[Illustration:
_IN THE FOREST OF CALIFORNIA_
_President Roosevelt and party, including Secretary Moody and
Governor Pardee, after crossing the old trail of “The Wilderness
Hunter”_]
THE WORKS OF
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
IN FOURTEEN VOLUMES
_Illustrated_
THE WILDERNESS HUNTER
[Illustration]
Executive Edition
PUBLISHED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE PRESIDENT THROUGH SPECIAL
ARRANGEMENT WITH THE CENTURY CO., MESSRS. CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, AND
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
THE CO-OPERATIVE PUBLICATION SOCIETY
NEW YORK AND LONDON
COPYRIGHT 1889 BY G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
This edition is published under arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
of New York and London.
TO
E. K. R.
“They saw the silences
Move by and beckon; saw the forms,
The very beards, of burly storms,
And heard them talk like sounding seas....
They saw the snowy mountains rolled
And heaved along the nameless lands
Like mighty billows; saw the gold
Of awful sunsets; saw the blush
Of sudden dawn, and felt the hush
Of heaven when the day sat down
And hid his face in dusky hands.”
--_Joaquin Miller_
“In vain the speeding of shyness;
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods....
... where geese nip their food with short jerks,
Where sundown shadows lengthen over the limitless prairie,
Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles,
far and near,
Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and ice-clad trees....
The moose, large as an ox, cornered by hunters, plunging with his
forefeet, the hoofs as sharp as knives.... The blazing fire at
night, the
sweet taste of supper, the talk, the bed of hemlock boughs, and the
bear-skin.”
--_Walt Whitman_
CONTENTS
PREFACE
CHAPTER I
THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS; WILDERNESS HUNTERS AND WILDERNESS GAME
The American Wilderness--Forests, Plains, Mountains--Likeness and
Unlikeness to the Old-World Wilderness--Wilderness Hunters--Boone,
Crockett, Houston, Carson--The Trappers--The Buffalo Hunters--The
Stockmen--The Regular Army--Wilderness Game--Bison, Moose, Elk,
Caribou, Deer, Antelope--Other Game--Hunting in the Wilderness
CHAPTER II
HUNTING FROM THE RANCH; THE BLACKTAIL DEER
In the Cattle Country--Life on a Ranch--A Round-up--Branding a
Maverick--The Bad Lands--A Shot at a Blacktail--Still-hunting the
Blacktail--Its Habits--Killing a Buck in August--A Shot at Close
Range--Occasional Unwariness of Blacktail
CHAPTER III
THE WHITETAIL DEER; AND THE BLACKTAIL OF THE COLUMBIA
The Whitetail--Yields Poor Sport--Fire Hunting--Hunting with
Hounds--Shooting at Running Game--Queer Adventure--Anecdotes of
Plainsmen--Good and Bad Shots--A Wagon Trip--A Shot from the
Ranch-house Veranda--The Columbian Blacktail
CHAPTER IV
ON THE CATTLE RANGES; THE PRONG-HORN ANTELOPE
Riding to the Round-up--The Open Plains--Sights and Sounds--Gophers,
Prairie Dogs, Sharp-tail Grouse, Antelope--The Cow-camp--Standing
Night Guard--Dawn--Make an Antelope Hunt--An Easy Stalk--A
Difficult Stalk--Three Antelope Shot--The Plains Skylark--The
Meadow-Lark--The Mocking-bird--Other Singers--Harsher Wilderness
Sounds--Pack Rats--Plains Ferret, Its Ferocity--The War Eagle--Attacks
Antelope--Kills Jack-Rabbit--One Shot on Wing with Rifle
CHAPTER V
HUNTING THE PRONG-BUCK; FROST, FIRE, AND THIRST
Hunting the Prong-Buck--Long Shots--Misses--Winter Weather--A Hunt
in December--Riding in the Bitter Cold--The Old Hunter’s Tepee--A
Night in a Line Camp--An Antelope Herd--Two Bucks Shot--Riding Back
to Ranch--The Immigrant Train--Hunting in Fall--Fighting Fire--A
Summer Hunt--Sufferings from Thirst--Swimming Cattle Across a
Swollen Stream--Wagon Trip to the Black Hills--The Great Prairies--A
Prong-buck Shot--Pleasant Camp--Buck Shot in Morning--Continue our
Journey--Shooting Sage Fowl and Prairie Fowl with Rifle
CHAPTER VI
AMONG THE HIGH HILLS; THE BIGHORN OR MOUNTAIN SHEEP
A Summer on the Ranch--Working Among the Cattle--Killing Game for the
Ranch--A Trip After Mountain Sheep--The Bad Lands--Solitary Camp--The
Old Horse Manitou--Still-hunt at Dawn--Young Ram Shot--A Hunt in the
Rocky Mountains--An Old Bighorn Stalked and Shot--Habits of the Game
CHAPTER VII
MOUNTAIN GAME; THE WHITE GOAT
A Trip to the Big Hole Basin--Incidents of Travel with a Wagon--Camp
Among the Mountains--A Trip on Foot After Goats--Spruce Grouse--Lying
Out at Night--A Climb over the High Peaks--Two Goats Shot--Weary Tramp
Back--A Hunt in the Kootenai Country--Hard Climbing Among the Wooded
Mountains--Goat Shot on Brink of Chasm--Ptarmigan for Supper--Goat
Hunting Very Hard Work--Ways and Habits of the Goats--Not much Decrease
in Numbers
CHAPTER VIII
HUNTING IN THE SELKIRKS; THE CARIBOU
A Camp on Kootenai Lake--Traveling on Foot Through the Dense
Forests--Excessive Toil--Water Shrew and Water Thrush--Black Bear
Killed--Mountain Climbing--Woodchucks and Conies--The Indian
Ammál--Night Sounds--A Long Walk--A Caribou Killed--A Midwinter Trip on
Snowshoes in Maine--Footprints on the Snow--A Helpless Deer--Caribou at
Ease in the Deep Drifts
CHAPTER IX
THE WAPITI OR ROUND-HORNED ELK
A Hunt in the Bitter Root Mountains--A Trip on Foot--Two Bull Elk
Fighting--The Peacemaker--All Three Shot--Habits of the Wapiti--Their
Bugling--A Grand Chorus--Shooting a Bull at Sunrise--Another
Killed near the Ranch--Vanishing of the Elk--Its Antlers--The
Lynx--Porcupine--Chickarees and Chipmunks--Clark’s Crow--Lewis’
Woodpecker--Whiskey-jack--Trout--The Yellowstone Canyon
CHAPTER X
AN ELK-HUNT AT TWO-OCEAN PASS
In the Shoshones--Traveling with a Pack-train--Scenery--Flowers--A
Squaw-man--Bull Elk Shot in Rain while Challenging--Storm--Breaking
Camp in Rain--Two-Ocean Pass--Our Camp--A Young Ten-pointer Shot--The
Mountains in Moonlight--Blue Grouse--Snowshoe Rabbits--Death of a
Master Bull--The Tetons--Following a Bull by Scent--Ill Luck--Luck
Changes--Death of Spike Bull--Three Bulls Killed--Traveling Home--Heavy
Snowstorm--Bucking Horse--Various Hunts Compared--Number Cartridges
Used--Still-hunting the Elk
CHAPTER XI
THE MOOSE; THE BEAST OF THE WOODLAND
The Moose of the Rocky Mountains--Its Habits--Difficult Nature of Its
Haunts--Repeated Failures while Hunting It--Watching a Marsh at Dawn--A
Moose in the Reeds--Stalking and Shooting Him--Traveling Light with a
Pack-train--A Beaver Meadow--Shooting a Big Bull at Dawn--The Moose
in Summer, in Winter--Young Moose--Pugnacity of Moose--Still-hunting
Moose--Rather More Easy to Kill than Whitetail Deer--At Times a
Dangerous Antagonist--The Winter Yards--Hunting on Snowshoes--A Narrow
Escape--A Fatal Encounter
CHAPTER XII
HUNTING LORE
Game Which Ought Not to Be Killed--Killing Black Bear
with a Knife--Sports with Rod and Shot-gun--Snowshoeing
and Mountaineering--American Writers on Out-door
Life--Burroughs--Thoreau--Audubon, Coues, etc.--American Hunting
Books--American Writers on Life in the Wilderness: Parkman,
Irving--Cooper on Pioneer Life--American Statesmen and Soldiers Devoted
to the Chase--Lincoln, Jackson, Israel Putnam--A Letter from Webster
on Trout-fishing--Clay--Washington--Hunting Extracts from Washington’s
Diaries--Washington as a Fox-hunter
APPENDIX
PREFACE
For a number of years much of my life was spent either in the
wilderness or on the borders of the settled country--if, indeed,
“settled” is a term that can rightly be applied to the vast, scantily
peopled regions where cattle-ranching is the only regular industry.
During this time I hunted much, among the mountains and on the plains,
both as a pastime and to procure hides, meat, and robes for use on the
ranch; and it was my good luck to kill all the various kinds of large
game that can properly be considered to belong to temperate North
America.
In hunting, the finding and killing of the game is after all but a
part of the whole. The free, self-reliant, adventurous life, with its
rugged and stalwart democracy; the wild surroundings, the grand beauty
of the scenery, the chance to study the ways and habits of the woodland
creatures--all these unite to give to the career of the wilderness
hunter its peculiar charm. The chase is among the best of all national
pastimes; it cultivates that vigorous manliness for the lack of which
in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities
can possibly atone.
No one, but he who has partaken thereof, can understand the keen
delight of hunting in lonely lands. For him is the joy of the horse
well ridden and the rifle well held; for him the long days of toil and
hardship, resolutely endured, and crowned at the end with triumph. In
after years there shall come forever to his mind the memory of endless
prairies shimmering in the bright sun; of vast snow-clad wastes lying
desolate under gray skies; of the melancholy marshes; of the rush of
mighty rivers; of the breath of the evergreen forest in summer; of the
crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of
cataracts roaring between hoary mountain masses; of all the innumerable
sights and sounds of the wilderness; of its immensity and mystery; and
of the silences that brood in its still depths.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
SAGAMORE HILL,
_June, 1893_.
THE WILDERNESS HUNTER
CHAPTER I
THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS; WILDERNESS HUNTERS AND WILDERNESS GAME
Manifold are the shapes taken by the American wilderness. In the east,
from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi Valley, lies a land of
magnificent hardwood forest. In endless variety and beauty, the trees
cover the ground, save only where they have been cleared away by man,
or where toward the west the expanse of the forest is broken by fertile
prairies. Toward the north, this region of hardwood trees merges
insensibly into the southern extension of the great sub-arctic forest;
here the silver stems of birches gleam against the sombre background of
coniferous evergreens. In the southeast again, by the hot, oozy coasts
of the South Atlantic and the Gulf, the forest becomes semi-tropical;
palms wave their feathery fronds, and the tepid swamps teem with
reptile life.
Some distance beyond the Mississippi, stretching from Texas to North
Dakota, and westward to the Rocky Mountains, lies the plains country.
This is a region of light rainfall, where the ground is clad with
short grass, while cottonwood trees fringe the courses of the winding
plains streams; streams that are alternately turbid torrents and mere
dwindling threads of water. The great stretches of natural pasture are
broken by gray sage-brush plains, and tracts of strangely shaped and
colored Bad Lands; sun-scorched wastes in summer, and in winter arctic
in their iron desolation. Beyond the plains rise the Rocky Mountains,
their flanks covered with coniferous woods; but the trees are small,
and do not ordinarily grow very closely together. Toward the north the
forest becomes denser, and the peaks higher; and glaciers creep down
toward the valleys from the fields of everlasting snow. The brooks are
brawling, trout-filled torrents; the swift rivers foam over rapid and
cataract, on their way to one or the other of the two great oceans.
Southwest of the Rockies evil and terrible deserts stretch for leagues
and leagues, mere waterless wastes of sandy plain and barren mountain,
broken here and there by narrow strips of fertile ground. Rain rarely
falls, and there are no clouds to dim the brazen sun. The rivers run
in deep canyons, or are swallowed by the burning sand; the smaller
watercourses are dry throughout the greater part of the year.
Beyond this desert region rise the sunny Sierras of California, with
their flower-clad slopes and groves of giant trees; and north of them,
along the coast, the rain-shrouded mountain chains of Oregon and
Washington, matted with the towering growth of the mighty evergreen
forest.
The white hunters, who from time to time first penetrated the different
parts of this wilderness, found themselves in such hunting grounds
as those wherein, long ages before, their Old-World forefathers had
dwelled; and the game they chased was much the same as that their
lusty barbarian ancestors followed, with weapons of bronze and of
iron, in the dim years before history dawned. As late as the end of
the seventeenth century the turbulent village nobles of Lithuania and
Livonia hunted the bear, the bison, the elk, the wolf, and the stag,
and hung the spoils in their smoky wooden palaces; and so, two hundred
years later, the free hunters of Montana, in the interludes between
hazardous mining quests and bloody Indian campaigns, hunted game
almost or quite the same in kind, through the cold mountain forests
surrounding the Yellowstone and Flathead lakes, and decked their log
cabins and ranch houses with the hides and horns of the slaughtered
beasts.
Zoologically speaking, the north temperate zones of the Old and New
Worlds are very similar, differing from one another much less than they
do from the various regions south of them, or than these regions differ
among themselves. The untrodden American wilderness resembles both in
game and physical character the forests, the mountains, and the steppes
of the Old World as it was at the beginning of our era. Great woods
of pine and fir, birch and beech, oak and chestnut; streams where the
chief game fish are spotted trout and silvery salmon; grouse of various
kinds as the most common game birds; all these the hunter finds as
characteristic of the New World as of the Old. So it is with most of
the beasts of the chase, and so also with the fur-bearing animals that
furnish to the trapper alike his life work and his means of livelihood.
The bear, wolf, bison, moose, caribou, wapiti, deer, and bighorn, the
lynx, fox, wolverine, sable, mink, ermine, beaver, badger, and otter
of both worlds are either identical or more or less closely kin to one
another. Sometimes of the two forms, that found in the Old World is
the larger. Perhaps more often the reverse is true, the American beast
being superior in size. This is markedly the case with the wapiti,
which is merely a giant brother of the European stag, exactly as the
fisher is merely a very large cousin of the European sable or marten.
The extraordinary prong-buck, the only hollow-horned ruminant which
sheds its horns annually, is a distant representative of the Old-World
antelopes of the steppes; the queer white antelope-goat has for its
nearest kinsfolk certain Himalayan species. Of the animals commonly
known to our hunters and trappers, only a few, such as the cougar,
peccary, raccoon, possum (and among birds the wild turkey), find their
nearest representatives and type forms in tropical America.
Of course this general resemblance does not mean identity. The
differences in plant life and animal life, no less than in the
physical features of the land, are sufficiently marked to give the
American wilderness a character distinctly its own. Some of the most
characteristic of the woodland animals, some of those which have
most vividly impressed themselves on the imagination of the hunters
and pioneer settlers, are the very ones which have no Old-World
representatives. The wild turkey is in every way the king of American
game birds. Among the small beasts the coon and the possum are those
which have left the deepest traces in the humbler lore of the frontier;
exactly as the cougar--usually under the name of panther or mountain
lion--is a favorite figure in the wilder hunting tales. Nowhere else is
there anything to match the wealth of the eastern hardwood forests, in
number, variety, and beauty of trees; nowhere else is it possible to
find conifers approaching in size the giant redwoods and sequoias of
the Pacific slope. Nature here is generally on a larger scale than in
the Old-World home of our race. The lakes are like inland seas, the
rivers, like arms of the sea. Among stupendous mountain chains there
are valleys and canyons of fathomless depth and incredible beauty and
majesty. There are tropical swamps, and sad, frozen marshes; deserts
and Death Valleys, weird and evil, and the strange wonderland of
the Wyoming geyser region. The waterfalls are rivers rushing over
precipices; the prairies seem without limit, and the forest never
ending.
At the time when we first became a nation, nine-tenths of the territory
now included within the limits of the United States was wilderness.
It was during the stirring and troubled years immediately preceding
the outbreak of the Revolution that the most adventurous hunters, the
vanguard of the hardy army of pioneer settlers, first crossed the
Alleghanies, and roamed far and wide through the lonely, danger-haunted
forests which filled the No-man’s-land lying between the Tennessee
and the Ohio. They waged ferocious warfare with Shawnee and Wyandot
and wrought huge havoc among the herds of game with which the forest
teemed. While the first Continental Congress was still sitting, Daniel
Boone, the archetype of the American hunter, was leading his bands of
tall backwoods riflemen to settle in the beautiful country of Kentucky,
where the red and the white warriors strove with such obstinate rage
that both races alike grew to know it as “the dark and bloody ground.”
Boone and his fellow-hunters were the heralds of the oncoming
civilization, the pioneers in that conquest of the wilderness which has
at last been practically achieved in our own day. Where they pitched
their camps and built their log huts or stockaded hamlets, towns
grew up, and men who were tillers of the soil, not mere wilderness
wanderers, thronged in to take and hold the land. Then, ill-at-ease
among the settlements for which they had themselves made ready the
way, and fretted even by the slight restraints of the rude and uncouth
semi-civilization of the border, the restless hunters moved onward
into the yet unbroken wilds where the game dwelled and the red tribes
marched forever to war and hunting. Their untamable souls ever found
something congenial and beyond measure attractive in the lawless
freedom of the lives of the very savages against whom they warred so
bitterly.
Step by step, often leap by leap, the frontier of settlement was
pushed westward; and ever from before its advance fled the warrior
tribes of the red men and the scarcely less intractable array of white
Indian fighters and game hunters. When the Revolutionary War was at
its height, George Rogers Clark, himself a mighty hunter of the old
backwoods type, led his handful of hunter-soldiers to the conquest of
the French towns of the Illinois. This was but one of the many notable
feats of arms performed by the wild soldiery of the backwoods. Clad in
their fringed and tasseled hunting-shirt of buckskin or homespun, with
coonskin caps and deer-hide leggings and moccasins, with tomahawk and
scalping-knife thrust into their bead-worked belts, and long rifles in
hand, they fought battle after battle of the most bloody character,
both against the Indians, as at the Great Kanawha, at the Fallen
Timbers, and at Tippecanoe, and against more civilized foes, as at
King’s Mountain, New Orleans, and the River Thames.
Soon after the beginning of the present century Louisiana fell into our
hands, and the most daring hunters and explorers pushed through the
forests of the Mississippi Valley to the great plains, steered across
these vast seas of grass to the Rocky Mountains, and then through
their rugged defiles onward to the Pacific Ocean. In every work of
exploration, and in all the earlier battles with the original lords
of the western and southwestern lands, whether Indian or Mexican, the
adventurous hunters played the leading part; while close behind came
the swarm of hard, dogged, border-farmers,--a masterful race, good
fighters and good breeders, as all masterful races must be.
Very characteristic in its way was the career of quaint, honest,
fearless Davy Crockett, the Tennessee rifleman and Whig Congressman,
perhaps the best shot in all our country, whose skill in the use of
his favorite weapon passed into a proverb, and who ended his days by
a hero’s death in the ruins of the Alamo. An even more notable man
was another mighty hunter, Houston, who when a boy ran away to the
Indians; who while still a lad returned to his own people to serve
under Andrew Jackson in the campaigns which that greatest of all the
backwoods leaders waged against the Creeks, the Spaniards, and the
British. He was wounded at the storming of one of the strongholds of
Red Eagle’s doomed warriors, and returned to his Tennessee home to rise
to high civil honor, and become the foremost man of his State. Then,
while Governor of Tennessee, in a sudden fit of moody anger, and of
mad longing for the unfettered life of the wilderness, he abandoned
his office, his people, and his race, and fled to the Cherokees beyond
the Mississippi. For years he lived as one of their chiefs; until one
day, as he lay in ignoble ease and sloth, a rider from the south, from
the rolling plains of the San Antonio and Brazos, brought word that
the Texans were up, and in doubtful struggle striving to wrest their
freedom from the lancers and carbineers of Santa Anna. Then his dark
soul flamed again into burning life; riding by night and day he joined
the risen Texans, was hailed by them as a heaven-sent leader, and at
the San Jacinto led them on to the overthrow of the Mexican host.
Thus the stark hunter, who had been alternately Indian fighter and
Indian chief, became the President of the new Republic, and, after its
admission into the United States, a Senator at Washington; and, to his
high honor, he remained to the end of his days staunchly loyal to the
flag of the Union.
By the time that Crockett fell, and Houston became the darling leader
of the Texans, the typical hunter and Indian fighter had ceased to be
a backwoodsman; he had become a plainsman, or mountain-man; for the
frontier, east of which he never willingly went, had been pushed beyond
the Mississippi. Restless, reckless, and hardy, he spent years of his
life in lonely wanderings through the Rockies as a trapper; he guarded
the slowly moving caravans, which for purposes of trade journeyed
over the dangerous Santa Fé trail; he guided the large parties of
frontier settlers who, driving before them their cattle, with all their
household goods in their white-topped wagons, spent perilous months and
seasons on their weary way to Oregon or California. Joining in bands,
the stalwart, skin-clad riflemen waged ferocious war on the Indians,
scarcely more savage than themselves, or made long raids for plunder
and horses against the outlying Mexican settlements. The best, the
bravest, the most modest of them all was the renowned Kit Carson. He
was not only a mighty hunter, a daring fighter, a finder of trails,
and maker of roads through the unknown, untrodden wilderness, but
also a real leader of men. Again and again he crossed and recrossed
the continent, from the Mississippi to the Pacific; he guided many of
the earliest military and exploring expeditions of the United States
Government; he himself led the troops in victorious campaigns against
Apache and Navahoe; and in the Civil War he was made a colonel of the
Federal Army.
After him came many other hunters. Most were pure-blooded Americans,
but many were Creole Frenchmen, Mexicans, or even members of the
so-called civilized Indian tribes, notably the Delawares. Wide
were their wanderings, many their strange adventures in the chase,
bitter their unending warfare with the red lords of the land. Hither
and thither they roamed, from the desolate, burning deserts of the
Colorado to the grassy plains of the Upper Missouri; from the rolling
Texas prairies, bright beneath their sunny skies, to the high snow
peaks of the northern Rockies, or the giant pine forests, and soft
rainy weather, of the coasts of Puget Sound. Their main business was
trapping, furs being the only articles yielded by the wilderness,
as they knew it, which were both valuable and portable. These early
hunters were all trappers likewise, and, indeed, used their rifles only
to procure meat or repel attacks. The chief of the fur-bearing animals
they followed was the beaver, which abounded in the streams of the
plains and mountains; in the far north they also trapped otter, mink,
sable, and fisher. They married squaws from among the Indian tribes
with which they happened for the moment to be at peace; they acted as
scouts for the United States troops in their campaigns against the
tribes with which they happened to be at war.
Soon after the Civil War the life of these hunters, taken as a class,
entered on its final stage. The Pacific Coast was already fairly well
settled, and there were few mining camps in the Rockies; but most of
this Rocky Mountain region, and the entire stretch of plains country
proper, the vast belt of level or rolling grass land lying between the
Rio Grande and the Saskatchewan, still remained primeval wilderness,
inhabited only by roving hunters and formidable tribes of Indian
nomads, and by the huge herds of game on which they preyed. Beaver
swarmed in the streams and yielded a rich harvest to the trapper; but
trapping was no longer the mainstay of the adventurous plainsmen.
Foremost among the beasts of the chase, on account of its numbers,
its size, and its economic importance, was the bison or American
buffalo; its innumerable multitudes darkened the limitless prairies.
As the transcontinental railroads were pushed toward completion, and
the tide of settlement rolled onward with ever-increasing rapidity,
buffalo robes became of great value. The hunters forthwith turned
their attention mainly to the chase of the great clumsy beasts,
slaughtering them by hundreds of thousands for their hides; sometimes
killing them on horseback, but more often on foot, by still-hunting,
with the heavy long range Sharp’s rifle. Throughout the fifteen years
during which this slaughter lasted, a succession of desperate wars
was waged with the banded tribes of the Horse Indians. All the time,
in unending succession, long trains of big white-topped wagons crept
slowly westward across the prairies, marking the steady oncoming of the
frontier settlers.
By the close of 1883 the last buffalo herd was destroyed. The beaver
were trapped out of all the streams, or their numbers so thinned that
it no longer paid to follow them. The last formidable Indian war had
been brought to a successful close. The flood of the incoming whites
had risen over the land; tongues of settlement reached from the
Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Rocky Mountains to
the Pacific. The frontier had come to an end; it had vanished. With it
vanished also the old race of wilderness hunters, the men who spent
all their days in the lonely wilds, and who killed game as their sole
means of livelihood. Great stretches of wilderness still remained in
the Rocky Mountains, and here and there in the plains country, exactly
as much smaller tracts of wild land are to be found in the Alleghanies
and northern New York and New England; and on these tracts occasional
hunters and trappers still linger; but as a distinctive class, with a
peculiar and important position in American life, they no longer exist.
There were other men besides the professional hunters, who lived on the
borders of the wilderness, and followed hunting, not only as a pastime,
but also as yielding an important portion of their subsistence. The
frontier farmers were all hunters. In the Eastern backwoods, and in
certain places in the West, as in Oregon, these adventurous tillers of
the soil were the pioneers among the actual settlers; in the Rockies
their places were taken by the miners, and on the great plains by the
ranchmen and cowboys, the men who lived in the saddle, guarding their
branded herds of horses and horned stock. Almost all of the miners and
cowboys were obliged on occasions to turn hunters.
Moreover, the regular army which played so important a part in all
the later stages of the winning of the West produced its full share
of mighty hunters. The later Indian wars were fought principally by
the regulars. The West Point officer and his little company of trained
soldiers appeared abreast of the first hardy cattlemen and miners.
The ordinary settlers rarely made their appearance until in campaign
after campaign, always inconceivably wearing and harassing, and often
very bloody in character, the scarred and tattered troops had broken
and overthrown the most formidable among the Indian tribes. Faithful,
uncomplaining, unflinching, the soldiers wearing the national uniform
lived for many weary years at their lonely little posts, facing
unending toil and danger with quiet endurance, surrounded by the
desolation of vast solitudes, and menaced by the most merciless of
foes. Hunting was followed not only as a sport, but also as the only
means of keeping the posts and the expeditionary trains in meat. Many
of the officers became equally proficient as marksmen and hunters. The
three most famous Indian fighters since the Civil War, Generals Custer,
Miles, and Crook, were all keen and successful followers of the chase.
Of American big game the bison, almost always known as the buffalo,
was the largest and most important to man. When the first white
settlers landed in Virginia the bison ranged east of the Alleghanies
almost to the sea-coast, westward to the dry deserts lying beyond
the Rocky Mountains, northward to the Great Slave Lake and southward
to Chihuahua. It was a beast of the forests and mountains, in the
Alleghanies no less than in the Rockies; but its true home was on
the prairies and the high plains. Across these it roamed, hither and
thither, in herds of enormous, of incredible magnitude; herds so
large that they covered the waving grass land for hundreds of square
leagues, and when on the march occupied days and days in passing a
given point. But the seething myriads of shaggy-maned wild cattle
vanished with remarkable and melancholy rapidity before the inroads
of the white hunters, and the steady march of the oncoming settlers.
Now they are on the point of extinction. Two or three hundred are left
in that great national game preserve, the Yellowstone Park; and it is
said that others still remain in the wintry desolation of Athabasca.
Elsewhere only a few individuals exist--probably considerably less than
half a hundred all told--scattered in small parties in the wildest and
most remote and inaccessible portions of the Rocky Mountains. A bison
bull is the largest American animal. His huge bulk, his short, curved
black horns, the shaggy mane clothing his great neck and shoulders,
give him a look of ferocity which his conduct belies. Yet he is truly
a grand and noble beast, and his loss from our prairies and forest is
as keenly regretted by the lover of nature and of wild life as by the
hunter.
Next to the bison in size, and much superior in height to it and to all
other American game--for it is taller than the tallest horse--comes the
moose, or broad-horned elk. It is a strange, uncouth-looking beast,
with very long legs, short thick neck, a big, ungainly head, a swollen
nose, and huge shovel horns. Its home is in the cold, wet pine and
spruce forests, which stretch from the sub-arctic region of Canada
southward in certain places across our frontier. Two centuries ago it
was found as far south as Massachusetts. It has now been exterminated
from its former haunts in northern New York and Vermont, and is on
the point of vanishing from northern Michigan. It is still found in
northern Maine and northeastern Minnesota and in portions of northern
Idaho and Washington; while along the Rockies it extends its range
southward through western Montana to northwestern Wyoming, south of
the Tetons. In 1884 I saw the fresh hide of one that was killed in the
Bighorn Mountains.
The wapiti, or round-horned elk, like the bison, and unlike the moose,
had its centre of abundance in the United States, though extending
northward into Canada. Originally its range reached from ocean to ocean
and it went in herds of thousands of individuals; but it has suffered
more from the persecution of hunters than any other game except the
bison. By the beginning of this century it had been exterminated in
most localities east of the Mississippi; but a few lingered on for many
years in the Alleghanies. Colonel Cecil Clay informs me that an Indian
whom he knew killed one in Pennsylvania in 1869. A very few still
exist here and there in northern Michigan and Minnesota, and in one or
two spots on the western boundary of Nebraska and the Dakotas; but it
is now properly a beast of the wooded Western mountains. It is still
plentiful in western Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, and in parts of
Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Though not as large as the moose it is
the most beautiful and stately of all animals of the deer kind, and its
antlers are marvels of symmetrical grandeur.
The woodland caribou is inferior to the wapiti both in size and
symmetry. The tips of the many branches of its long irregular antlers
are slightly palmated. Its range is the same as that of the moose,
save that it does not go so far southward. Its hoofs are long and
round; even larger than the long, oval hoofs of the moose, and much
larger than those of the wapiti. The tracks of all three can be told
apart at a glance, and can not be mistaken for the footprints of other
game. Wapiti tracks, however, look much like those of yearling and
two-year-old cattle, unless the ground is steep or muddy, in which
case the marks of the false hoofs appear, the joints of wapiti being
more flexible than those of domestic stock.
The whitetail deer is now, as it always has been, the best known and
most abundant of American big game, and though its numbers have been
greatly thinned it is still found in almost every State of the Union.
The common blacktail or mule deer, which has likewise been sadly
thinned in numbers, though once extraordinarily abundant, extends from
the great plains to the Pacific; but is supplanted on the Puget Sound
coast by the Columbian blacktail. The delicate, heart-shaped footprints
of all three are nearly indistinguishable; when the animal is running
the hoof points are of course separated. The track of the antelope is
more oval, growing squarer with age. Mountain sheep leave footmarks
of a squarer shape, the points of the hoof making little indentations
in the soil, well apart, even when the animal is only walking; and
a yearling’s track is not unlike that made by a big prong-buck when
striding rapidly with the toes well apart. White-goat tracks are
also square, and as large as those of the sheep; but there is less
indentation of the hoof points, which come nearer together.
The antelope, or prong-buck, was once found in abundance from the
eastern edge of the great plains to the Pacific, but it has everywhere
diminished in numbers, and has been exterminated along the eastern and
western borders of its former range. The bighorn, or mountain sheep,
is found in the Rocky Mountains from northern Mexico to Alaska; and in
the United States from the Coast and Cascade ranges to the Bad Lands of
the western edges of the Dakotas, wherever there are mountain chains or
tracts of rugged hills. It was never very abundant, and, though it has
become less so, it has held its own better than most game. The white
goat, however, alone among our game animals, has positively increased
in numbers since the advent of settlers; because white hunters rarely
follow it, and the Indians who once sought its skin for robes now
use blankets instead. Its true home is in Alaska and Canada, but it
crosses our borders along the lines of the Rockies and Cascades, and
a few small isolated colonies are found here and there southward to
California and New Mexico.
The cougar and wolf, once common throughout the United States, have now
completely disappeared from all save the wildest regions. The black
bear holds its own better; it was never found on the great plains. The
huge grisly ranges from the great plains to the Pacific. The little
peccary or Mexican wild hog merely crosses our southern border.
The finest hunting ground in America was, and indeed is, the
mountainous region of western Montana and northwestern Wyoming. In
this high, cold land, of lofty mountains, deep forests, and open
prairies, with its beautiful lakes and rapid rivers, all the species of
big game mentioned above, except the peccary and Columbian blacktail,
are to be found. Until 1880 they were very abundant, and they are
still, with the exception of the bison, fairly plentiful. On most of
the long hunting expeditions which I made away from my ranch, I went
into this region.
The bulk of my hunting has been done in the cattle country, near my
ranch on the Little Missouri, and in the adjoining lands round the
lower Powder and Yellowstone. Until 1881 the valley of the Little
Missouri was fairly thronged with game, and was absolutely unchanged
in any respect from its original condition of primeval wildness. With
the incoming of the stockmen all this changed, and the game was wofully
slaughtered; but plenty of deer and antelope, a few sheep and bear, and
an occasional elk are still left.
Since the professional hunters have vanished with the vast herds of
game on which they preyed, the life of the ranchman is that which
yields most chance of hunting. Life on a cattle ranch, on the great
plains or among the foothills of the high mountains, has a peculiar
attraction for those hardy, adventurous spirits who take most kindly
to a vigorous out-of-door existence, and who are therefore most apt to
care passionately for the chase of big game. The free ranchman lives
in a wild, lonely country, and exactly as he breaks and tames his
own horses, and guards and tends his own branded herds, so he takes
the keenest enjoyment in the chase, which is to him not merely the
pleasantest of sports, but also a means of adding materially to his
comforts, and often his only method of providing himself with fresh
meat.
Hunting in the wilderness is of all pastimes the most attractive, and
it is doubly so when not carried on merely as a pastime. Shooting over
a private game preserve is of course in no way to be compared to it.
The wilderness hunter must not only show skill in the use of the rifle
and address in finding and approaching game, but he must also show
the qualities of hardihood, self-reliance, and resolution needed for
effectively grappling with his wild surroundings. The fact that the
hunter needs the game, both for its meat and for its hide, undoubtedly
adds a zest to the pursuit. Among the hunts which I have most enjoyed
were those made when I was engaged in getting in the winter’s stock of
meat for the ranch, or was keeping some party of cowboys supplied with
game from day to day.