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 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 experience 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 reproduction 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 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 discover the holes and poke their fingers through the
paper. Don’t you believe me, reader? Does your kind heart repudiate
with heat this aspersion? 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, _masque allongée_. I 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 continued to draw Pacific Creek as flowing
into Buffalo Fork. Now Pacific Creek is a thoroughfare 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 geographical 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; _that_ wasn’t being found out!
Pacific Creek being wrong to a certainty, how then about Atlantic
Creek, and Thoroughfare, and a good many more? Did 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 contrast between the two: having come the same 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 coherence
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 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 Cañon 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. Lydekker, 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 beyond
that point, south or east. I have never 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 mountain, 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? Difference 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.
“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 notebook 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 discrimination 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 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 appears, 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 Piccolo, 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 “Biological Survey of
Mount Shasta,” which touches upon the goat’s habitat in Oregon and
Washington, 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--I 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
unicorn, or the wool-bearing horse. Now I would meet the assurance
that “over there somewhere,” among the mountains near the Pacific, a
snow-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 nobody 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 circumventing 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.
[Illustration: THE WHITE GOAT IS AN AGILE CLIMBER]
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 business 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 inheriting 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 swallow, and taught
them to eat the camass, a precarious vegetable. In the language of
Doctor 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 survived 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 mountain 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 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.” Accurate 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 journey. It has
successfully wintered on the coast, and has now come up the Columbia
again, fifty miles above Vancouver.
“While we were at breakfast one of the Indians offered us two
sheepskins for sale; … the second was smaller … with the horns
remaining.… 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 goat 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 reading 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?
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 successively 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 Dr. Hunter. Nine years later the eminent George
Ord gave to the animal his first academic baptism, and he appeared as
_Ovis montana_. Pretty soon M. de Blainville seems to have called him
_Antilope americana_, and _Rupicapra 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 beginning 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 frequently employed
an alias than this probably blameless animal. Such is the story of the
confusion 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 approaches 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. Suddenly 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 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 masculinity; and the seamy
side of masculinity fits cowardice 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 discomfortable 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 I drew one
hundred blanks; there was not the semblance of an image upon a single
one. The same mischance had attended the Greely expedition, 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 expedition; 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 wandering
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 him
… at night he returned to the never ending game and lost some more.…
I went to my room to go 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, lifting the inkstands and newspapers for me.… 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
country; and the river Columbia itself, when you finally 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 unlovely
river that ever I have seen.
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 a subsequent 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.