next night we had wild
mutton for supper. That initial day, Wednesday,
August twenty-ninth, brought us this sweet luck,
sweet not alone in its promise of more (for the
country was evidently full of sheep), but almost
equally because of late, during our perilous jour-
ney, we had come down to bacon. Now, to be a
hunting party, to be in the Shoshone Mountains
in August, 1888, and to be eating dacon, was to be
humiliated ; only our hard travelling that allowed
no attending to other business could excuse such
a bill of fare; hence did our pride and our stom-
achs hail this wild mutton. There was not much
of him to hail: he was a young ram; and be-
tween six of us, after bacon... need I say
more?

It had been my intention, until this very para-
graph, to skip what happened next day. But I
am growing confidential; these shall be the con-

1g0 The Mountain Sheep

fessions of a bad shot. I have read in books and
in periodicals so many pages where none but
good shots were ever fired; I have listened —
merciful heaven !— to the tales of my sportsman
friends; and, reader, unless you are not at all like
me, you have read such pages too, have listened
to such stories too, and you have found a monot-
ony creep over these triumphs of other people,
—the hair’s-breadth climb, the noiseless approach,
the long-range shot, one hundred yards, two hun-
dred, five hundred, with sights not adjusted but
elevation merely guessed at, and the inevitably
unerring result; and in the midst of all this
asphyxiating skill, you have sometimes longed for
one pure, fresh breath of failure — have you not?
Well, at all events you shall read of mine; and,
besides variety, there is a second good reason for
this; you could not better learn the ways of the
mountain sheep, which, so far as I know them, I
am attempting to tell you.

Four of us were so foolish as to set out together
upon this evil morning; two parties, that is, of
the guide and the guided. There is never any
gain in doing this, and almost always loss. The
attention which you should be giving to your
business is divided by conversation, or by waiting

The Mountain Sheep 1g1

for some member of the party who has fallen be-
hind; and no matter how silent you keep your-
selves, four people are sure at some wrong
unless circumstances make : wise that there
should be two of you—steep country does make
this wise — but assuredly never go after game in
fours, as we two white men and two Indians went
now. We labored and we labored and we finally
were upon the top instead of at the bottom of
something. It was no more than a ridge, not
high, that everywhere dropped off into our own
valley or the next one; but two sweating hours
had gone in getting merely here, and here our
eight eyes discerned sheep, quite a_band of them.
Not, however, before the sheep had discerned us
four wily hunters. We did not know this then,
because they stayed still where they seemed to be
grazing. It was a great way off in a straight line
through the air, for the sheep were small dots
upon the mountain; and there was no straight
line for us to reach them by. We labored and we
labored down to a new bottom and upward ona
new slope, and made a most elaborate “sneak,”
crouching, and stopping, and generally manceu-
vring among stones, gravel, and harsh tufts of

192 The Mountain Sheep

growth; so did we come with splendid caution
upon where the sheep had been, and, lifting our
heads, beheld the vacuum that they had left, and
themselves contemplating us from the extreme
top of the mountain. Iam sure that you know
how it feels to have your foot step into space at
what you thought was the bottom of the staircase.
There is a gasp of very particular sensation con-
nected with this, and that is what I had now,
followed at once by the no less distasteful retro-
spect of myself with my half-cocked rifle, crawl-
ing carefully for yards upon my belly, while the
sheep watched me doing it. There they were on
the top of this new mountain, away far above us,
and we four hunters proceeded to go on wrong,
as we had begun. I have forgotten to mention
that, among our other follies, we had brought
horses. Never do sucha thing! If you are not
in training good enough to hunt mountain sheep
on your own legs, wait and climb about for a few
days until you have got your breath. What my
horse did for me on this precious day was this:
our hills were too steep for him to carry me up,
so I led him; they were too steep for him to carry
me down, so I led him; and betweenwhiles, when
I was stalking sheep, I naturally had to leave him

The Mountain Sheep 193

behind, and naturally had to go back for him
when the stalk was over. You will have by this
time but a middling opinion of my common
sense; but please bear in mind that Shoshone
Indians invariably hunt with horses, and that in
those days I was still too much one of the “ guided ”
to be equal to dictating to any Indian what trail
we should go, and in what manner we should hunt.
This entire hunt of 1888, from the distant Tetons
and the waters of Snake River over to the Wa-
shakie Needle and Owl Creek, is a tale of struggle
between ourselves and our red-skinned guides ;
we were beginning to know the mountains, to
crave exploration, to try the unbeaten path; and
for an Indian (though you would never suspect it
until you suffered from it) the wzbeaten path is
the one that he never wishes to try and will do
all things to escape — even to deserting you and
going home.

We hunters now set our legs to new laboring,
and presently were again weltering in sweat, and
could look down into a third valley similar to the
two we had so painfully quitted. Down at the
bottom of this new gash in the hills went a little
stream like all the others, and beyond bristled
interminably the knife-like intersections of the

194 The Mountain Sheep

mountains. We had placed our sheep behind a
little rise along the summit, and between this and
ourselves some three hundred yards still inter-
vened. We were, of course, much above where
any trees grew, and the ground was of that stony
sort with short growth and no great rocks immedi-
ately near; a high, lumpy pasture of mounds and
hollows, wet with snows but lately melted, hailed
upon often, rained on but seldom. Lower down,
this pasture country (which made the top of all
but the highest and severest mountains) fell away
in descents of gravel and sheer plunges of rock.
To get closer to our sheep we now discovered we
must go down some of this hill we had just come
up; they were on the watch, but were fortunately
watching the wrong place, and we all sat down
in happy pride for a consultation. The other
side of the hill had turned out suddenly to be a
precipice, a regular jumping-off one, that went
a long way and ended in a crumble of shifting
stones, and then took a jump or two more and so
reached the water at the distant bottom. This
side was our only possible course, and we took
another look at the sheep. They had given up
watching, and in joy we started for them quickly.
We had so skilfully chosen the ground for our

The Mountain Sheep 195

approach that we were screened by a succession
of little rises and hollows which lay between us
and the sheep. This time, this time, there
was to be no crawling up to find a vacuum, no
raising your head to discover the departed sheep
taking a bird’s-eye view of you! What the
hearts of the other hunters did, I don’t know,
but my heart thumped with vindictive elation
as we sped crouching among the little inter-
vening hollows, perfectly hidden from the sheep
and drawing close to them at last. Only one
more rise and hollow lay between us and where
they were pasturing; and over that rise we
hastened straight into the laps of some_twenty
sheep we had known nothing about; they were
all lying down. Neither had they known any-
thing about us; the surprise was mutual. All
round me I saw them rise, as it were, like one
man and take to diving over the precipice. Be-
wilderment closed over me like a flood; all my
senses melted into one blurred pie of perception
in which I was aware only of hind legs and _hop-
ping. Frightful language was pouring from me,
but I didn’t hear what it was; all was a swirl and
scatter of men and sheep. Not one of us hunters
was ready with his gun or his intelligence. We

196 The Mountain Sheep

indiscriminately stampeded to the edge, and there
went the sheep, hustling down over the stones,
sliding, springing, and dissolving away. And
now, suddenly, when it was of no use at all, we
remembered that we carried rifles, and like a
chorus in a comic opera we stood on the brow of
the mountain, concertedly working the levers,
firing our Winchesters into space.

It’s all fifteen years ago; yet as I read over my
relentless camp-diary, I blush in spite of laughter ;
it’s hot work staring truth in the face! And now
comes the last feeble pop of the ridiculous. We
turned our heads, and beheld the sheep we had
come for, the sheep we had climbed two moun-
tains for, the sheep we had at length got within
a hundred yards of, just disappearing over a final
ridge so far away that there remained to them no
color, and only one dimension—length. They
looked like a handful of toothpicks. They natu-
rally had not been idle while we were so busy;
while we were losing our heads, they had kept
theirs; and during that brief fusillade of ours —
the whole preposterous affair could not have filled
more than three minutes — they had put such a
stretch of ups and downs between us, that going
after them any more was not to be thought of.

The Mountain Sheep 197

We stood at the empty top of the mountain
with our ruined day. There was not a live ani-
mal in sight anywhere. Those that jumped into
the valley were lost among the pines, and warned
about us beyond retrieve. We had banged away
at such a rate up here that a wide circle of sheep
must be apprised of our neighborhood. Why had
we doneit? For just the same reason that a num-
ber of brave persons ran away suddenly at Bull
Run as if perdition were at their heels. Surprise,
I take it, is at the bottom of the most unaccount-
able acts of men. And if you wonder why our
two Indians were surprised, I can only answer
with a theory of mine that Indians who hunt on
horseback have small knowledge of mountain
sheep. Antelope, deer, white-tail and black, and
even elk, can be, and are constantly thus hunted
by the Indians; but when it comes to climbing
where the horses cannot go, I suspect that his
rider seldom goes either. Looking back, I see
now that this whole excursion was conducted
ignorantly, and that our guides (both of them
excellent hunters of other game) neglected the
very first principle here, namely, to get to the
top of the mountains and hunt down.

We returned our long way to camp, and the

198 The Mountain Sheep

elk that one of us shot at sundown made no
atonement for our melancholy farce. My diary
concludes, “So ended Thursday, August 30, a
most instructive day, full of weather, wind, and
experience.”

By breakfast we were bearing up a little, mak-
ing much of the fact that, after all, the sheep we
had seen were only ewes and lambs. This would
not have caused us to spare them, to be sure; we
were out of fresh meat when we saw them; and
though the head and horns of a ewe do not make
a noble trophy for the sportsman, they represent
hard work, and are decidedly better than nothing
at all when you are a beginner, and hungry.

We took another course, making for moun-
tains on the side of the valley opposite from
yesterday’s route. My Indian was not hopeful.
“Too much shoot,” he remarked. “Run away.”
But presently we passed very fresh tracks, and
began one of those ascents where you are continu-
ally sure that the next top is the real top. We
had come looking for the sheep at a season when
he is living mostly upon the roof of his house.
He, with the goat, inhabits, it may be fairly
said, the tallest mansion of all our ruminants;
indeed, you may put the whole case thus: —

The Mountain Sheep 199

Our Rocky Mountains are a four-story build-
ing. The bottom is the sage-brush and cotton-
wood, the second is pines and quaking-asp, the
third is willow bushes, wet meadows, and mo-
raines, and the fourth is bald rocks and snow-
fields. The house begins about five thousand
feet high, and runs to fourteen thousand. We
have nothing to do with the prairie-dog and
others that live in the cellar; it is the antelope
to which the first floor belongs, and also the
white-tail deer, which, however, gets up a little into
the second. The elk, the black-tail, and the mule-
deer possess second and third stories in common,
while the fourth is the exclusive territory of the
sheep and the goat. But here is the difference;
these latter (the sheep, certainly) descend to all
the other stories if the season drives or the humor
suits them; they go from roof to ground, while
the other animals seldom, save when hunted, are
to be met above or below their assigned levels.
I have met a sheep on Wind River in July where
the sage-brush was growing, and another on a
wooded foot-hill just above Jackson’s Lake.

This day we went to the fourth story by a
staircase dear to the heart of a sheep. I mounted
through an uncanny domain where all about me

200 The Mountain Sheep

stood little pillars of round stones baked together
in mud, and planted on end, each supporting a
single rock of another color set upon them trans-
versely; shafts of necromancy they would have
seemed in the age of witches, altars which might
flame by night while some kind of small, naked
beings with teeth held rites over the traveller’s
crushed body, for from one’s feet here the little
stones rolled down to right and left into depths
invisible. You who have not seen cannot imag-
ine how here and there in the Rocky Mountains
these masonries of nature suggest the work not
of men but demons. Silence drew around me as
I passed upward through the weird dwarf Stone-
henge; and on top we found ourselves looking
down the other side at a gray stump which pres-
ently moved. The glasses showed us the stump’s
legs and fine curling horns; and our hearts,
which had been for some time heavy at the poor
luck, grew light. Only, how to get at him?

We had almost given up the game when we
spied the ram; we had come so far for so long;
and we now had been sitting upon — almost
straddling —this ultimate ridge, with the Indian
every little while lugubriously repeating, “No
sheep.” The ram had not a suspicion of us, and

SURPRISED (White Sheep — Ouvis dalli’)

ne

The Mountain Sheep 203

presently lay down in the sun near the bottom
of a rocky gulch. The whole of the gulch
we could not see, not even when we had crawled
down a side of the mountain, an endless surface
of rolling stones with scanty patches of grass
and an occasional steadfast rock. This descent
seemed the most taxing effort yet. It was nearly
always (and sometimes quite) impossible to stir a
foot or a hand, or shift any fraction of my weight,
without starting a rippling stream of stones that
chuckled and bounced and gathered noise as
they flowed downward, and finally sprang into a
rocky chasm which gave out hollow roars. [|
often felt certain these sounds must reach the
ram; but they were only next door to him, so to
speak, and separated by the tilted wall of moun-
tain which divided his gulch from the one down
the side of which I was so very gradually making
my way. I don’t believe the whole distance could
have been more than three hundred yards; yet I
was nearly thirty minutes accomplishing it with
the help of the grass tufts and every other fixture
that came within available reach in this sliding
sea of stones. I at length arrived where I wanted
to be, and a truly unkind thing happened: I was
taken with “buck-fever”! It didn’t prevent my

204 The Mountain Sheep

finally getting a shot in; but here is the whole
adventure.

I lifted myself and looked over the edge into
the next gulch. There was the ram, who saw me
at the same moment, and rose. I probably missed
him; for after my shot he continued to walk
toward me in a leisurely manner, not fifty yards
distant, I should think, down in his gulch.
Whether I fired at him again or not, I caw’t re-
mentber, —couldn’t remember that same evening
when I tried to put the whole event faithfully
down in my diary! Buck-fever is not the only
reason for this uncertainty; for now, from behind
every rock below me, horns rose up lke tricks
out of a trap-door, apparitions of horns every-
where, an invasion of mountain sheep. They
came straight up to me, — this was the most up-
setting part of it all. Not one did I see running
down the gulch; they hadn’t made me out, or
made anything out, save that some noise had
disturbed them. They came up and up around
me, passing me, steadily coming and going on
over the mountain while my buck-fever raged.
“TI saw their big grave eyes and the different
shades of their hair, and noticed their hoofs
moving — but whether they came by fast or slow,

The Mountain Sheep 205

or what number there were, I cannot remember
at all.” Such are the actual words I wrote not
more than six hours later, and I am glad to
possess this searching record of that day and of
my bygone state of mind; for with the best
honesty in the world no man can from memory
alone rebuild the minute edifice of truth that has
been covered by the heap of fifteen gathering
years. So I stood, crazy and inefficient, upon the
mountains, and after a little no more sheep were
there. A speck of conscious action remained
with me, namely, that during the passage of the
sheep I had held myself enough in control to get
“a bead” on the broadside of two successively ;
I remembered following them along for a moment
with my rifle before pulling the trigger. But
these I never saw again, and know not where I
hit them —if hit them I did. One trophy re-
mains to show for this day. A ram that had
been shot at some moment of the invasion re-
turned to the gulch where I was, and stood at a
short distance above me; and then I succeeded
in placing one shot where I meant it to go.
The visions of this band, as it scattered in twos
and threes after crossing my gulch, would incline
me to guess there must have been from fifteen to

206 The Mountain Sheep

twenty of them—all rams. Their sex is quite
certain; the most intense impression that was
given to my unstrung perceptions is of their
huge curving horns and their solemn eyes. It is
hateful to think that some of them were hurt and
so went off to limp, or to die; and I am thankful
to have but very few memories of wanton shoot-
ing, and some consoling ones of temptations
resisted. These rams mostly escaped the indis-
criminate blasts from my rifle; of this I am sure.
I saw them, high and low, near and far, scuttling
into safety over the steep ridges, or down into
unseen cafions; and upon presently searching
the vicinity, we found but one trace of blood. As
for the buck-fever, it was the first seizure that I
ever had, and it has proved the last. Why it
should have held off in previous years and come
down upon me in 1888, who shall say? You
will wonder as much as I do that a silver-tip
bear did not give me the slightest touch of it
in July, 1887. A bear is more important game
than a sheep; this grizzly was the first I had
ever seen, and I was less experienced. Excita-
bility is a matter of temperament that varies in-
finitely; but this scarcely explains why, with a
bear to shoot, no cucumber could have been

The Mountain Sheep 207

cooler than I was one year, and why the next,
with these rams, I seem to have been a useless
imbecile. The unexpected apparition of so many
animals does not account for it, because when I
raised myself to look over the ridge before my
first shot that brought them into sight, I was
shaking thoroughly.

These proceedings did not, at any rate, impair
appetite. With the flavor of elk, deer, antelope,
bear, and even porcupine, we were familiar; but
wild mutton was still a great novelty, and we
found it the most palatable of all. I say “we
found it” and not “it was,” because I have found
a lump of dough sponged round a tin plate full
of bacon grease so very delicious! The romance
of wild game so mixes with its taste that we
carve a venison steak with unction and respect.
Yet I have come almost to think that our good
old friend roast beef is more savory than any-
thing we can find in the woods. If it is merely
the pleasure of the table that you seek, take a
good walk every day in the park, or even just
up and down town, and the meats from your
kitchen (if your lot is blest with a kitchen) will
be superior to all the meats of camp.

I become, as I look back, surer than ever that

208 The Mountain Sheep

our Indians knew not much more than we did
ourselves about the habits of the mountain sheep,
and that they did as little reasoning as we did.
On the day preceding this, what had been our
experience? To run into bands of ewes and
lambs. If the women and children were thus
off by themselves in the month of August, it was
no great jump to conclude that the men must
be keeping each other company somewhere else.
When we spied that ram down the gulch sun-
ning himself, we should have tried to ascertain
whether or not he was alone. As a matter of
natural history, the summer season does find
the Ovzs canadensis, as well as many other of
the ruminants, thus separated by sex; and the
chances are that if you meet a ewe she is not far
from more, and that a ram had better not be pre-
sumed solitary until his individual habit has been
so proved. You are not likely to find ewes and
rams together till the rutting season,’ in Decem-
ber. I have read in some book, or books, that
the lambs are dropped in March, but I think this
is a somewhat early date, or, rather, that many

1 The ram’s horns cease growing at the time of the rutting sea-
son, and do not begin again until the spring brings nourishing food.
This causes the rings on the horns, it is said, which indicate the
number of winters old the sheep is.

The Mountain Sheep 209

come in April, and that it is scarcely correct to
limit their season to the single month. The
lambs, from the time of their birth on into the
late fall, follow their careful mothers — receive, in
fact, a half-year’s bringing up. And I had, one
day in September, 1896, the singular good fortune
to watch a mamma with her child for a period
even longer than my observation of the ram at
Livingston.

The Tetons lie just south of the Yellowstone
Park, and directly upon the borders of Wyoming
and Idaho. Any recent map might seem to prove
this geography inaccurate, because, as I under-
stand it, a late extension of the timber reservation
reaches below these mountains, and most wisely
includes both them and Jackson’s Lake with the
whole piece of country eastward to the Conti-
nental Divide. Of all places in the Rocky Moun-
tains that I I know, it is the most_ beautiful ; ‘and,
as it lies too 00 high for man n to ‘build and prosper
in, its trees and waters should be kept from man’s
irresponsible destruction; those forests feed the
great river system of the Columbia and Snake.
But I have been a poacher, according to the
recent map. In 1896, however, the line was
north of me by a few miles; and the day before

210 The Mountain Sheep

I saw the ewe and the lamb, I had shot a ewe.
It is, I believe, considered unsportsmanlike to do
this; I have never seen the sportsman yet, though,
who would not cheerfully bring home a ewe to an
empty larder. Our larder was empty, even of fish,
which had been plentiful until we had climbed up
here among the Tetons, where the brooks ran too
small for fish.

My object this second day was to find, if I
could, a ram; and it proved one of those occa-
sions (sadly rare in my experience) when, being
disappointed of one’s wish, something actually
better descends from the gods, bringing consola-
tion. It was a climb less severe than those of
which I have already written, for our camp among
the Tetons was close to the fourth story; less, I
should suppose, than a thousand feet above our
tent, the mountain grew bare of trees. Upward
from this, it was not a long walk to snow.

When first I saw the mother and child, I
already had them at a great disadvantage; they
were, to be sure, where I had not expected them
to be, but I was where they had not expected me
~ to be; and thus I became aware of them a long
distance below me, actually coming up to me by
the trail I had come myself. Trail, you must

The Mountain Sheep 211

understand, does not here mean a path beaten by
men, or even by game, but simply the pleasant-
est way of getting up this part of the mountain.
The mother had been taking her child upon a
visit, to the third story, had been away down
among the pine woods and open places, where
brooks ran and grass grew with several sorts of
flowers and ripe berries; and now she was return-
ing to the heights of her own especial world.
Alas for my camera! it was irretrievably in
camp. I laid my useless rifle down, for from
me neither of these lives should receive any
hurt; and with the next best thing to a camera
— my field-glasses— I got ready for a survey of
this family as prolonged and thorough as they
should allow. But field-glasses are a poor second
best in such a case; a few pictures of this lady
and her offspring “at home” would have told
you more than my words have any hope of
conveying.

I never saw people in less haste. From begin-
ning to end they treated the whole mountain as
you would treat your library (dining room were,
perhaps, nearer the mark) upon an idle morning
between regular meals. No well-to-do matron,
with her day’s housekeeping finished, could have

aa

212 The Mountain Sheep

looked out of the window more serenely than
this ewe surveyed her neighborhood. The two
had now arrived at what, in their opinion, was a
suitable place for stopping. “Their” opinion is not
correct; it was, I soon unmistakably made out,
the mamma who—far more than the average
American mother as American mothers go now
— decided what was good and proper for her
child. This lamb was being brought up as strictly
as if it were English. They had just completed a
somewhat long and unrelieved ascent, — so I had,
at any rate, previously found it. This upper
region of the mountain rose above the tree belt
in three well-marked terraces which were rimmed
by walls of rock extremely symmetrical. Each
terrace made a platform fairly level and fairly
wide, upon which one was glad to linger for a
while before ascending the slant to the next
terrace wall. I was seated at the edge of the top
terrace, a floor of stones and grass and very thick
little spruce and juniper bushes ; the mamma had
just attained the terrace next below me, and up
the wall after her had climbed and scrambled
the little lamb with (I was diverted to notice)
almost as much difficulty as I had found at that
spot myself. The mamma knew a good deal

THE SADDLEBACK SHEEP — (Ovis fannint

The Mountain Sheep 215

more about climbing than the lamb and I
did.

There this couple stood in full view some
few hundred feet—about three hundred, I
should think — below me; and here sat I at my
ease, like a person looking over a comfortable
balcony, observing them through my glass.
There was a certain mirth in the thought how
different would have been the mamma’s deport-
ment had she become aware that herself, her
child, and her privacy were all in the presence of
a party who was taking notes. But she, through-
out, never became aware of this, and I sat the
witness of a domestic hour full of discipline,
encouragement, and instruction. The glasses
brought them to a nearness not unlike peeping
through the keyhole; I could see the color of
their eyes. The lady’s expression could easily
have passed for critical. After throwing a glance
round the terrace, her action to the lamb was
fairly similar to remarking, “ Yes, there are no
improper persons here; you may play about if
you wish.”

Some such thing happened between them,
for, after waiting for the scrambling lamb to come
up with her on the level and stand beside her,

216 The Mountain Sheep

she appeared to dismiss it from her thoughts.
She moved over the terrace, grazing a little,
walking a little, stopping, enjoying the fine day,
while her good child amused itself by itself.
I feared but one thing, —that the wind might take
to blowing capriciously, and give their noses
warning that a heathen stranger was in the
neighborhood. But the happy wind flowed
gentle and changeless along the heights of the
mountains. I have not more enjoyed anything
in the open air than that sitting on the terrace
watching those creatures whose innocent blood
my hands were not going to shed.

After a proper period of relaxation, the mother
judged it time to go on. There was nothing
haphazard in her action; of that I am con-
vinced. How she did it, how she intimated to
the lamb that they couldn’t stop here any longer,
I don’t pretend to know. I do, however, know
that it was no mere wandering upward herself,
confident the lamb would follow; because pres-
ently (as I shall describe) she quite definitely
made the lamb stay behind. She now began
mounting the hill right toward me, not fast but
steadily, waiting now and then, precisely as other
parents wait, for her toddling child to come up

The Mountain Sheep 217

with her. Here and there were bushes of some
close stiff leaf, that she walked through easily,
but which were too many for the toddling child.
The lamb would sometimes get into the middle
of one of these and find itself unable to push
through; after one or two little efforts, it would
back out and go round some other way, and
then I would see it making haste to where its
mother stood waiting. Upon one of these
occasions the mother received it with a manner
that seemed almost to say: “Good gracious,
at your age I found no trouble with a thing of
that kind!” They drew, by degrees, so near me
that I put away my glasses. There was a time
when they were not fifty feet below me and I
could hear their little steps; and once the ewe
sneezed in the most natural manner. While I
was wondering what on earth they would do
when they found themselves stepping upon the
terrace into my lap, the ewe saw a way she liked
better. Had she gone to my left as I watched
her, and so reached my level, the wind would
have infallibly betrayed me; but she turned the
other way and went along beneath the terrace
wall to a patch of the bushes high enough to
make severe work for the lamb. While she was

218 The Mountain Sheep

doing this, I hastened to a new position. Where
I had been sitting she was bound to see me as
soon as she climbed twenty feet higher, and I
accordingly sought a propitious cover, and found
it in a clump of evergreens. She got to the wall
where she could make one leap of it. It was
done in a flash, and resembled nothing that any
well-to-do matron could perform; but once at the
top, she was again the complete matron. She
scanned the new ground critically and with ap-
parent satisfaction at first. I stole the glasses to
my eyes and saw her closed lips wearing quite
the bland expression of a lady’s that I know
when she has entered a room to make a call, and
finds the wall-paper and furniture reflect, on the
whole, favorably upon the lady of the house.
Meanwhile, the poor little lamb was vainly
springing at the wall; the jump was too high
for it. Its front hoofs just grazed the edge, and
back it would tumble to try again. Finally it
bleated; but the mother deemed this not a mo-
ment for indulgence. She gave not the slight-
est attention to the cry for assistance. There
was nothing dangerous about the place, no un-
reasonable hardship in getting the best of the
wall; and by her own processes, whether you

The Mountain Sheep 219

term them thought or instinct, she left her child
to meet one of the natural difficulties of life, and
so gain self-reliance.

Do you think this fanciful? That is because
you have not sufficiently thought about such
things. The mamma did undoubtedly not use
the words “self-reliance” or “natural difficulties
of life”; but if she had not her sheep equivalent
for what these words import, her species would
a long while ago have perished off the earth. The
mountain sheep is a master at the art of self-
preservation; its eye is tenfold keener than
man’s, because it has to be, and so is its foot ten
or twenty fold more agile; every sense is devel-
oped to an extreme alertness. It measures foot-
hold more justly than we do, because it has had
to flee from dangers that do not beset us. That
the maternal instinct (which these mothers retain
until their young can shift for themselves) should
fail in a matter so immediate as the needs of its
young to understand rock climbing, is a notion
more unreasonable than that it should be con-
stantly attentive to this point. But— better than
any talk of mine—the next step taken by the
ewe will show how much she was climbing this
mountain with an eye to her offspring.

220 The Mountain Sheep

The lamb had bleated and brought no sign
from her. She continued standing, or moving
a few feet onward in my direction. This means
that she was coming up a quite gentle slant, and
that thirty yards more would land her at my ever-
green bush. She came nearer than thirty yards
and abruptly stopped. She had suddenly not
liked the looks of my evergreen. Behind her
on one side, the last steep ascent of the moun-
tain rose barer and barer of all growth to its
stony, invisible summit which a curve of the
final ridge hid from view. Behind her, down
the quiet slant of the terrace, was the wall where
she had left the lamb. She now backed a few
stiff steps, keeping her eye upon the evergreen.
Her uncertainty about it, and the ladylike re-
serve of her shut lips, caused me to choke with
laughter. To catch a wild animal going through
a (what we call) entirely human proceeding has
always been to me a delightful experience; and
from now to the end this sheep’s course was as
human as possible. I had been so engaged with
watching her during the last few minutes that
I had forgotten the lamb. The lamb had some-
how got up the wall and was approaching. Its
mamma now turned and moderately hastened

The Mountain Sheep 221

down the slope to it. What was said between
them I don’t know; but the child came no far-
ther in my suspicious direction; it stayed be-
hind among some little bushes, and the mother
returned to scrutinize my hiding-place. She
looked straight at me, straight into my eyes it
seemed, and her curiosity and indecision again
choked me with laughter. She came even
nearer than she had come before. How much
of me she saw I cannot tell, but probably my
hair and forehead; she at any rate concluded
that this was no suitable place. She turned as
I have seen ladies turn from a smoking-car, and
with no haste sought her child again. How she
managed their next move passes my comprehen-
sion; I imagined that every foot of the moun-
tain ascent near me was in my full view. But
it was not. Quite unexpectedly I now became
aware of the two, trotting over the shoulder of
the ridge above me, with already two or three
times the distance between us that had been just
now. If I had wished to follow them, it would
have been useless, and° I had seen enough.
When I was ready, I made for the summit my-
self. The side which I had so far come up was
the south side, and a little further climbing took

222 The Mountain Sheep

me over the narrow shoulder to the north, where
I was soon walking in long patches of snow.
Across these in front of me went the tracks of
the mamma and her lamb, the sage and gentle
guide with the little novice who was learning
the mountains and their dangers; across these
patches I followed them for several miles, because
my way happened to be theirs. No doubt they
saw me sometimes; but I never saw them again.
I hope no harm ever came to them; for I like
to think of these two, these members of an inno-
cent and charming race that we are making away
with, as remaining unvexed by our noise and
destruction, remaining serene in the freedom that
lives among their pinnacles of solitude.

The Mountain Sheep 223

AMERICAN BIGHORN
(OviIs CANADENSIS!)

The bighorn of the American continent, inclu-
sive of its local races (frequently regarded as dis-
tinct species), is a large sheep, distinguished from
the Asiatic argalis, among other features, by the
comparative smoothness of the horns, in which
the outer front angle is prominent, and the inner
one rounded off, and also by the smaller size of
the face glands. There is a well-marked whitish
patch on the rump, but the amount of white on
the under parts and legs shows considerable local
variation. In the typical Rocky Mountain race
(O. canadensis typica) the ears are long and
pointed, with short hair, and the horns, which are
very heavy, diverge but little outwards, and gen-
erally have the tips broken. The Californian
O. canadensis nelsoni is a paler southern race.
On the other hand, in O. canadensis stonez of the
northwest territories the color of the back is very
dark, and the white on the belly and legs sharply
defined. And both in this race and the light-
colored O. canadensis dalli of Alaska the horns

1 “Records of Big Game,” Rowland Ward, third edition.

224 The Mountain Sheep

are lighter, more divergent, and sharper pointed,
while the ears tend to become shorter, blunter,
and more hairy. Height at shoulder about 3 feet
2 inches; weight about 350 pounds.

The horns of the ewes are very small in com-
parison to those of the rams, seldom measuring
more than 15 inches on the curve from base to
tip. Large male horns are now difficult to obtain,
and of late years it is seldom that those of fresh-
killed specimens are seen exceeding 38 inches on
the curve from tip to tip. American sportsmen
are keen to obtain horns of large basal girth; but
these, as will be seen from the following table,
rarely exceed 16 inches. The Maclaine of Loch-
buie possesses a specimen whose girth, according
to his own measurement, is 19 inches.

Distribution.— North America, from the Rocky
Mountains southward to Sonora, northern Mex-
ico, and California, and northward to Alaska and
the shores of Bering Sea. The Alaskan race,
for at least some portion of the year, is snow-
white.

The Mountain Sheep

225

MEASUREMENTS OF HoRNS

LENGTH Gree

Tip to Tip

LocaLity

—————— | | |

eer FERENCE
—52% | 183
—45 .:
—42 | 16}
42 16
. 17%
—413 | 15
—40} | 16}
4of | 15%
—40 15%
40 15
393 | 153
393 163
39% | 15%
—39 15%
385 | 15%
38; | 163
383 | 153
384 16
38 17
38 15
— 38 163
372 | 15k
pegs | FOE
374 | 153
—37 16
37 164
37 163
37 153
363 19
362 | 152
363 143
363 16
365 | 14
364 | 143
36 143
36 153
36 143
—354 | 142
ase | 154
She ae By

(tips much
worn)

The Selkirks,
B.C., 1885
>

Lower California
Wyoming

Wyoming
Kootenay, B.C.

Yellowstone

?
Rocky Moun-

tains

British Columbia
Colorado
Montana

?

?

?
Bighorn

Mountains

Montana
N.W. Territories
Alberta, N.W.T.
British Columbia
British Columbia
Mexico
British Columbia
British Columbia
Wyoming
Montana
British Columbia
Wyoming
British Columbia
Wyoming
Wyoming

>)

?

?
Montana
Alberta, N.W.T.
Wyoming
Wyoming
British Columbia
British Columbia

OwNER

W. F. Sheard

W. Grant Mackay

George H. Gould

Picked up by

T. W. H. Clarke

T. W. H. Clarke
Measured by John Fannin,
Provincial Museum, B.C.
British Museum

Sir Edmund G. Loder, Bart.
Otho Shaw

J. W. R. Young

St. George Littledale
British Museum

Sir Edmund G. Loder, Bart.
W. A. Baillie-Grohman
Gerald Buxton

H. Seton-Karr

Edmund Littledale

S. Ratcliff

Arnold Pike

Captain F. Cookson
Major C. C. Ellis

J. A. H. Drought

J. O. Shields

J. Turner-Turner

T. W. H. Clarke
Major Maitland Kirwan
R. H. Venables Kyrke
Lord Rodney

C. H. Kennard
Moreton Frewen
Gerald Buxton
Thomas Bate

J. D. Cobbold

Gerald Buxton

R. H. Sawyer

Arnold Pike

Capt. G. Dalrymple White
Count E. Hoyos

G. Wrey

Hon. S. Tollemache

226

CuRVE

LENGTH
on FRONT Circum-

The Mountain Sheep

MEASUREMENTS OF Horns (continued)

FERENCE

Tip To Tip

LocaALity

British Columbia
California

British Columbia
British Columbia

Wyoming

Wyoming

S.E. Montana

California

N.W. Wyoming

British Columbia
Border

British Columbia

British Columbia
Wyoming
?

British Columbia
British Columbia
?

Fraser River,
BiG;

Lower California

British Columbia

Yellowstone
River

N.W. Territory

Grand Encamp-
ment, Wyo.

British Columbia

?

Lower California
Wyoming
Wyoming
Alberta, N.W.T.

Alaska
Alaska
Alaska

Alaska

OwNER

T. P. Kempson

Sir Victor Brooke’s Coll.

Sir Peter Walker, Bart.

Admiral Sir Michael
Culme-Seymour, Bart.

Count Schiebler

Gerald Hardy

J. A. Jameson

G. P. Fitzgerald

A. Rogers

Barclay Bonthron

Admiral Sir Michael
Culme-Seymour, Bart.

Capt. E. G. Verschoyle

Lieut.-Col. Hon. W. Coke

F. H. B. Ellis

T. P. Kempson

A. E. Butter

C. G. R. Lee

A. E. Leatham

G. Barnardiston
J. W. Wood, Jr.
British Museum

Maj. Algernon Heber-Percy
Frank Cooper

T. E. Buckley
Hon. Walter Rothschild

Ely Quilter

J. L. Scarlett
Hugh Peel

F. C. Williamson

Rowland Ward

Hon. Walter Rothschild
J. T. Studley

British Museum

British Museum

THE WHITE GOAT AND HIS WAYS

By OWEN WISTER

a

ABOVE TIMBER LINE

tHE WHITE GOAT AND HIS
WAYS

SHOULD you wish with your own eyes to look
upon this odd and much-debated creature, it is
(to name some of his territories) in the Saw
Tooth Range in Idaho, and among the peaks
northward from Lake Chelan, the Okanogan and
Methow rivers, all three in Washington, and
also upon many mountains near the coast in
British Columbia that, if you climb high and
hard enough, you are almost sure to find him;
and you would be perfectly certain to find him
in the Zodlogical Gardens at Philadelphia to-day
April twenty, 1903. But it may be that by the
time you shall read this the summer heat of
Philadelphia will have ended his existence there;
and this is the only place in our country (or in
any country at present writing) where he is in
captivity. Of his natural habitat and the inter-
esting questions that it raises, I shall presently
speak; let me at once dismiss the question

231

232 The White Goat

of his species, now finally known as Oveamnus
montanus.

He is not a goat at all. We have fallen to
speaking of him so in English because for a good
number of years it has been the name he has
gone by where he lives; but he is an antelope,
and his nearest relative is the chamois, whose
quite peculiar way of walking his own gait closely
resembles. The chamois I have never hunted,
but have often watched the singular hunching
and truculent movement of the goat, as with head
lowered (you might suppose for a charge) he
slowly and heavily proceeds along his chosen
vertiginous paths of rock and snow. He is a
mountain antelope; and his various Latin names,
and the confusion, both popular and scientific, of
which he was the subject through most of the
nineteenth century, are curious and interesting
matters. He was doubtless in zodlogic truth an
emigrant, having walked from frozen Asia to frozen
America across that great old Aleutian Isthmus be-
tween two frozen oceans, adjacent seas unmerged
as yet by Behring Strait. With other newcomers
he replaced the original dwellers of the soil, the
American rhinoceros and any number more of old
inhabitants with whom the climate had ceased to

The White Goat 233

agree. After landing upon our continent away
up in the north the goat and sheep spread them-
selves widely; but the goat not half nor a quarter
so widely as the sheep. The more we compare
these similar creatures, the more singular seem
their contrasts.

If they were fellow-travellers and twin arrivals,
if they did come over the Aleutian bridge together,
it is either because there was only one bridge and
both had to use it, or else they fell out on the
way, and reached here not on speaking terms.
The first hypothesis is the one to which I incline:
they had to use the same trail because there was
only one. Sheep and goat do not seem to me to
live on good terms. I should not venture this
observation were it based upon my individual
experience alone. What my campings have
gradually led me to notice is this: you don’t find
sheep and goat on the same hill as you find elk
and deer in the same wood. Considering that
both animals like steep places, like rocks, like
very high rocks; and also that their respective
habitats coincide in certain regions,—2in British
Columbia, for instance, and in Washington, and,
I think one might fairly add, in Idaho, —I dare
by no means make the sweeping assertion that

234 The White Goat

sheep and goat have never been found, or are never
to be found, frequenting the same pasture; I don’t
know this, and all of us do know that negatives
are difficult of proof. But I have camped high
in Washington, with goats in profusion all around,
and the whole country looking precisely like a
sheep country, yet never the sign of a sheep any-
where to be seen. People said, “ Plenty of sheep
over there,” and they would point to some clearly
visible heights. And next, people came from not
thirty miles away, having seen and killed sheep.
It was the same latitude, the same altitude, the
same season, the same everything. What is to be
drawn from this? That it was an accidental year,
and just happened so for the few weeks that I was
there? This is the conclusion that you might
draw, as I then did; and you would be wrong, as
I then was. For I returned there six years later,
and it was still the case, and had been the case
meanwhile, saving only that goats and sheep and
all wild animals, wherever their chosen abode was,
had been growing scarcer and shyer, and were
approaching that extinction which we deal to all
helpless things that do not minister to our own
comfort and survival. During those intervening
years I had hunted sheep in a country which for

The White Goat 235

all the world looked as if a goat might come round
the corner at any moment. But no goat ever
did; and yet, had I ridden down those mountains,
and over a space of plains to the westward, and
up the very first mountains I should then have
met, there would then have been all the goat I
wanted, and not (I have been told) a single
sheep !

Thinking these things over, I began to wonder
if some particular kind of food (since climate it
could absolutely not be) was the cause of this
flocking apart. Was there, perchance, some little
herb which a goat must have and a sheep didn’t
like? Well, if that be so, no botanist has so far
told me its name; while on the other hand, very
recently, I have had news of a sportsman who was
hunting in some mountains of British Columbia
where sheep and goat were both readily to be
found, and whose experience was like mine, only
more marked and significant. He had stood upon
one mountain where there were goat, and looked
across to an adjacent one where he could plainly
see sheep. Now on his mountain there was not
a single sheep; he must go to the other for them ;
but over there he must expect no goat. He
found this so, and he was assured that it was

236 The White Goat

always so: the animals did not seem to trespass
upon each other’s premises.

These few facts that I have here gathered seem
to me worthy of recording, and perhaps enough
to warrant a presumption; but insufficient for an
assertion. Until others shall have on their part
added similar observations, I would lay down no
rule that a chronic hostility separates Ovzs and
Oreamnus. Perhaps such a rule has been laid
down, but if it be printed anywhere, I have not
met it; nor have I had the fortune (after consult-
ing the books) to meet any accounts of goat which
essentially add to what has been said already by
Audubon; and that is somewhat meagre. Many
pictures there are, much better than his old-
fashioned plates, but further solid information is
uncommonly scarce. Even the latest and most
official authorities, when you test their pages by
an intimate searching for a piece of comprehensive
and definite information, do not give you that
information.

If my surmise be true, and sheep and goat are
apt to be upon strained relations, I think we may
be certain which of the two has regulated the
affair. Iwill hazard the guess that in single com-
bat the goat could ruin the sheep before the

The White Goat 237

sheep was fully aware of what had befallen him.
Hunters can picture such an encounter, which
probably would be brief if grand. The gallant
old sheep would stand, aim, bound to the attack
and leap in the air, expecting to dash his forehead
and curling horns against the face and horns of
the goat. But the goat—dah! that’s not the
goat’s way. It would have happened so quickly
as not to be made out; but there the poor ram
would lie, ripped open. The goat does nothing
so picturesque and unpractical as jumping in the
air. He lowers his sullen head, one shrewd thrust
and jerk-back with his deadly sharp horns, and
the business is despatched. And the goat looks
it, too. His appearance suggests immediately
that you had better look out for him if you
happen to be a ram with beautiful useless horns
— useless, that is, against any such apparatus as
the goat carries. One day I stood watching a
good specimen billy-Oveamnus. The nanny, less
conspicuous, lay in the shade on some flat ground,
asleep. But the billy sat hunched on the peak of
a built-up pyramid of rocks. It was in the Zo6-
logical Gardens at Philadelphia where this pair,
taken into captivity in 1901, have grown and
thrived, but have not bred. The billy shows his for-

238 The White Goat

midable nature; no strangers can go near him; he
would disembowel them in a jiffy; even his keeper
has to be wary. Atthe top of his pile of rocks sat
the captive, hunched, as I have said, and truculent
and lowering, in spite of his stillness. His eye
had that gaze which so wonderfully remains with
wild animals who are prisoned from the great free
natural spaces that belong to them, whose birth-
right is a liberty of no sparrow-and-robin size, but
a colossal liberty, the range of the primal world,
where fences and statutes are not. Our delight-
fully conventional intelligence is familiar with ~
this look in the eyes of the lion and the eagle
because the poets have called our attention to it,
have said pretty things about it; but if you have
the unusual gift of making your own observations,
you will find it in many other animals, including
certain types of man. As for this goat, no goat
sitting on a rock at Harlem could stare like him;
he might have been sitting on the top of the
Cascade Mountains, surveying huge gulfs, and
(possibly) meditating how improving it would be
to disembowel a ram.

As I watched him, an odd thought revisited
me: how Asiatic he looked, for some obscure
reason! I remembered thinking this same thing

The White Goat 239

when I had shot my first goat eleven years
before. Asiatic? Yes; and I cannot at all ex-
plain why, unless it be that one has seen pic-
tures of animals which hail from somewhere like
Tibet, and which bear some resemblance to the
Oreamnus. I know that no other of our Western
big game strike me in this way; buffalo, elk, deer,
antelope, sheep, —all these have always seemed
to me to look indigenous, to belong to our North
American soil. But this goat is a figure that
it surprises me to meet among the haunts of my
own language; his idiom should be Mongolian!

He’s white, all white, and shaggy, and twice as
large as any goat you ever saw. His white hair
hangs long all over him, like a Spitz dog’s or an
Angora cat’s; but it is stiff and coarse, not silky,
and against its shaggy white mass the blackness
of his hoofs, and horns, and nose, looks particularly
black. His legs are thick, his neck is thick, every-
thing about him is thick, saving only his thin
black horns. They’re generally about six inches
long, they spread very slightly, and they curve
slightly backward. At their base they are a little
rough, but as they rise they cylindrically smooth
and taper to an ugly point. His hoofs are heavy,
broad, and blunt. The track they make is huge,

240 The White Goat

and precisely the reverse of the sheep’s; it is a
capital V, pointing backward. The sheep’s track
is a V also, but pointing forward. By his clumsy-
looking hoofs, and his thick-set and apparently
unwieldy legs, it would seem as though this goat
had best keep his level, as though he might sel-
dom go up two steps of even a porch without
accident; a set of legs and hoofs could scarce
be instanced of seemingly less avail for a moun-
taineer. So, at least, I should argue, recalling the
various sharp apparatus which we need ourselves.
One does not see how these heavy animals can
leap and cling. But let me transcribe uncor-
rected some sentences from my hunting journal
of November, 1892, pencilled in flippant spirit
after a day’s pursuit of the goat.

“They ... chose places to lie down where fall-
ing off was the easiest thing you could do... .
The individual tracks we have passed always
choose the inclined plane where they have a
choice between that and the level. ... I sup-
pose these animals sometimes must fall, though
they have a projecting heel of horn to their hoof
which is wonderfully adapted to their vertical
habits. But if they do fall, it probably amuses
them. Their hair is more impenetrably thick

The White Goat 241

than any hair I have seen, and beneath this
is the hide thicker than buffalo. If they play
games together, it is probably to push each other
Over a precipice, and the goat that takes longest
to walk up again loses the game.”

You can see from these lines what a tide of
resentment flows between them. I remember
that hard but successful day very well; and it
furnished some facts about size and weight and
so on, which were all recorded on the spot, and
which give some good details well to know.

To begin with, there is that “ projecting heel of
horn” to the goat’s hoof. We cannot imagine
how he manages to make such a slight thing
(not over a quarter of an inch) catch his weight.
He weighs anywhere from one hundred and
eighty to three hundred pounds. I had no means
that day on top of the Cascade Mountains to
ascertain how much the male I had killed might
weigh, but he was very much of a load for two
of us to move. His hide (not the hair but the
leather) on his rump was as thick as the sole of
my boot. My boot was made for climbing moun-
tains, and the sole was filled with hobnails; the
hide was as thick as such a sole, and when bal-
anced against things in camp whose weight we

242 The White Goat

knew, — such as flour and sugar bags, — it alone
weighed thirty pounds! We carried home, be-
side the head and hide, the web-tallow, and this
was three-quarters of an inch thick. Hunters
will know what ample supply this means in
animals much larger than the goat. This speci-
men was, my most companionable guide told me,
of good but not supreme size. We carried home
none of the meat. The flesh of the grown-up
goat cannot be eaten with much pleasure; but
later, for the sake of a complete set of specimens,
I shot a kid; and the flesh of this we ate with
entire satisfaction for our Thanksgiving dinner.
And this brings me to the next point.

“ These wild goat,” says my journal, “are twice
the size and more of the ordinary goat, and if
their hides kept clean and snow-white as they
naturally are, they would be a splendid-looking
animal.”

This was written two weeks before I was able
to examine one that was in very truth snow-
white; and lately, while looking through the
books to find what they have to say that may
fill out my imperfect knowledge, I have come
more than once on the statement that the goat
is not pure white, but has a tinge of yellow, or

The White Goat 243

some shade, here and there, that dulls his total
sheen. This I conceive to be error. Age, it is
possible, may bring a few dark hairs to the white
goat. But I should wish to be very sure about
this before I asserted it. The sum of my experi-
ence is, that first I killed some plainly old male
goats (they were off by themselves, no longer
with the herd), and of these the coats were
dingy; that presently I found a plainly younger
male goat (he was lighter in weight and his
horns and hoofs showed less wear), and his coat
was spotless ; and that finally I found the coat of
a kid born that same year to be equally spotless.
What is the inference —almost the conclusion?
Is it not that in the older goats the color was
discoloration, from causes external; that by nature
_ the goat is perfectly white; and that the books
have gone on reproducing an original mistake
which grew from some writer’s having seen only
goats that were weather-stained? Oh, the repro-
duction of error! The way one man’s inaccurate
statement is blandly copied down by the next
man, and verification shirked at every turn!
Why will they do it, these little scientific folk?
For the great ones never do. The great ones
verify, or else, when they come to a hole in their

244 The White Goat

knowledge, they frankly tell you that they don't
know. They paste no piece of paper over the
hole, pretending it’s all solid underneath. But
the small fry —the popular magazine size, —
these unceasingly are pasting paper. And why?
Because they're not afraid of being found out.
They know how few of their readers can dis-
cover the holes and poke their fingers through
the paper. Don’t you believe me, reader? Does
your kind heart repudiate with heat this asper-
sion? Perhaps —for instance — you're not aware
how some little writers go on deriving the
name of a well-known St. Lawrence fish from
two French words, masgue allongée. 1 would
tell you about it, only I did not discover
their ludicrous blunder myself; but here’s a
hole where I happened to poke my own finger
through the paper. During ten years I used
every official map of Wyoming that I could
procure. First it was a territory, and next a
state, but all the while the map-makers con-
tinued to draw Pacific Creek as flowing into
Buffalo Fork. Now Pacific Creek is a thorough-
fare between the two sides of the Continental
Divide, and it does not flow into Buffalo Fork,
but into Snake River. It was a really bad geo-

The White Goat 245

graphical mistake. Some original map-maker
had traced his map on hearsay or guesswork,
hadn’t gone down the creek to see for himself,
and all his successors faithfully reproduced his
ignorance. The people who knew better were
merely Indians, prospectors, cowboys, or stray
hunters like myself. We didn’t count; chat
wasn’t being found out!

Pacific Creek being wrong to a certainty, how
then about Atlantic Creek, and Thoroughfare,
and a good many more? Diyid these, also, flow
one way officially, and actually another? How
could I be sure until I had crossed mountains
and found them for myself? And how should
you, reader, enjoy being condemned to such
maps in a country where Indians, and bears, and
blizzards prevailed? You will scarce wonder
that I grew to place upon those maps the same
chastened reliance that I place to-day upon books
which tell me that the goat is not strictly white,
or that he lives in the Rocky Mountains. You
might search a good many hundred miles of
Rocky Mountains that have never seen a goat,
but which the sheep has frequented since before
the memory of man. Here again comes the con-
trast between the two: having come the same

246 The White Goat

road from Kamchatka, their ranges upon this
continent but partially coincide, and even where
both animals are established and flourishing in
the same zone, their localities within that zone
are so capriciously separated as to baffle even the
explanation that one drives the other out.

It would seem that they can stand equal cold;
both are to be found in Alaska, as might be
expected from the manner of their emigration.
And beginning with Alaska (one authority, R.
Lydekker, “ The Royal Natural History,” London,
1898, the best authority I have found for co-
herence and completeness, names latitude 64° as
the northern limit), we find goat and sheep alike
plentifully distributed as we come south. But
only for a certain distance. If the Northwest be
plain like a picture in your mind’s eye, you can
recall how in the far North the Cascades and
Rockies are intermingled, and how, as we come
down through British Columbia to our own soil,
they gradually separate, slope apart, so that by
the time they reach the latitude of Portland,
Oregon, a wide, flat domain lies between them.
Both have slanted inland; but while the Cascades
are only some hundred and sixty miles from the
Pacific coast, the Rockies are away over in Idaho

The White Goat 247

and Montana, and continue to diverge until they
sink among the hot sands of the mesquite and
the yucca. Now, in Arizona, in the Colorado
Canon for instance, we still find the sheep, and
can find him yet farther down in northwest
Mexico. But no goat is so far south. The goat
stops more than a thousand miles to the north.
It seems clear, then, that goat and sheep will
inhabit equal cold, but not equal heat.

Where, exactly, does the goat stop? That is
something which no book (that I have seen) will
tell you. The London book, which I have quoted
already, names latitude 40° as the southern limit
of his habitat. This is considerably farther south
than I have ever heard of him. My knowledge
of him goes no farther south than the Saw Tooth
Range, which is in Idaho. These sharp ridges
nourish the head waters of the Salmon River,
and are in the southern-central part of the state.
And I am inclined to say, in spite of Mr. Lydek-
ker, but supported by Mr. Arthur Brown, that
the Saw Tooth and Salmon River country in
Idaho is about the southeastern corner of the
goat’s province. Saving stray and accidental
individuals, you are not likely to find him be-
yond that point, south or east. I have never

248 The White Goat

talked with any hunter who had seen him in
Wyoming, although (and here again I will re-
enforce my own experience with Mr. Brown’s)
there seems to be a sort of goat tradition in
Wyoming, here and there. This myth is, to be
sure, highly sublimated. You don’t hear that
goat used to be upon this or that definite moun-
tain, or that So-and-So saw a man who saw a
goat, or whose wife or uncle saw one; it never
comes as near you as that; yet still faintly in the
air of the Continental Divide there hovers this
vague rumor of the animal.

If he was ever in Wyoming as a domiciled
resident, who shall say why he departed? Why
is he not to-day upon the Washakie Needle, or
in the abrupt country where heads Green River,
or among the formidable Tetons, since to-day he
is but a little farther west of the Tetons, in the
Saw Tooth Range? And why, if man (or sheep)
drove him from these Wyoming peaks, has he
not been driven from the peaks of Idaho? Dizif-
ference in neither heat, nor cold, nor humidity,
nor accessibility, can be the explanation, for there
is no difference; and as for difference in food, I
find no suggestion of it in the pages of the
authorities.

The White Goat 249

“What they eat in winter is a mystery. But
it must be the little knobs of moss that grow at
the edges of the steep rocks on top, where the
snow cannot lie. They never come down into
the valleys, as the mountain sheep do when the
snow grows deep up above.”

This is no authority, but merely my camp note-
book again; and the statement that the goat is
never, like the sheep, driven to low pastures by
the snow is but the popular account of him that
I was able to gather from the inhabitants — the
prospectors, the trappers—of the mountains
where I hunted him. Yet it is interesting; and
if generally true, it may furnish some clue to the
capricious local separations between sheep and
goat in the zone of their common habitat. But
if the goat cannot, when the weather would drive
him down, subsist upon the less lofty growths
that then satisfy the sheep, you will remark how
truly unlike the real goat is this narrow discrimi-
nation as to diet.

It is surprising, indeed, that at this late day,
when investigation and verification are so easy,
no naturalist seems anywhere to have written a
plain, complete paragraph answering the plain,
natural question: In what states and territories

250 The White Goat

does the white goat live? It would seem the
naturalist’s business to tell us this. We have the
right to expect to open some single standard
book, and find such facts at once. Well, I have
had to open eight, gathering here a fact and there
,a fact in a manner not unlike the painful process
of rag-picking. The result is far from covering
the ground; let me acknowledge this, and beg
friendly correction and amplification, —and let
me say, nevertheless, that the following is the
most detailed information to be found so far
set down in any one place.

In Alaska and British Columbia we find the
goat, and in northwest Montana, and in Idaho,
but only in spots; he is also in the northern
Cascades in Washington, but, oddly enough it ap-
pears, not in the Olympic Range. Nor is he in
the southern Cascades, in Oregon. Elsewhere
he is not, unless possibly in California. There
is an ancient legend of him among the higher
mountains of that state; the Spanish Padre de
Salvatierra and his fellow-missionary, Padre Pic-
colo, are supposed to have seen him. We must
uselessly wonder if they did; and I should have
been more indebted to a foot-note in the “ Bio-
logical Survey of Mount Shasta,” which touches

The White Goat 251

upon the goat’s habitat in Oregon and Wash-
ington, were it not wholly silent as to the
animal’s presence or absence, past or present,
in the state of California. |

The farther we follow the story of the white
goat, the more do we find his steps attended with
the mists of confusion; and for the gloomy critic
this would be a timely moment to write some
sentences about the longevity of error. But it
all came out right in the end; and we will get
to the facts at once, and how I first began to
meet the stream of uncertainty of which the
fountain-source lies in the old romantic pages of
Lewis and Clark.

A while ago I spoke of a goat tradition in
Wyoming. Now it was not until the fall of 1889
that I believed there was such a thing as this
goat anywhere. I thought—JI could not then
say why — that the unlettered mountaineers and
plainsmen, whose talk I heard, were speaking of
the sheep ; and, also, they contradicted each other
in a way So curious and persistent that the animal
became in a manner fabulous to me, like the uni-
corn, or the wool-bearing horse. Now I would
meet the assurance that “over there somewhere,”
among the mountains near the Pacific, a snow-

252 The White Goat

white goat lived, with long hair; again, I would
meet a positive denial of this. Some sceptical
old trapper or prospector would proclaim that he
“guessed he had been most everywhere,” and no-
body could “fool him about no goat” with long
hair. Indeed, when I at last laid my own goat
trophies, heads and hides, before the eyes of my
old friend John Yancey of the Yellowstone Park,
they gave him a genuine sensation. He had
wasted small faith in any tales of goat. He stared
at them, he touched them, he lifted them, he
could not get over it; they caused me to rise in
his esteem, and he refused to believe that circum-
venting a mountain sheep is a far more skilful
exploit. He, too, like myself, had supposed that
in some way this notion about goats could be
traced to mountain sheep, and that they were one
and the same animal. I found this error spread
eastward to great cities.

In the front hall of a certain club there used to
hang — and still hangs, for all I know —the head
of a white goat. I stood near it one day in 1894
or 1895, while two gentlemen were looking at it.
One had hunted in our West, and was asked by
the other what animal this was. He replied with
certainty, “A mountain sheep.” It was no busi-

THE WHITE GOAT IS AN AGILE CLIMBER

The White Goat 255

ness of mine, and I did not correct him. But
how inveterate and singular was the confusion !
for these two wild animals do not resemble each
other a particle more than do their domestic
namesakes. In the hall of the club that day I
did not know that, ninety years before, the self-
same blunder had been made and written down
for the first time, and that we were still inherit-
ing its consequences.

On September twenty-six, 1805, Meriwether
Lewis, quite inconveniently sick, was, with his
equally inconveniently sick comrades, camped for
the purpose of building canoes. They lay at the
confluence of the north fork with the main stream
of that river which Idaho now most often calls the
Clearwater, and which the Indians then called
the Kooskooskee. They had come overland a
great way —two thousand miles — walking and
riding. They had lately been high among the
cold snows, and they were now abruptly plunged
in the flat climate of the plains. Heat and the
copious new food made every mother’s son of
them ill. But a few days before this, and they
had been sparingly serving out rations of horse
flesh to keep together soul and body; now the
Indians have given them all the salmon they can

256 The White Goat

swallow, and taught them to eat the camass, a
precarious vegetable. In the language of Doc-
tor Coues (the admirable annotator of the 1894
edition, one can hardly imagine a better and
honester piece of work): “ Having been neither
frozen nor starved quite to death — having sur-
vived camass roots, tartar emetic, and Rush’s
pills (the famous Dr. Rush of Philadelphia,) the
explorers have reached navigable Columbian
waters... .” I could quote from this splendid
book forever. It is our American Robinson’
Crusoe. Somebody, no doubt, will grind it into
a historical novel; but no novel, no matter how
big a sale it has, can spoil the journal of Lewis
and Clark. Well, at this sick camp, while they’re
making ready to float to Astoria, enter the white
goat. It is his first recorded appearance.

Says Gass: “There appears to be a kind of
sheep in this country, besides the ibex or moun-
tain sheep, and which have wool on. I saw some
of the skins, which the natives had, with wool
four inches long, and as fine, white, and soft as

”

any I had ever seen.”

Here, you perceive, is the error, appearing
simultaneously with the goat.

These sheep “live,” says the text in another

The White Goat 257

place, “in greater numbers on that chain of
mountains which forms the commencement of
the woody country on the coast and passes the
Columbia between the falls and rapids.” Accu-
rate in everything save the name.

Next comes the observation (William Dunbar
and Dr. Hunter) written on the Columbia River
near the Dalles: “We here saw the skin of a
mountain sheep, which they say lives among the
rocks in the mountains; the skin was covered
with white hair; the wool was long, thick, and
coarse, with long, coarse hair on the top of the
neck and on the back, resembling somewhat the
bristles of a goat.”

This time, you see, they are on the very edge
of getting the thing straight. But no; they
recede again, after the following which seems to
promise complete clearing up: —

“ A Canadian, who had been much with the
Indians to the westward, speaks of a wool-bearing
animal larger than a sheep, the wool much mixed
with hair, which he had seen in large flocks.”

April ten, 1806, the party is on its return jour-
ney. It has successfully wintered on the coast,
and has now come up the Columbia again, fifty
miles above Vancouver.

258 The White Goat

“While we were at breakfast one of the In-
dians offered us two sheepskins for sale; ...
the second was smaller . . . . with the horns re-
maining.... The horns of the animal were
black, smooth, and erect; they rise from the
middle of the forehead, a little above the eyes,
in a cylindrical form, to the height of four inches,
where they are pointed.”

Here there is no mistake about the mistake;
he describes a goat and calls it a sheep. "Why
he should do this when he had seen the bighorn
constantly during his journey up the Missouri
may possibly be thus explained: He says that
he did not think the bighorn much like a sheep,
and so, perhaps, the oat did not strike him as
much like a goat; we know it happens to be
an antelope. But however we account for this
original mixing of names, it is easy to perceive
how good a start the mixing got; and after read-
ing the text of the old confusion, is it not odd
and interesting to trace it down through the
years, down through Yancey, to the front hall of
the club? to find it cropping up among all sorts
and conditions of men, now in a city and now on
top of the Wind River Mountains, where it used
to perplex me?

The White Goat 259

And this is only the popular side of it; the
scholars have been just as mixed as Yancey.
The scientific side of the story is picturesquely
seen through the dynasty of Latin names succes-
sively lavished upon the goat.

The country at large first heard of the_goat in
1806, when Thomas Jefferson accompanied his
message to Congress about Lewis and Clark’s
exploration with various documents, and among
these the observations of William Dunbar and
mr. Fiunter. Nine years later the eminent
George Ord gave to the animal his first aca-
demic baptism, and he appeared as Ouzs mon-
tana. Pretty soon M. de Blainville seems to
have called him Azzelope americana, and Rufpi-
capra americana. By 1817 he was known as
Mazama Sericea—which is wandering pretty
wide of the family. Four years more, and he is
plain Rocky Mountain sheep. Next follow Capra
montana, Antilope lanigera, Capra Americana,
and Haplocerus montanus. This last was begin-
ning to look permanent, when it was discovered
that somebody had for some time been styling
the goat by a well-devised appellation, to wit,
Oreamnus montanus. He goes by that now;
and it may be doubted if any thief has more

260 The White Goat

frequently employed an alias than this probably
blameless animal. Such is the story of the con-
fusion begun—we can only guess why — by
Lewis and Clark, and not cleared up until our
own day.

The goat is an animal far less wary than the
sheep. His watch is concentrated upon ap-
proaches from below. All the hunter has to do
is to get above him, to make at once for the
/ summit of the ridge which he proposes to hunt,
_ and the unsuspecting creature will never give you
a thought. Upon my word, it is inexcusable to
kill him, except for a specimen in a collection;
he is so handsome, so harmless, and so stupid!
And in his remoter haunts, where the nature of
man is still a closed book to him, he “thinketh
no evil”; he will stand looking at the hunter
with a sedate interest in his large, deep brown
eyes. The tenderfoot sportsman, it seems, will
generally make his beginnings as a maniac. Sud-
denly confronted with a herd of wild animals, he
frantically pumps his repeating rifle, hypnotized
by the glut of destruction. Luckily, he is apt, in
his excitement, to miss. His desire is for no one
special trophy, but for a hot killing of all in sight.
If we are not to blame him for this flare of blind

The White Goat 261

brute instinct, for heaven’s sake don’t let us praise
the performance! The best that can possibly be
said for it is to call it the seamy side of masculin-
ity; and the seamy side of masculinity fits coward-
ice like a glove. I am speaking from the sinner’s
bench; and long back in the years (not so long
materially, but miles and miles every other way)
I see one or two spots of shame. To-day, my
wish is to photograph the game, and let him go
his way in peace.

With my rifle I carried a kodak among the
goats. The kodak and the rifle made a dis-
comfortable pair now and then. For instance: —

“ Saturday twelfth (November) four and one-half
hours’ climb up opposite ridge, so as to get above
goat seen yesterday. Snow six and eight inches
deep on top.” This was a day that I carried
both instruments, and the rocks continually
required the use of both hands. Well, I got
the goat that I wanted with my rifle. I took
the kodak home with one hundred pictures of
my very long, hard, interesting journey. It was
the year that the company’s films were bad, and |
drew one hundred blanks; there was not the
semblance of an image upona single one. The
same mischance had attended the Greely expedi-

262 The White Goat

tion, and I had not travelled as far as they did;
so you see my mouth must utter no complaints.
No; my mileage fell short of the Greely expe-
dition; but no goat will ever tempt me through
such adventures again. Alas, that a man should
come to shrink from discomforts which once
— but let me tell you about some of them.

Because nothing but good fellowship and
kindness were shown me there, I suppress the
name of the town at the railroad’s end where
I waited from Saturday till Monday for the north-
bound stage. It was Saturday, October ninth, my
journal reminds me.

“They gave me a room... . I was glad to
see as little of it as possible. I washed in the
public trough and basin which stood in the office
between the saloon and the dining room; and
I spent my time either in the saloon watching a
game of poker that never ceased, or in wander-
ing about in the world outside. A Chinaman
named Madden .. . played poker and of course
lost to his American friends, . .. swearing in
the most ludicrous jargon. ... Yet he was good-
natured ... the men seemed to like hime sees
night he returned to the never ending game and
lost some more. ... I went to my room to go

The White Goat 263

to bed, turned down the bed clothes, and saw
there, not what I feared, but cockroaches to the
number of several thousand, I should think.
They scampered frantically, jostling each other
like any other crowd. Then I lifted one pillow
and watched more cockroaches hurry under the
neighboring pillow for shelter. Then I saw that
the walls, ceiling, and floor were all quivering
and sparkling with cockroaches. So I told the
landlord downstairs. I said that if he had no
other room, I would throw my camp blankets
on the office table and sleep there if he had no
objection. He was sympathetic, and explained
that the cockroaches must have come up from
the kitchen which was below my room. This
was Saturday night, and every Saturday night
the cook put powder in the kitchen; so that must
have sent them up. This explanation was given
me in a voice full of condolence. And I replied
that very likely this was how they came and that
sleeping in bed with so many at a time would
be impossible. He entirely agreed with me.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘cockroaches is hell.’ . . .

“So I unrolled my blankets and the landlord
helped me make my bed on his office table, lift-
ing the inkstands and newspapers for me... .

264 The White Goat

I went to sleep, hearing the game of poker in the
adjoining room, the gobbling of Madden when
he lost, and the hoarse merriment of the other
men at his gibberish.

“Sunday. ... This morning the game was
still going on, but Madden had retired about
four o'clock a loser. The bar-tender, sweeping
the office, waked me, and I arose and made a
toilet, as usual, in the public trough.”

The retrospect fills me with merriment —
and regret that it’s all over for ever and ever;
and the goat does not live for whose sake I
would do it again.

It is hard not to yield to further temptation,
not to transcribe from that diary of 1892 much
more about the appearance and customs of the
strange wild country through which I now passed
on my way to the goat. Some of the landscape
was the worst, the forlornest, the most worthless
that I know, far outstripping Nevada in sheer
meanness, and as desolate as Arizona, without
Arizona’s magic splendor and fascination. Great
deserts without grandeur, great valleys without
charm, great rocks without dignity, mere lonely
ugliness everywhere; that is the Big Bend coun-
try; and the river Columbia itself, when you finally

The White Goat 265

descend to it from the parched bare dust and the
strewn black boulders of the table-land, is a
sweeping, sullen, shadeless flood, the most un-
lovely river that ever I have seen. ae

I like, when I can, to bring support to my
opinions. On a later day, in the middle of the
Big Bend, I came upon a desolate sign-post,
placed there no doubt to cheer up the wayfarer’s
discouraged heart. This post announced that
Central Ferry was thirty-five miles distant; and
below this a wayfarer had scrawled his personal
comment: —

Forty-five miles to water.
And asubsequent wayfarer had added: —
Seventy-five miles to wood.
And a final wayfarer : —
Two and one-half miles to hell.

Ah, the dauntless, invaluable spirit of man!
Those few words scrawled by a hand that I
should like to shake, made the desert blossom
with humor, and I continued on my journey with
a smiling heart.

Three nights out from the cockroaches, and I
was sleeping in the open, among pleasant hills.

266 The White Goat

An old ragged fiddler, with hair hanging grizzled
to his shoulders, had kept me listening late to
all sorts of old-fashioned tunes and dances. He
had fiddled his way across our continent, and
had taken his lifetime to do so. Here he was,
with silvering hair, up in the Cascade Moun-
tains. I spread my blankets a hundred yards
from his cabin, where he lived alone. He was
perfectly blithe-hearted and perfectly _penniless.
I dont know his name; I never saw him but
that once; I suppose he is dead; but his dis-
course and his fiddle gave me an evening of
entertainment over which I still sometimes dwell.
Had I found no goat, the characters that I met,
such as he, would have rewarded my excursion.
But all things came to me. After some vain
trips, whence I returned empty handed from
fairly rough camping, on Wednesday, Novem-
ber 2, the diary reads, “ One of my particular long-
cherished wishes is accomplished, and I have
» seen and killed a mountain goat.” On the next
day a second head and hide hung in our very
snug camp. These first two were males, and
they served as a basis for the description that
I have attempted to draw earlier in this chapter.
It was while we sat, my companionable guide

The White Goat 267

and I, skinning the second goat, that we held a
conversation which I must here record.

How we ever fell upon such a subject as the
royal family of England, I do not remember;
but camping in the wilderness uses up subjects,
and leaves you with a steadily narrowing choice
each day; and T—, who took an illustrated
paper, observed to me that he had always rather
liked “that chap Lorne.” This was how he
phrased it; his language about some of the
others held less of compliment.

Now I had happened, not long before this, to
read of a distressing coxtretemps that had _ be-
fallen the procession during the Queen’s jubilee,
and I reminded T— of this; but it was new to
him. So I told him that while the crowned
heads were proceeding in state through London
streets with the eyes of the civilized world watch-
ing them with admiration, the Marquis of Lorne’s
horse kicked up. It was a horse that required
a better rider than the Prince of Wales had con-
sidered the marquis to be, for he had warned
him against the animal beforehand. But the
marquis preferred to ride him. And so the horse
kicked up, and off fell the marquis, right in the
middle of the Queen’s jubilee.

268 The White Goat

T— looked at me and said nothing. I was
therefore left uncertain if it came home to the
mind of the mountaineer that this royal progress,
this historic and panoplied moment, was a bad
one for a nobleman to select to tumble off his
horse in. I continued: —

“T believe that the Queen, upon seeing the
accident, sent somebody.”

“Where?” said T—.

“To the marquis. She probably called the
nearest King and said, ‘ Frederick, Lorne’s off.
Go and see if he’s hurt.’”

“* And if he ain’t hurt, Zuz7¢ him,” added T—,
speaking for the Queen. So I perceived that he
had given the situation its full value.

After this second day of success, storm and
snow beat down upon us, a blinding day, keep-
ing us in camp. More storms followed, and no
more goat; and we had to shoot a horse which
had “cast” himself, being entangled in his rope,
and so frozen as he lay helpless overnight in the
heavy snow. We left these mountains and de-
parted to others in search of a herd of goat;
I wished a female and kid, and we seemed to
have lighted upon a resort of old solitary males.
Eight days after the second goat we sighted our

The White Goat 269

herd, and this occasioned an experience more
enlightening.

I feel confident that those who have done
much hunting of big game have sometimes
heard such words as these: “This mountain used
to have a bunch of sheep on it all the time; three
hundred sheep; ” or, “ Just about here last season
I ran into a band of twelve hundred elk;” or,
“I passed two thousand antelope on the flat
yesterday.” The person who says this to you
will have been your own guide, or some visitor
to camp who is comparing notes and exchang-
ing anecdotes. I, at any rate, have listened many
times to such assertions; and now and then I
have been tempted to observe (for instance) in
reply: “Two thousand antelope! When you'd
counted nineteen hundred and ninety-nine, I
should think you’d have been too tired to go on.”
But these are temptations that I have resisted.
I think, too, that the men believed what they
said—in a general way. But here with the
goat was a famous opportunity. We could see
them clearly; they were across a cafion from our-
selves, a mile or so away; they were lying down,
or standing, some eating, some slowly moving
about a little; they were in crowds, and in smaller

270 The White Goat

groups, and by ones and twos, changing their
positions very leisurely; and they seemed num-
berless; they were up and down the hill every-
where. Getting to them this day was not
possible, since most of the day was already gone,
and we were high up on an opposite mountain
side.

“ There’s a hundred thousand goat!” exclaimed
T—; and I should have gone home asseverating
that I had seen at least hundreds.

“Let’s count them,” said I. We took the
glasses and did so. There were thirty-five.

From these thirty-five during the next two
days I completed with no trouble, save hard
climbing, my tally of desired specimens, — an
adult male and female, and a kid, for my own
keeping, with two males to give away to friends.
And I learned a little more about the goat.

The female is lighter built than the male, and
with horns more slender —a trifle. And (to re-
turn to the question of diet) we visited the pas-
ture where the herd had been, and found no sign
of grass growing, or grass eaten; there was no
grass on that mountain. The only edible sub-
stance was a moss, tufted, stiff, and dry to the
touch. The largest horns at the base measured

The White Goat 271

six inches in circumference, and twenty-one and
a half inches from one tip down to the skull and
so across and up to the other tip. I also learned
that the goat is safe from predatory animals.
With his impenetrable hide and his disembowel-
ling horns, he is left by the wolves and mountain
lions respectfully alone. And T— told me of a
mother goat’s energy. A prospector had in early
summer captured a kid still too young to run
much. Its mother saw him taking it to camp,
ran after him, chased him in full sight of his
comrades so hotly that he had to drop her child,
and she got it back! I have said by inference,
but must definitely state, that the kids are
dropped in May and June.

To the sum of our knowledge about the
Oreamnus montanus, the gift of a subspecies
has lately been offered; but acceptance of this
gift would at present, I think, be premature. It
depends on one’s idea of the number of facts
needful in daily life to justify a generalization.
For instance, if you should read in the paper
that one person died of diphtheria last week in
New York, it would not prevent your going to
that city; but if you read that five hundred had
died in a week, you might decide not to take

272 The White Goat

your children there for the season,—and this
would be the result of a justifiable generalization.
The rule is nowise different in genuine science.
This new variety of goat has been based upon a
single specimen, and only the dried skull at that!
Because the horns were a few inches longer and
spread a few inches wider than the average, and
because there were certain differences in measure-
ment of the jaw, is scarce adequate proof that
these variations were not a distortion, congenital
or the result of accident. We have seen people
with squints and with club-feet; we have also
been to the circus, yet we do not make sub-
species for the Kentucky giant and the bearded
lady. But that little ache for self-perpetuation,
for some sort of permanence in this forgetting
world, throbs in many hearts, and since we are
all trying to affix our names to something that
will hand them down to the succeeding genera-
tions, why not tie them to Oveamnus and Ovts ?
And so, reader, you have the pleasing vision of
our zodlogists, riding down to posterity upon the
backs of sundry subspecies of goat and sheep.
These animals, like all our Western big game,
are disappearing. It is not (as the political
Western loud-talker has so frequently shouted)

The White Goat 273

the Eastern “tenderfoot” who is responsible for
this destruction; it is the Westerner himself,
quietly breaking the laws he made, and killing
(to take one recent example) dozens of bull elk
out of season in Jackson’s Hole, Wyoming, merely
to sell the two teeth known as “tushes,” and leav-
ing the rest of the carcass to rot on the hills.
That is the real man who is destroying our big
game, just as he is wiping out our forests. Left
in his hands, the face of our continent would
presently look like a burnt house. Two years
before I hunted the goat, the deer in those moun-
tains came down in herds to stare at the new set-
tlers — who shot them from their cabin doors for
fun. The deer are scarce enough now.

The Yellowstone Park is a sanctuary for
buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, and sheep. There (if
anywhere) our big game have a chance of surviv-
ing. I have never heard of goat as existing in
this sanctuary; but good news comes lately that
the sheep are thriving upon Mt. Evarts. Let me
suggest to the commandant that he take steps to
secure some goat from the Saw Tooth Range —
or anywhere he best can — and try the interesting
experiment of breeding the animal in the Yellow-
stone Park.

274 The White Goat

ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT
(HAPLOCERUS MONTANUS ?)

This is one of the very few mammals that are
permanently white or whitish at all seasons, and
although commonly termed a goat, it really belongs
to the same group as the serows, which it closely
resembles in the form and color of the horns. In
winter the hair is very long, and pure white in
color; along the back it is erect, and much elon-
gated on the withers and haunches, so as to give
to the animal the appearance of possessing a pair
of humps. The summer coat is comparatively
short, and has a yellowish tinge. Height at
shoulder just short of 3 feet; weight from 180 to
300 pounds.

Distribution.— North America, throughout the
Rocky Mountains, from about latitude 36° in Cali-
fornia at least as far north as latitude 60°. By
American naturalists the proper generic name of
the animal is considered to be Orveamnus instead
of Haplocerus.

1“ Records of Big Game,” Rowland Ward, third edition.

CirRcuM-

The White Goat

MEASUREMENTS OF HORNS

TIP To
Tipe

LOcALITY

British Columbia

Kutenay, British
Columbia

Montana

British Columbia

Similkameen River,
British Columbia

2

British Columbia

British Columbia

Montana

N.W. Territories

N.W. Territories

N.W. Territories

Alaska
North America
British Columbia
East Kutenay, British
Columbia
Bitter Root Mts.,
U.S.A.
British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia
North America
British Columbia
Montana

British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia

275

OwNER

Clive Phillipps-Wolley

John T. Fannin
(measured by)

Walter James

R. Rankin

Arthur Pearse

E. N. Buxton

Capt. A. Egerton

J. V. Colby

Theodore Roosevelt

S. Ratcliff

H.R.H. le Duc
d’Orléans

Sir Edmund G. Loder,
Bart.

Sir George Littledale

J. D. Cobbold

P. B. Vander-Byl

A. E, Butter

James J. Harrison

A. E, Leatham
T. W. H. Clarke
J. Turner-Turner
Earl of Lonsdale
G. Lloyd Graeme
Thomas Bate,
British Museum
Sir Peter Walker, Bart.
T. P. Kempson
Count E. Hoyos
Count Schiebler

INDEX

Age indicated by rings on rams’ | Audubon, J. J., 122, 147.

horns, 208 xz.
Alaska, buffalo range as extending
to, 123.
remains of musk-oxen
found in, 85.
Mountain sheep in, 176, 181 .,
223-224, 226, 246.
Remains of buffaloes found in,
123-124.
Rumors of musk-oxen in, 85-93.
White goat found in, 246, 250, 275.
Alaskan bighorn [ Ovis canadensis
dalli|, 176, 181 2., 223-
224, 226, 246.
Alces [Moose], 120.
Alleghanies, the, eastern boundary
of buffalo range, 120.
Allen, Professor J. A., 79, 80.
Monograph on American bisons
by, 119.
Animals, attachment of, to one
locality, 138-146.
Antelope, white goat an, 232.
Antelope-hunting on horses, 197.
Antilope americana, white goat
termed, 259.
Antilope lanigera, 259.
Arctic islands, musk-oxen on, 51,
60, 85, 93.
Argalis, Asiatic, mountain sheep
distinguished from, 223.
Arizona, mountain sheep in, 247.
Arkansas, musk-ox skull found in,
85.

Fossil

“Missouri River Journal” quoted,
157-159.

Aurochs, European bison called, I1I.

Aylmer Lake, musk-ox killed at, 94.

Babiche, 41, 67.
Bache Peninsula, musk-oxen killed
on, 76-79.
Bad Lands, mountain sheep in the,
176.
‘Barren Ground of Northern Can-
ada,” W. Pike’s, 47.
Barren Grounds, hunting in, 17-29.
Physical character of, 34-35.
Route for best reaching, 50-51.
Snowfall in, 35.
Bear River Valley, buffalo formerly
abundant in, 125.
Bedson, S. L., experiments in breed-
ing buffalo by, 148.
Bent, George, 128.
Bent, Colonel William, 128.
Berlin, live musk-ox in, 103.
Big Bend country, description of, 264.
Bighorn, American [ Ovis canaden-
sis], 223-224. See Moun-
tain sheep.
Alaskan [ Ovis canadensis dallt],
176, 181 2., 223-224, 226,

246.
“Biological Survey of Mount
Shasta,” 250.

Birds, attachment of, to certain

localities, 142.

277

278

Bison, American[ Bos dzso7], 111-166.
Mountain, 126, 135-136.
Points distinguishing, from Euro-
pean bison, 165.
Prairie [Bos bison typicus], 165.
Reported relation of musk-ox
to, 75.
See Buffaloes.
Bitter Root Mountains, white goat
found in, 275.
Blackfeet Indians, white buffalo skin
dedicated to Sun by, 127.
Blainville, M. de, 259.
Bodfish, Captain H. H., 93, 103.
Bonneville, Captain, on buffaloes in
Bear River Valley, 125.
Bos bison athabasce [Wood bison],
I17, 123, 165.
Bos bison typicus [Prairie bison],
165.
British Columbia, mountain sheep
in, 225, 226,
White goat in, 231, 250, 275.
Brown, Arthur, on southern range
of white goat, 247.
absence of, from Barren
Grounds, 35-36.
“ Buck-fever,” 203-207.
Buffaloes, agility of, 135-136.
Attachment to one locality, 140-
146.
Battles between males, 131-132.
Bulls, 129-132.
Butchering of, by Indians, de-
scribed, 157-159.
Calves, 132-135, 146-147.
Color of, 126-128, 132-133.
Cross-breeding of, 147-150.
Description, 165.
Domestication, 147-150.
Extermination of, 111-119.
Habits, 129-130.
Hair, 165.
Height, 165.

Brush,

Index

Buffaloes [continued | —

Herds of, 117, 161-163.

Hides, 130-131.

Horns, 165.

Indians hold sacred, 127-129.

Methods of hunting, 150-156.

Migrations, 137-142.

Panics among, 136-137.

Range, 119-126, 165.

Rubbing-stones, 131, 163.

Rutting season, 131-132.

Superstitions concerning, 127-
130.

“Surround” method of hunting,
150-156.

Trails, 138.

Weight, 165.

Young, 132-135, 146-147.

See Bison.

Buffalo-running, 159-161.

California, absence of white goat
from, 244-245.
California mountain sheep [ Ovzs
canadensis nelsoni], 223,
226.

Calves, buffalo, 132-133, 146-147.

Of musk-oxen, 100, 103, 132-133.

Camping in Barren Grounds, 64-
69.

Canoes, musk-ox hunting in, 61-62.

Cape Bryant, musk-oxen killed at,
93+

Capote, caribou-skin, 55.

Capra americana, white goat called,
259.

Capra montana, 259.

Caribou, course of migration, in Bar-
ren Grounds, 44, 47-48.

Cervus canadensis [Elk], 120.

Chamois, relation of white goat to,
232)

Charging, false reputation of musk-
oxen for, 73-75.

Index

Cheyenne Indians, white buffalo skins
dedicated to Sun by, 127.

Coffee a luxury in the North, 50.

Cogmolik Indians, 92.

Colorado, buffalo-horns from, 166.

Colorado Cafion, mountain sheep in,
247.

Copenhagen, live musk-ox in, 105.

Corsica, the moufflon of, 182.

Coues, Dr. Elliott, 256.

Dakota, disappearance of mountain
sheep from, 178-179.
Deer-hunting on horses, 197.
District of Columbia, buffaloes re-
ported as once found in,
120-121.
Dodge, Colonel, 115, 133, 161.
Dogs, question of shipping, into the
Barren Grounds, 41-42.
Scarcity of, in North Country,
38-39.
See Sledge-dogs.

Domestication of buffaloes, 147-150.
Drought, buffaloes driven from Mis-
sissippi by, 121.

Duffel, the, defined, 39.

Duke of Bedford, live musk-ox
owned by, 103.

Dunbar, William, 257, 259.

Dung of musk-ox, 100.

Earl of Lonsdale, musk-ox horns
owned by, 99-100.
Elk [ Cervus canadensis], 120.
Slaughter of, at Jackson’s Hole,
Ky., 273.
Elk-hunting on horses, 197.
Equipment for Barren Ground expe-
dition, 53-54.
Europe, fossil remains of musk-oxen
found in, 85.
Specimens (live) of musk-ox in,
103.

279

Ewe and lamb, Wister’s experience
with, 210-222,

Feeding, problem of, in Barren
Grounds, 41-42.

Firth, John, 91.

Flesh of musk-oxen, 100-103.

Flowers in the Barren Grounds, 62.

Fort Resolution, 39, 50.

Fossil remains of musk-oxen, 85.

Franz Josef Land, musk-oxen un-
known in, 93.

Fremont, J. C., on western range of
buffaloes, 125.

Fur, color of, of musk-oxen, 80,
104.

Gass, 175, 179, 256.

Gaudet, Hudson’s Bay Company post
factor, 53.

Goat, relation between sheep and,
182. See White goat.

Grease, craving for, in the North, 47.

Great Lakes northern boundary of
buffalo range, 121.

Greenland, musk-oxen in, 51, 79-80,
85.

Green River, buffaloes found on
tributaries of, 125.

Grinnell Land, fossil remains of
musk-oxen in, 85.

Musk-oxen of, 79-80.

Haggerty, Captain, go.

Hair of white goat, 239, 240-241,
257.

Haplocerus montanus [ Rocky Moun-
tain goat], 231, 259, 274.
See White goat.

Harlan’s musk-ox [Ovibos bombi-
Jrons], 76, 85.

Headgear in Barren Ground hunt-
ing, 33-34.

Heads of musk-oxen, 99-100,

280

Henry, Alexander, Journal of, 118,
161-162.
Hides, of buffaloes, 130-131.
White goat, 241.
Hodgson, Mr., Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany trader, 91.

Hoofs of white goat, 239-240.

Hornaday, W. T., 120-121, 148, 165.

Horns, of mountain sheep, 181 7.
Musk-oxen’s, 76, 98-100,

Rings on rams’, 208 2.
White goat’s, 239.

Horses, antelope-hunting on, 197.
Buffalo-hunting on, 153-155.
Deer-hunting on, 197.
Sheep-hunting on, 192-193.

Hostility between sheep and goat,

233-237, 245-246.

Hudson’s Bay Company posts, 37.

Hunter, Dr., 257, 259.

Hunting seasons in Barren Grounds,

44-48, 50-52.

Idaho, white goat in, 247, 250.
India, sheep found in, 182.
Indians, Alaskan, 90, 91, 92.

For Barren Ground hunting, 52-

53:
Buffaloes formerly sacred to, 127.
Methods of, in hunting musk-
oxen, 47-49.
Slaughter of buffalo by, 157-159.
Innuits, musk-ox hunting by, 60-61.

Jackson’s Hole, elk-killing at, 273.
Jones, C. J., experiments in breeding
buffalo by, 148.

Kamchatka, sheep found in, 182.
Kentucky, buffaloes formerly in, 122.
Domestication of buffaloes in,
147.
Skull of musk-ox found in, 85.
Kids of white goat, 271.

Index

Knife for musk-ox hunting, 67.
Kodak, hunting with a, 261.
Kogmolik Indians, 92.
Kookpugmioot Indians, 92.

Lambs of mountain sheep, 208-222.
‘Land of Little Sticks,” 17, 36.
Laramie Plains, buffaloes on the,
124, 125.
Lewis, Meriwether, 175-176, 245,
255-257-
Confusion of goat and sheep by,
251, 255-260.
Livingston, Mont., mountain sheep
seen at, 171-173, 183-184.
London, live musk-ox in, 103.
Loucheaux Indians, 91.
Lydekker, Professor R., 75, 79.
“The Royal Natural History”
of, 246.

Mackenzie River, musk-oxen not
found west of, 86-93.

Maclaine of Lochbuie, the, horns
of sheep owned by, 224.

Maps, mistakes in, 244-245.

Mazama Sericea, white goat named,
259.

Mexico, mountain sheep in, 181 z.,
247.

Migrations, buffalo, 137-142.
Caribou, in Barren Grounds, 44,

47-48.

Mississippi, buffaloes formerly in,

127s

“Missouri River Journal,” Audu-

bon’s, quoted, 157-159.

Moccasins essential in Barren Ground

outfit, 39.

Montana, bison horns from, 166.
Mountain sheep in, 225, 226.
White goat in, 250, 275.

Moore, Francis, ‘‘ Voyage

Georgia” of, 121.

to

Index

Moose [Alces], 120.
Mosquitoes in Barren Grounds, 44.
Moufflon, the, of Corsica, 182.
Mt. Evarts, sheep on, 273.
Mountain bison, 126, 135-136.
Mountain sheep [American bighorn,
Ovis canadensis], 171-
226.
Color, 179-180.
Description, 179-183, 223-224.
Distribution, 176, 224.
Habitat, 199, 246-247.
Height, 224.
Hide, 179.
Horns, 223-225.
Hostility to goat, 233-237, 245-
246.
Keenness of sight, 219.
Lambs, 208-222.
Method of hunting, 197-199.
Range, 176, 224.
Rutting season, 184, 208.
Species and subdivisions, 180-
182.
Weight, 224.
White goat and, 233-237, 245-
246.
White variety [Ovzs dalli], 181,
201.
Munn, Henry Toke, 47.
Musk-ox of Barren Grounds [ Ov7-
bos moschatus], 17-106.
Action when attacked, 59-60, 73-
75:
Appearance, 73.
Calves, 100, 103, 130-131.
Dung of, 100.
Flesh, 100, 103.
Fur, 97-98, 104-105.
Genus, 75-80.
Herds of, 97.
Hides not valuable, 52.
Horns, 98-100, 104, 106.
Inaccessibility of, 50.

281

Musk-ox [continued ] —
Method of hunting, 56-69.
Origin (reputed), 70.
Permit necessary for hunting, 51.
Range, 76, 79-80, 85-94, 105.
Size, 94, 105.
Specimens (live), 103.

National Park, Colorado, buffaloes
in, 117-118. See Yellow-
stone Park.

Noonitagmiott Indians, go.

North Platte River, buffaloes on
tributaries of, 126,

Olympic Range, white goat not
found in, 250.

Ord, George, 259.

Oreannus montanus [Rocky Moun-
tain goat], 231, 259, 274.

Oregon, absence of white goat from,
250.

Ovibos bombifrons [Harlan’s musk-
ox], 76, 85.

Ovibos moschatus [Barren Ground
and Greenland type of
musk-ox], 76, 80, 82, 83,
104-105.

Ovibos pearyt, 80.

Ovibos wardi, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83,
104-105, 106.

Ovis canadensis [American big-
horn], 180-181, 208, 223-
224. See Mountain sheep.

Ovts canadensis auduboni, 181.

Ovis canadensis dalli | Alaskan big-
horn], 176, 181 2., 223-
224, 226, 246.

Ovis canadensis nelsoni [Californian
sheep ], 223, 224.

Ovis canadensis stonet, 223.

Ovis canadensis typica [Rocky
Mountain sheep], 223,
259.

282

Ovis cervina, 181.

Ovis dalli, 181, 201.

Ovis fannini [Saddleback sheep],
181-182, 213.

Ovis mexicana, 181.

Ovis montana, 259.

Ovis nelsoni, 181, 187.

Ovis stonei, 177, 181.

Panics among buffaloes, 136-137.
Pawnee Indians, buffalo skins sacred
to, 127.
Peary, Lieutenant, musk-ox captured
by, 105.
Musk-oxen killed by, 76-79, 93.
Pemmican, from dried buffalo meat,
156.
Scarcity of, in the North, 49.
Philadelphia, white goat in Zodlogi-
cal Gardens at, 231, 237-
238.
Piccolo, Padre, 250.
Pike, Warburton, 47, 62, 74, 94.
Musk-ox heads owned by, 100.
Pine, patches of, in Land of Little
Sticks, 36.
Platte River, buffaloes on tributaries
of, 125-126.
Prairie bison (Bos bison typicus),
165.
Protection, government, of musk-
oxen, 5I.
Provision question in musk-ox hunt-
ing, 36-38.
Provisions in Barren Grounds, 62-63.

Rae, J., Hudson’s Bay Company
factor, 99.

Railroads, effect of, on buffaloes,
113-116.

Ram seen at Livingston, Mont.,
171-173, 183-184.

“Records of Big Game,” R. Ward’s,
104, 165, 223-224, 274.

Index

Red Desert Country, buffaloes in,
126.

Red River, buffaloes on the, 162.

Red River half-breeds, buffalo hunts
of, 117, 154-155.

Rings on rams’ horns, 208 2.

Robinson, John (“ Uncle Jack Rob-
inson ”), 124.

Rocky Mountain goat [Haplocerus
montanus or Oreamnus
montanus |, 231, 259, 274.
See White goat.

Rocky Mountain sheep [ Ovis cana-
densis typica|, 223, 259.

“ Royal Natural History, The,” Ly-
dekker’s, 246, 247.

Rubbing-stones, buffaloes’, 131, 163.

Rupicapra americana, white goat
termed, 2509.

Rutting season, buffaloes’, 131-132.

Mountain sheep’s, 184, 208,

Saddleback sheep [Ovis fannint],
181-182, 213.

Salt Lake Valley, buffaloes in, 124.

Salvatierra, Padre de, 250.

Saw Tooth Range, white goat in, 247.

Schwatka, Frederick, 60, 61, 93.

Serows, Rocky Mountain goat mem-
ber of same group as, 274.

Sheep. See Mountain sheep.

Shoshone Indians, sheep-hunting on
horses by, 193.

Siberia, fossil remains of musk-oxen
found in, 85.

Skulls of musk-oxen, 75-76, 80, 82, 83.

Slaughter of buffaloes in America,
114-119.

Sledge, description of, in Barren
Ground outfit, 40-41.

Sledge-dogs, methods of harnessing,
60-61.

Scarcity of, in North, 38-39.
Snowfall in Barren Grounds, 35.

Index

233

Snows, effect on buffaloes, 124, 137.| Washakie Needle, mountain sheep

Snow-shoes, Barren Ground, 35.

on the, 186-196.

Spitzbergen, musk-oxen unknown| Washington (state), white goat

in, 93-

found in, 250.

Stone, Andrew J., report as to west- | White goat [Oreamnus montanus],

ern range of musk-oxen,

86-93.
Stouch, Major G. W. H., 143.
Stringer, Rev. I. O., 89, go.
Strouds, 53, 54-
“ Surround ” method of hunting buf-
falo, 150-153.
Sweetwater River, buffaloes on, 126.

Tail, ‘lack of, in mountain sheep,
182.

Tea an essential in Barren Ground
outfit, 39-40.

Tennessee River southern boundary
of buffalo range, 121.

Tepee in Barren Ground outfit, 55,
57> 64.

Teton Range, sheep-hunting in, 209-
222.

Tibet, sheep found in, 182.

White goat in, 239.

Tobacco, necessity of, in Barren
Ground outfit, 39-40.

Tooyogmioot Indians, go.

Tracks made by white goat, 239-240.

Travelling, methods of, in Barren | Whitney,

Ground hunting, 62-63.
Trees, absence of, from Barren

Grounds, 35-36.
“Tripping” snow-shoes, 35.

Vaches (vaches sauvages), 120.

Virginia, domestication of buffaloes
in, 147-

“ Voyage to Georgia,” Moore’s, 121.

Ward, Rowland, 79.
“Records of Big Game” by,
cited, 104, 165, 223, 274.

227-273-
Color, 242-243, 274.
Description, 239-242.
Food, 249.
Habitat, 231, 245-251.
Hair, 257.
Height, 274.
Hide, 241.
Horns, 258.
Hostility to sheep, 233-237, 245-
246.
Immigration from Asia, 232-233,
245-246.
Kids, 271.
Lewis’s error about, 251, 255-260.
Method of hunting, 260.
Origin, 232-233.
Relationship to chamois, 232.
Sheep and, 233-237, 245-246.
Size, 242.
Species, 232, 259.
Specimens (live), 231, 237-238.
Track made by, 239-240.
Various Latin names for, 259.
Weight, 241, 274.
Casper, musk-ox head
taken by, 100.
Whitney, William C., live musk-ox
bought by, 103.
Wild cows, elk called, 120.
Wood bison [ Bos bison athabasce],
II7, 123, 165.
Wool of musk-ox, 97-98, 104—105.
Wycliff, Robert, 147, 148, 149.
Wyoming, bison horns from, 166.
Mountain sheep in, 185, 225,
226.
White goat not found im, 245,

248.

284 Index

Yancey, John, 252. Young [continued] —
Yellowstone Park, bison horns from, Of musk-oxen, 100, 103.
166. Of white goat, 271.
Buffaloes in, 117-118.
Game in, 273. Zodlogical gardens, musk-oxen in,
Yoke, breaking buffaloes to the, 149. 103.
Young, of buffaloes, 132-135, 146-| Zodlogical Gardens, Philadelphia,
147. white goat in, 231, 237-

Of mountain sheep, 208-222. 238.

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