the woods found plenty of fresh tracks, and finally halted by some big
trees. The men placed themselves on some high limbs, where they could
watch, and I stood in deep grass, some six or eight feet from a
well-traveled path used by the bear in fishing the stream. The magpies
were calling all about, and seemed to be saying, _Midwit, midwit_,
Aleut for bear. The air was dead calm. Hardly were the men on their
perches, before they saw a bear walk into the brush on one side of the
valley. We waited quietly, in the midst of mosquitoes, but nothing came
in sight. It was already after 10 o'clock, and so dark that the men
gave up their watch, and came down to join me. Suddenly we heard a sharp
screech up the stream, and when it was repeated, Vacille said it must be
a young bear crying because its mother would not feed it fast
enough. Here Vacille did some good work.
We walked rapidly up stream, through the thick brush, and before we had
gone 100 yards heard a large animal, just ahead, moving about in the
brush, and making a good deal of noise. I started ahead to get a view,
thinking we had disturbed the bear, but Vacille held me back. We walked
on noiselessly to a little bare point in the stream, and just then the
bear appeared, bent on fishing, thirty feet away. She lumbered down into
the stream, and when I fired fell into the water, the ball just missing
her shoulder. She was up again, and this time I shot hurriedly, and a
little behind the ribs. She ran, crossing up about forty feet away, and
a trial with the .30-40 scored, but made no impression.
Tchort caught up with her just as she fell, after running a hundred feet
or more, and gave us to understand that he was the responsible party. We
tried immediately to capture the cub, which would have been a rare
prize, but had no success at all in the thicket. The old one, though of
considerable age, was not a large specimen, and, with the exception of
the head, the hair was in bad condition. Length about 6 feet 4 inches;
height at shoulder 44 inches; weight 500 pounds. The stomach was full of
salmon, gleaned from the fishing beds made all along the stream. The
Ozinka people did not enjoy my killing a bear just outside the village.
I caught the boat about a week later, after a few pleasant days with
Kidder and Blake, who had turned up at Wood Island, after a very
successful hunt on the mainland.
A word in regard to the Kadiak bear. Dr. Merriam has proved that he is
distinct from other bear. That he ever reached 2,000 pounds is doubtful
in my mind, but, by comparing measurements of skins, we can be sure he
comes up to 1,200, or a little over. Whether the Kadiak bear is bigger
than the big brown bear of the mainland is doubtful. At present the
growth of these bears is badly interfered with by the natives, and they
rarely reach the old bear age, when these brutes become massive in their
bony structure, and accumulate a vast amount of fat, just before denning
up.
_W. Lord Smith_.
The Mountain Sheep and its Range
The mountain sheep is, in my estimation, the finest of all our American
big game. Many men have killed it and sheep heads are trophies almost as
common as moose heads, and yet among those who have hunted it most and
know it best, but little is really understood as to the life of the
mountain sheep, and many erroneous ideas prevail with regard to it. It
is generally supposed to be an animal found only among the tops of the
loftiest and most rugged mountains, and never to be seen on the lower
ground, and there are still people interested in big game who now and
then ask one confidentially whether there really is anything in the
story that the sheep throw themselves down from great heights, and,
striking on their horns, rebound to their feet without injury.
Each one of us individually knows but little about the mountain sheep,
yet each who has hunted them has observed something of their ways, and
each can contribute some share to an accumulation of facts which some
time may be of assistance to the naturalist who shall write the life
history of this noble species. But unless that naturalist has already
been in the field and has there gathered much material, he is likely to
be hard put to it when the time comes for his story to be written, since
then there may be no mountain sheep to observe or to write of. The sheep
is not likely to be so happy in its biographer as was the buffalo, for
Dr. Allen's monograph on the American bison is a classic among North
American natural history works.
The mountain sheep is an inhabitant of western America, and the books
tell us that it inhabits the Rocky Mountains from southern California to
Alaska. This is sufficiently vague, and I shall endeavor a little
further on to indicate a few places where this species may still be
found, though even so I am unable to assign their ranges to the various
forms that have been described.
For this species seems to have become differentiated into several
species and sub-species, some of which are well marked, and all of which
we do not as yet know much about. These as described are the common
sheep of the Rocky Mountains _(Ovis canadensis_); the white sheep
of Alaska _(Ovis dalli)_, and its near relative, _O. dalli
kenaiensis_; the so-called black sheep of northern British Columbia
(_O. stonei_), described by Dr. Allen; Nelson's sheep of the
southwest (_O. nelsoni_) and _O. mexicanus_, both described by
Dr. Merriam. Besides these, Mr. Hornaday has described _Ovis
fannini_ of Yukon Territory, about which little is known, and
Dr. Merriam has given the sheep of the Missouri River bad lands
sub-specific rank under the title _O.c. auduboni_. Recently
Dr. Elliot has described the Lower California sheep as a sub-species of
the Rocky Mountain form under the name _O.c. cremnobates_. For
twenty-five years I heard of a black sheep-like animal in the central
range of the Rocky Mountains far to the north, said to be not only black
in color, but with black horns, something like those of an antelope, but
in shape and ringed like a female mountain sheep. From specimens
recently examined at the American Museum of Natural History, I now know
this to be the young female of _Ovis stonei_. That several species
of sheep should have been described within the last three or four years
shows, perhaps as well as anything, how very little we know about the
animals of this group.
The sheep of the Rocky Mountains and of the bad lands
(_O. canadensis_ and _O. canadensis auduboni_) are those with
which we are most familiar. Both forms are called the Rocky Mountain
sheep, and from this it is commonly inferred that they are confined to
the mountains, and live solely among the rocks. In a measure this belief
is true today, but it was not invariably so in old times. As in Asia,
so in America, the wild sheep is an inhabitant of the high grass land
plateaus. It delights in the elevated prairies, but near these prairies
it must have rough or broken country to which it may retreat when
pursued by its enemies. Before the days of the railroad and the
settlements in the West, the sheep was often found on the prairie. It
was then abundant in many localities where to-day farmers have their
wheat fields, and to some extent shared the feeding ground of the
antelope and the buffalo. Many and many a time while riding over the
prairie, I have seen among the antelope that loped carelessly out of the
way of the wagon before which I was riding, a few sheep, which would
finally separate themselves from the antelope and run up to rising
ground, there to stand and call until we had come too near them, when
they would lope off and finally be seen climbing some steep butte or
bluff, and there pausing for a last look, would disappear.
Those were the days when if a man had a deer, a sheep, an antelope, or
the bosse ribs of a buffalo cow on his pack or in his wagon, it did not
occur to him to shoot at the game among which he rode. I have seen sheep
feeding on the prairies with antelope, and in little groups by
themselves in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, and men whose
experience extends much further back than mine--men, too, whose life was
largely devoted to observing the wild animals among which they
lived--unite in telling me that they were commonly found in such
situations. Personally I never saw sheep among buffalo, but knowing as I
do the situations that both inhabited and the ways of life of each, I am
confident that sheep were often found with the buffalo, just as were
antelope.
The country of northwestern Montana, where high prairie is broken now
and then by steep buttes rising to a height of several hundred feet, and
by little ranges of volcanic uplifts like the Sweet Grass Hills, the
Bear Paw Mountains, the Little Rockies, the Judith, and many others, was
a favorite locality for sheep, and so, no doubt, was the butte country
of western North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska, this being roughly
the eastern limit of the species. In general it may be said that the
plains sheep preferred plateaus much like those inhabited by the mule
deer, a prairie country where there were rough broken hills or buttes,
to which they could retreat when disturbed. That this habit was taken
advantage of to destroy them will be shown further on.
To-day, if one can climb above timber line in summer to the beautiful
green alpine meadows just below the frowning snow-clad peaks in regions
where sheep may still be found, his eye may yet be gladdened by the
sight of a little group resting on the soft grass far from any cover
that might shelter an enemy. If disturbed, the sheep get up
deliberately, take a long careful look, and walking slowly toward the
rocks, clamber out of harm's way. It will be labor wasted to follow
them.
Such sights may be witnessed still in portions of Montana and British
Columbia, Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado, where bald, rolling mountains,
showing little or no rock, are frequented by the sheep, which graze over
the uplands, descending at midday to the valleys to drink, and then
slowly working their way up the hills again to their illimitable
pastures.
Of Dall's sheep, the white Alaskan form, we are told that its favorite
feeding grounds are bald hills and elevated plateaus, and although when
pursued and wounded it takes to precipitous cliffs, and perhaps even to
tall mountain peaks, the land of its choice appears to be not rough
rocks, but rather the level or rolling upland.
The sheep formerly was a gentle, unsuspicious animal, curious and
confiding rather than shy; now it is noted in many regions for its
alertness, wariness, and ability to take care of itself.
Richardson, in his "Fauni-Boreali Americana," says: "Mr. Drummond
informs me that in the retired part of the mountains, where hunters had
seldom penetrated, he found no difficulty in approaching the Rocky
Mountain sheep, which there exhibited the simplicity of character so
remarkable in the domestic species; but that where they had been often
fired at they were exceedingly wild, alarmed their companions on the
approach of danger by a hissing noise, and scaled the rocks with a speed
and agility that baffled pursuit." The mountain men of early days tell
precisely the same thing of the sheep. Fifty or sixty years ago they
were regarded as the gentlest and most unsuspicious animal of all the
prairie, excepting, of course, the buffalo. They did not understand that
the sound of a gun meant danger, and, when shot at, often merely jumped
about and stared, acting much as in later times the elk and the mule
deer acted.
We may take it for granted that, before the coming of the white man, the
mountain sheep ranged over a very large portion of western America, from
the Arctic Ocean down into Mexico. Wherever the country was adapted to
them, there they were found. Absence of suitable food, and sometimes the
presence of animals not agreeable to them, may have left certain areas
without the sheep, but for the most part these animals no doubt existed
from the eastern limit of their range clear to the Pacific. There were
sheep on the plains and in the mountains; those inhabiting the plains
when alarmed sought shelter in the rough bad lands that border so many
rivers, or on the tall buttes that rise from the prairies, or in the
small volcanic uplifts which, in the north, stretch far out eastward
from the Rocky Mountains.
While some hunters believe that the wild sheep were driven from their
former habitat on the plains and in the foothills by the advent of
civilized man, the opinion of the best naturalists is the reverse of
this. They believe that over the whole plains country, except in a few
localities where they still remain, the sheep have been exterminated,
and this is probably what has happened. Thus Dr. C. Hart Merriam writes
me:
"I do not believe that the plains sheep have been driven to the
mountains at all, but that they have been exterminated over the greater
part of their former range. In other words, that the form or sub-species
inhabiting the plains (_auduboni_) is now extinct over the greater
part of its range, occurring only in the localities mentioned by you.
The sheep of the mountains always lived there, and, in my opinion, has
received no accession from the plains. In other words, to my mind it is
not a case of changed habit, but a case of extermination over large
areas. The same I believe to be true in the case of elk and many other
animals."
That this is true of the elk--and within my own recollection--is
certainly the fact. In the early days of my western travel, elk were
reasonably abundant over the whole plains as far east as within 120
miles of the city of Omaha on the Missouri River, north to the Canadian
boundary line--and far beyond--and south at least to the Indian
Territory. From all this great area as far west as the Rocky Mountains
they have disappeared, not by any emigration to other localities, but by
absolute extermination.
A few years ago we knew but one species of mountain sheep, the common
bighorn of the West, but with the opening of new territories and their
invasion by white men, more and more specimens of the bighorn have come
into the hands of naturalists, with the result that a number of new
forms have been described covering territory from Alaska to Mexico. These
forms, with the localities from which the types have come, are as follows:
_Ovis canadensis_, interior of western Canada.
(Mountains of Alberta.)
_Ovis canadensis auduboni_, Bad Lands of South Dakota.
(Between the White and Cheyenne rivers.)
_Ovis nelsoni_, Grapevine Mountains,
boundary between California and Nevada.
(Just south of Lat. 37 deg.)
_Ovis mexicanus_, Lake Santa Maria, Chihuahua, Mexico.
_Ovis stonei_, headwaters Stikine River
(Che-o-nee Mountains), British Columbia.
_Ovis dalli_, mountains on Forty-Mile Creek,
west of Yukon River, Alaska.
_Ovis dalli kenaiensis_, Kenai Peninsula, Alaska (1901).
_Ovis canadensis cremnobates_, Lower California.
The standing of _Ovis fannini_ has been in doubt ever since its
description, and recent specimens appear to throw still more doubt on
it. Those most familiar with our sheep do not now, I believe,
acknowledge it as a valid species. It comes from the mountains of the
Klondike River, near Dawson, Yukon Territory.
What the relations of these different forms are to one another has not
yet been determined, but it may be conjectured that _Ovis canadensis,
O. nelsoni_, and _O. dalli_ differ most widely from one another;
while _O. stonei_ and _O. dalli_, with its forms, are close
together; and _O. canadensis_, and _O.c. auduboni_ are closely
related; as are also _O. nelsoni, O. mexicanus_, and _O.c.
cremnobates_. The sub-species _auduboni_ is the easternmost
member of the American sheep family, while the sheep of Chihuahua
and of Lower California are the most southern now known.
PRIMITIVE HUNTING.
At many points in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas the Indians
were formerly great sheep hunters, and largely depended on this game for
their flesh food. That it was easily hunted in primitive times cannot be
doubted, and is easily comprehended when we remember the testimony of
white observers already quoted. In certain places in the foothills of
the mountains, or in more or less isolated ranges in Utah, Nevada,
Montana, and other sections, the Indians used to beat the mountains,
driving the sheep up to the summits, where concealed bowmen might kill
them. On the summits of certain ranges which formerly were great resorts
for sheep, I have found hiding places built of slabs of the trachyte
which forms the mountain, which were used by the Indians for this
purpose in part, as, later, they were also used by the scouting warrior
as shelters and lookout stations from which a wide extent of plain might
be viewed. The sheep on the prairie or on the foothills of such ranges,
if alarmed, would of course climb to the summit, and there would be shot
with stone-headed arrows.
Mr. Muir has seen such shelters in Nevada, and he tells us also that the
Indians used to build corrals or pounds with diverging wings, somewhat
like those used for the capture of antelope and buffalo on the plains,
and that they drove the sheep into these corrals, about which, no doubt,
men, women, and children were secreted, ready to destroy the game.
Certain tribes made a practice of building converging fences and driving
the sheep toward the angle of these fences, where hunters lay in wait to
kill them, as elsewhere mentioned by Mr. Hofer. In fact, sheep in those
old times shared with all the other animals of the prairie that tameness
to which I have often adverted in writing on this subject, and which now
seems so remarkable.
The Bannocks and Sheep Eaters depended for their food very largely on
sheep. In fact, the Sheep Eaters are reported to have killed little
else, whence their name. Both these tribes hunted more or less in
disguise, and wore on the head and shoulders the skin and horns of a
mountain sheep's head, the skin often being drawn about the body, and
the position assumed a stooping one, so as to simulate the animal with a
considerable closeness. The legs, which were uncovered, were commonly
rubbed with white or gray clay, and certain precautions were used to
kill the human odor.
A Cheyenne Indian told me of an interesting happening witnessed by his
grandfather very many years ago. A war party had set out to take horses
from the Shoshone. One morning just at sunrise the fifteen or sixteen
men were traveling along on foot in single file through a deep canon of
the mountains, when one of them spied on a ledge far above them the head
and shoulders of a great mountain sheep which seemed to be looking over
the valley. He pointed it out to his fellows, and as they walked along
they watched it. Presently it drew back, and a little later appeared
again further along the ledges, and stood there on the verge. As the
Indians watched, they suddenly saw shoot out from another ledge above
the sheep a mountain lion, which alighted on the sheep's neck, and both
animals fell whirling over the cliff and struck the slide rock
below. The fall was a long one, and the Cheyennes, feeling sure that the
sheep had been killed, either by the fall or by the lion, rushed forward
to secure the meat. When they reached the spot the lion was hobbling off
with a broken leg, and one of them shot it with his arrow, and when they
made ready to skin the sheep, they saw to their astonishment that it was
not a sheep, but a man wearing the skin and horns of a sheep. He had
been hunting, and his bow and arrows were wrapped in the skin close to
his breast. The fall had killed him. From the fashion of his hair and
his moccasins they knew that he was a Bannock.
A reference to the hunting methods of the Sheep Eaters reminds one very
naturally of that pursued by the Blackfeet, when sheep were needed, for
their skins or for their flesh. These animals were abundant about the
many buttes which rise out of the prairie on the flanks of the Rocky
Mountains, in what is now Montana, and when disturbed retreated to the
heights for safety.
Hugh Monroe, a typical mountain man of the old time, who reached Fort
Edmonton in the year 1813, and died in 1893, after eighty years spent
upon the prairie in close association with the Indians, has often told
me of the Blackfoot method of securing sheep when their skins were
needed for women's dresses. On such an occasion a large number of the
men would ride out from the camp to the neighborhood of one of these
buttes, and on their approach the sheep, which had been feeding on the
prairie, slowly retreated to the heights above. The Indians then spread
out, encircling the butte by a wide ring of horsemen, and sending three
or four young men to climb its heights, awaited results. When the men
sent up on the butte had reached its summit, they pursued the sheep over
its limited area, and drove them down to the prairie below, where the
mounted men chased and killed them. In this way large numbers of sheep
were procured.
Of the hunting of the sheep by the Indians who inhabited the rough
mountains in and near what is now the Yellowstone National Park,
Mr. Hofer has said to me:
"It is supposed that when the Sheep Eater Indians inhabited the
mountains about the Park they kept the sheep down pretty close, but
after they went away the sheep increased in that particular range of
country, the whole Absaroka range; that is to say, the country from
Clark Fork of the Yellowstone down to the Wind River drainage.
"The greatest number of sheep in recent years was pretty well toward the
head of Gray Bull, Meeteetsee Creek and Stinking Water. In those old
times the Indians used to build rude fences on the sides of the
mountains, running down a hill, and these fences would draw together
toward the bottom, and where they came nearly together the Indians would
have a place to hide in. Fifteen years ago there was one such trap that
was still quite plainly visible. One fence follows down pretty near the
edge of a little ridge, draining steeply down from Crandle Creek divide
to Miller Creek. There was no pen at the bottom, and no cliff to run
them off, so that the Indians could not have killed them in that way,
but near where the fences came together there was a pile of dead limbs
and small rocks that looked to me as if it had been used by a person
lying in wait to shoot animals which were driven down this ridge; and it
was near enough to the place that they must pass to shoot them with
arrows. These Indians had arrows, and hunted with them; and up on top of
the ridges you will find old stumps that have been hacked down with
stone hatchets. Some of the tree trunks have been removed, but others
have been left there. I think that some Indians would go around the
sheep and start them off, and gradually drive them to the pass where the
hunter lay. I remember following along this ridge, and then on another
ridge that went on toward the Clark Fork ridge to quite a high little
peak, and on top of this peak was quite a large bed for a man to lie
in. He could watch there until the sheep should pass through, and then
he could come out and drive them on."
AGENTS OF DESTRUCTION.
The settling up of much of their former range, with pursuit by
skin-hunters, head-hunters, and meat-hunters, has had much to do with
the reduction in numbers of the mountain sheep, but more important than
these have been the ravages by diseases brought in to their range by the
domestic sheep, and then spread by the wild species among their wild
associates. For many years it has been known that the wild sheep of
certain portions of the Rocky Mountain region are afflicted with scab, a
disease which in recent years seems to have attacked the elk as
well. Testimony is abundant that wild sheep are killed by scab as
domestic sheep are. On a few occasions I have seen animals that appeared
to have died from this cause, but Mr. Hofer, to be quoted later, has had
a much broader experience.
More sweeping and even more fatal has been the introduction among the
wild sheep of an anthrax, of which, however, very little is known.
Aside from man, the most important enemies of the sheep in nature are
the mountain lion and eagles of two species. These last I believe to be
so destructive to newly born sheep and goats that I think it a duty to
kill them whenever possible.
Dr. Edward L. Munson, at that time Assistant Surgeon, U.S. Army, but
whose services in more recent years have won him so much credit, and
such well deserved promotion, wrote me in 1897 the following interesting
paragraphs with relation to disease among sheep. He said: