ago. One was roped last summer, and this is the only representative
which has been seen or heard of there in ten years. The introduction of
tame sheep early in the '80's was followed by a most destructive
anthrax, which not only destroyed immense numbers of tame sheep, but
also exterminated the wild ones, which appeared to be especially
susceptible to this disease. In going through these mountains one often
finds the skeletons of a number huddled together, and the above is the
explanation given by some of the older settlers. The mountains are
small, and the wild sheep could not climb up out of the infected
zone. Immediate contact is, of course, not necessary in the propagation
of anthrax, and the bacilli and spores left on soil grazed over by an
infected band would readily infect another animal feeding over such a
country even a long time afterward.
"I have also heard that the introduction of dog distemper played havoc
with wolves, coyotes, and Indian dogs, when it first came into the
country. This is the case with regard to any disease introduced into a
virgin human population, in which there is no immunity due to the
prevalence of such a disease for hundreds of years previously."
Mr. Elwood Hofer, discussing this subject in conversation, says:
"There are not a great many sheep in the Park now, anywhere; they have
died off from sickness--the scab. This is a fact known to everyone
living in the neighborhood of the Park. I have killed only one that had
the disease badly, but I used to see them every day, and pay no
attention to them. I did not hunt for them, for I did not want them in
that condition. I remember that once a man came out to Gardiner who did
not know that the sheep were sick. He saw some when he was hunting, and
rushed up in great excitement and killed three of them. They seemed to
be weak and were pretty nearly dead with scab before he saw them.
Sometimes they become so weak from this disease that they lie down and
die.
"I first noticed sheep with the scab around the canyon by the
Yellowstone. I never saw any troubled with this disease around
Meeteetsee or Stinking Water. I have been there in winter, and hunted
them as late as November, and Col. Pickett used to kill some still
later. I never heard him speak of the scab."
In spring and early summer, when the young sheep are small, the eagles
are constantly on the watch for them, and unquestionably capture many
lambs. I have been told by my friend, Mr. J.B. Monroe, who has several
times captured lambs alive, that when they heard the rope whistling as
he threw it toward them, they would run directly toward him, seeming to
fear some enemy from above. He believes that they took the sound of the
rope flying through the air for the sound of the eagle's wings.
While, of course, the mountain lions cannot overtake the sheep in fair
chase, they lie in wait for them among the rocks, killing many, because
the sheep range on ground suitable for the lions to stalk them on; that
is to say, among the rocks on steep mountain sides, or at the edges of
canyons.
A conversation had with Mr. Hofer a year or two since is so interesting
that I offer no apology for giving the gist of it here. It has to do
with the enemies of the sheep, especially the mountain lion, and with
some of the sheep's ways. In substance, Mr. Hofer said:
"One day about the first of January I was in my cabin looking through
the window, and up through the Cinnabar Basin, over the snow-covered
mountains. As I was looking, I saw a dark patch disappear in the snow
and then rise out of it again. The snow was deep and fluffy. The animal
that I was watching would disappear in the snow with a plunge, and then
would come up with a jump. It made several wonderful flights. It was so
far off I could not tell what it was, and when I looked at it through
the glasses I saw that it was a big ram breaking a trail. I was watching
him closely and at first did not notice that others were with him. Soon,
however, I discovered that there were four or five other sheep following
him.
"The big ram came down from the side of the mountain, and, to pass over
to the other mountain, he had to cross the valley. There were a number
of knolls or ridges in this valley, where the snow was not so deep as in
the hollows. The ram broke a trail to a knoll, and stopped and looked
back, and pretty soon I saw the rest of the sheep coming along. They
followed his trail and passed him while he was standing there looking
back, always looking up at the mountain. While he stood on this knoll
where the snow was not deep--for it had blown off--and the other sheep
had passed him, one of them took the lead to the next knoll, breaking
the trail, but here the snow was not so deep as that the ram had come
through. No sooner had the sheep got to this knoll than the old ram
started. He took the trail the others had made, and joined them at the
next knoll, and then plunging in, went on ahead and broke a fresh trail
to the next rise of ground. The ram did most of the trail-breaking, but
sometimes one of the others went ahead; there was always one in the
rear, on guard, as it were, until they had crossed the valley to a steep
ridge on the next mountain. As they went, they stopped every little
while and stood for some time looking back.
"Knowing the habits of the animal, I felt sure that something had driven
them off the mountain. They looked back as if to see whether anything
was following, or perhaps to look again at what had frightened them. I
thought it was a mountain lion. Soon afterward I took my snowshoes and
went up that way and found the track of a mountain lion. From the size
of the track it seemed as if the animal must have been enormous. On
soft snow, though, tracks spread and look big, and besides that, these
cats commonly spread out their toes. There was no mistake about its
being a mountain lion, for I could see where the tail had struck the
soft snow and made holes in it.
"Mountain lions were around there a good deal, and E. De Long, who had a
cabin a little further up in the valley, told me that three times in his
experience of hunting up there he had come on a place where a mountain
lion had just killed a sheep. In each case he found the sheep in nearly
the same place, and in each case the sheep was freshly killed, and he
dressed it and took it home.
"This seemed to be a favorite place for the lions to kill sheep. They
are great hands to kill sheep in about the same place. Far up on the
Boulder--way up near the head--Col. Pickett and I found nineteen or
twenty skulls of sheep by one rock. There was a wonderful lot of
them. They had been killed at various times, and in a place where they
never could have been killed by snowslides. It was under a very high
rock, fifteen feet perpendicular on one side, and in the valley a game
trail passed close under this side. On the other side the rock was not
so high, but sloped off to the side of the hill. A lion could easily lie
there without being seen, but could himself see both ways. The game
trail was so close that he could jump right down on to it. The number of
skulls that we saw here was so remarkable that Col. Pickett and I
counted them; there were more than eighteen.
"The skulls were most of them old--killed a good while before. None of
them had the shells of the horns. They were old skulls, and the oldest
were almost in fragments, very much weathered. It was the accumulation
of a number of years, probably ten or fifteen. To my mind it showed
clearly that this was a favorite place for lions to lie for mountain
sheep. I have known of something similar to that in Cinnabar Basin,
where I have seen a number of skulls scattered along the gulch. There
was a heavy trail there which led up to a valley where there is a pass
by which we used to wind down to the Yellowstone and Tom Miner Creek and
Trapper Creek.
"Lions are quite bad along the Yellowstone here, and sometimes in a hard
winter they seem to be driven out of the mountains, and a considerable
number have been killed on Gardiner River and Reese Creek.
"If mountain lions are after the sheep, the sheep leave the mountain
they are on and go to another; they will not stay there, and will not
return until something drives them back."
SOME WAYS OF THE SHEEP.
Mr. Hofer said:
"In old times it was sometimes possible to get a 'stand' on sheep, and,
in my opinion, sheep often, even to-day, are the least suspicious of all
the mountain animals. A mountain sheep always seems to fear the thing
that he sees under him. If a man goes above him he does not seem to know
what to do. I could never understand why, when one is above him, he
stands and looks. I have sometimes been riding around in the mountains,
and have come on sheep right below me. I have often thrown stones at
them, and sometimes it was quite a while before I could get them to
start. Finally, however, they would run off. They acted as if they were
dazed.
"On the other hand, when I carried the mail down in San Juan county,
Colorado, in the winter of 1875-'76, going across from Animas Forks by
way of the Grizzly Pass to Tellurium Fork, I was the only person in that
section of the country all through the winter, and yet, although the
sheep saw only me, and saw me every day, they always acted
wild. Sometimes a ram would see me and stand and look for a long time,
and then presently all along the mountain side I would see sheep running
as if they were alarmed. On the other hand, if I met any of them on top
of the mountain, they scarcely ever ran, they just stood and looked at
me.
"Once, when on a hunting trip, I had my horses all picketed in sight,
just above the basin where we were camped. The boy that had the care of
the horses had been up to change the picketed animals, and when he came
in he said: 'There's a sheep up there close by the horses. He saw me and
was not afraid.' We went out of the tent and presently I could see the
sheep, a small one about four years old. We went up toward it, and I saw
the sheep moving about. It went out to a little flat place on the slide
rock, where the slide rock had pushed out a little further, making a
little low butte, or flat-topped table; it was loose rock, with
snow. Here the sheep lay down.
"I went around to station my man where he could get a rest for his
rifle, and when I had done this, I went around above to make the sheep
get up to drive him out, so that the man could shoot him. After I got
well up the gulch, above him, the sheep could see me plainly, and I
could see his eyes. I hesitated about making him get up, thinking
perhaps it was somebody's tame sheep, but we were the first ones up
there that spring, and of course it was not a tame sheep. If we had not
been out of meat I would not have disturbed the animal. I walked toward
it to make it get up, but it would not, and still lay there. When I was
within thirty feet of it I took up a stone and threw it, and called at
him. The sheep stood up and looked at me. I said, 'Go on, now,' and he
started in the direction I wished him to take. When he came in sight,
the man fired two or three shots at him, but did not hurt him, and the
sheep again lay down in sight of camp. Afterward I fired at him about
300 yards up the side of the mountain, but I did not touch him. However,
he was disturbed by the shooting, and moved away.
"It is often difficult to find a reason for the way sheep act. It is
possible that this young ram, which was in the Sunlight Mining District,
had seen many miners, and that they had not disturbed him, and that so
he had lost his fear of man. He was not at all afraid of horses, perhaps
because he was accustomed to seeing miners' horses; or he may have taken
them for elk. I do not see why our wind did not alarm him. At all
events, for some reason, this one showed no fear.
"Along the Gardiner River, inside the northern boundary of the
Yellowstone Park, there are always a number of sheep in winter, and they
become very tame, having learned by experience that people passing to
and fro will not injure them. Men driving up the road from Mammoth Hot
Springs to Gardiner, constantly see these sheep, which manifest the
utmost indifference to those who are passing them. Sometimes they stand
close enough to the road for a driver to reach them with his whip. One
winter the surgeon at the post, driving along, came upon a sheep
standing in the road, and as it did not move, he had to stop his team
for it. He did not dare to drive his horse close up to it. Finally the
ram jumped out to one side of the road, and the surgeon drove on. He
said he could have touched it with his whip."
One winter when Mr. Hofer made an extended snowshoe trip through the
Park, he passed very close to sheep. It appeared to him that they fear
man less along the wagon roads than when he is out on the benches and in
the mountains. They seem to care little for man, but if a mountain lion
appears in the neighborhood, the sheep are no longer seen. Just where
they go is uncertain, but it is believed that they cross the Yellowstone
River by swimming.
In winter, and especially late in the winter, sheep frequent southern
and southwestern exposures, and spend much of their time there. I have
seen places on the St. Marys Lake, in northern Montana, where there were
cartloads of droppings, apparently the accumulation of many years, and
have seen the same thing in the cliffs along the Yellowstone River. On
the rocks here there were many beds among the cliffs and ledges. Often
such beds are behind a rock, not a high one, but one that the sheep
could look over. In places such as this the animals are very difficult
to detect.
Although the wild sheep was formerly, to a considerable extent, an
inhabitant of the western edge of the prairies of the high dry plains,
it is so no longer. The settling of the country has made this
impossible, but long before its permanent occupancy the frequent passage
through it by hunters had resulted in the destruction of the sheep or
had driven it more or less permanently to those heights where, in times
of danger, it had always sought refuge.
To the east of the principal range of the wild sheep in America to-day
there are still a few of its old haunts not in the mountains which are
so arid or so rough, or where the water is so bad that as yet they have
not to any great extent been invaded by the white man. Again to the
south and southwest, in portions of Arizona, Old Mexico, and Lower
California, there rise out of frightful deserts buttes and mountain
ranges inhabited by different forms of sheep. In that country water is
extremely scarce, and the few water holes that exist are visited by the
sheep only at long intervals. There are many men who believe that the
sheep do not drink at all, but it is chiefly at these water holes that
the sheep of the desert are killed.
At the present day the chief haunts of the mountain sheep are the fresh
Alpine meadows lying close to timber line, and fenced in by tall peaks;
or the rounded grassy slopes which extend from timber line up to the
region of perpetual snows. Sitting on the point of some tall mountain
the observer may look down on the green meadows, interspersed perhaps
with little clumps of low willows which grow along the tiny watercourses
whose sources are the snow banks far up the mountain side, and if
patient in his watch and faithful in his search, he may detect with his
glasses at first one or two, and gradually more and more, until at
length perhaps ten, fifteen or thirty sheep may be counted, scattered
over a considerable area of country. Or, if he climbs higher yet, and
overlooks the rounded shoulders which stretch up from the passes toward
the highest pinnacles of all--he will very likely see far below him,
lying on the hill and commanding a view miles in extent in every
direction, a group of nine, ten or a dozen sheep peacefully resting in
the midday sun. Those that he sees will be almost all of them ewes and
young animals. Perhaps there may be a young ram or two whose horns have
already begun to curve backward, but for the most part they are females
and young.
The question that the hunter is always asking himself is where are the
big rams? Now and then, to be sure, more by accident than by any wisdom
of his own, he stumbles on some monster of the rocks, but of the sheep
that he sees in his wanderings, not one in a hundred has a head so large
as to make him consider it a trophy worth possessing. It is commonly
declared that in summer the big rams are "back along the range," by
which it is meant that they are close to the summits of the tallest
peaks. It is probable that this is true, and that they gather by twos
and threes on these tall peaks, and, not moving about very much, escape
observation.
During the spring, summer, and early fall the females and their young
keep together in small bands in the mountains, well up, close under what
is called the "rim rock," or the "reefs," where the grass is sweet and
tender, the going good, and where a refuge is within easy reach. While
hunting in such places in September and October, when the first snows
are falling, one is likely to find the trail of a band of sheep close up
beneath the rock. If the mountain is one long inhabited by sheep, they
have made a well-worn trail on the hillside, and the little band, while
traveling along this in a general way, scatters out on both sides
feeding on the grass heads that project above the snow, and often with
their noses pushing the light snow away to get at the grass beneath. I
have never seen them do this, nor have I seen them paw to get at the
grass, but the marks in the snow where they have fed showed clearly that
the snow was pushed aside by the muzzle.
Like most other animals, wild and tame, sheep are very local in their
habits, and one little band will occupy the same basin in the mountains
all summer long, going to water by the same trail, feeding in the same
meadows and along the same hillsides, occupying the same beds stamped
out in the rough slide rock, or on the great rock masses which have
fallen down from the cliff above. Even if frightened from their chosen
home by the passage of a party of travelers, they will go no further
than to the tops of the rocks, and as soon as the cause of alarm is
removed will return once more to the valley.
I saw a striking instance of this some years ago, when, with a
Geological Survey party, I visited a little basin on the head of one of
the forks of Stinking Water in Wyoming, where a few families of sheep
had their home.
Our appearance alarmed the sheep, which ran a little way up the face of
the cliff, and then, stopping occasionally to look, clambered along more
deliberately. When we reached the head of the basin we found that there
was no way down on the other side, and that we must go back as we had
come. The afternoon was well advanced and the pack train started back
and camped only a mile or two down the valley, while I stopped among
some great rocks to watch the movements of the sheep. Though at first
not easy to see, the animals' presence was evident by their calling, and
at length several were detected almost at the top of the cliff, but
already making their way back into the valley.
I was much interested in watching a ewe, which was coming down a steep
slope of slide rock. There was apparently no trail, or if there was
one, she did not use it, but picked her way down to the head of the
slope of slide rock, stood there for a few moments, and then, after
bleating once or twice, sprang well out into the air and alighted on the
slide rock, it seemed to me, twenty-five feet below where she had
been. A little cloud of dust arose and she appeared to be buried to her
knees in the slide rock. I could not see how it was possible for her to
have made this jump without breaking her slender legs, yet she repeated
it again and again, until she had come down about to my level and had
passed out of sight. Nor was this ewe the only one that was coming
down. From a number of points on the precipice round about I could hear
rocks rolling and sheep calling, and before very long eight or ten ewes
and four or five lambs had come together in the little basin, and
presently marched almost straight up to where I lay hid. There was meat
in the camp, and so no reason for shooting at these innocents. Later
when I returned to camp, one of the packers informed me that for an hour
or two before a yearling ram had been feeding in the meadow with the
pack animals, close to the camp.
The sheep now commonly shows himself to be the keenest and wariest of
North American big game. Yet we may readily credit the stories told us
by older men of his former simplicity and innocence, since even to-day
we sometimes see these characteristics displayed. I remember riding up a
narrow valley walled in on both sides by vertical cliffs and at its head
by a rock wall which was partly broken down, and through which we hoped
to find a way into the next valley to the northward. As we rode along,
a mile or more from the cliff at the valley's head, I saw one or two
sheep passing over it, and a few minutes later was electrified by
hearing my companion say: "Oh, look at the sheep! Look at the sheep!
Look at the sheep!" And there, charging down the valley directly toward
us, came a bunch of thirty or forty sheep in a close body, running as if
something very terrifying were close behind them, and paying not the
slightest attention to the two horsemen before them. I rolled off my
horse and loaded my gun. The sheep came within twenty-five or thirty
steps and a little to one side, and passed us like the wind, but they
left behind one of their number, which kept us in fresh meat for several
days thereafter.
The first shot I fired at this band gave me a surprise. I drew my sight
fine on the point of the breast of the leading animal and pulled the
trigger, but instead of the explosion which should have followed I heard
the hammer fall on the firing-pin. There was a slow hissing sound, a
little puff at the muzzle of the rifle, and I distinctly heard the
leaden ball fall to the ground just in front of me. In a moment I had
reloaded and had killed the sheep before it had passed far beyond me;
but for a few seconds I could not comprehend what had happened. Then it
came back to me that a few days before I had made from half a dozen
cartridges a weight to attach to a fish line for the purpose of sounding
the depth of a lake. Evidently a lubricating wad had been imperfect,
and dampness had reached the powder.
Like others of our ungulates, wild sheep are great frequenters of
"licks"--places where the soil has been more or less impregnated with
saline solutions. These licks are visited frequently--perhaps
daily--during the summer months by sheep of all ages, and such points
are favorite watching places for men who need meat, and wish to secure
it as easily as possible. At a certain lick in northern Montana, shots
at sheep may be had almost any day by the man who is willing to watch
for them. In the summer of 1903 a bunch of nine especially good rams
visited a certain lick each day. The guide of a New York man who was
hunting there in June--of course in violation of the law--took him to
the lick. The first day nine rams came, and the New Yorker, after firing
many shots, frightened them all away. Perhaps he hit some of them, for
the next day only seven returned, of which three were killed. In British
Columbia I have seen twenty-five or thirty sheep working at a lick, from
which the earth had been eaten away, so that great hollows and ravines
were cut out in many directions from the central spring.
Examination of such licks in cold--freezing--weather, seems to show that
the sheep do not then visit them. I have seen mule deer and sheep
nibbling the soil in company, and have seen white goats visit a lick
frequented also by sheep.
Of Dall's sheep, Mr. Stone declares that it is rapidly growing scarcer,
and this statement is based not only on his own observation, but on
reports made to him by the Indians. Mr. Stone describes it as possessing
wonderful agility, endurance, and vitality, and gives many examples of
their ability to get about among most difficult rocks when wounded. He
adds: "From my experience with these animals, I believe they seek quite
as rugged a country in which to make their homes as does the Rocky
Mountain goat. They brave higher latitudes and live in regions in every
way more barren and forbidding." He reports the females with their lambs
as generally keeping to the high table lands far back in the
mountains. Among the specimens which he recently collected, broken jaw
bones reunited were so frequent among the females killed as to excite
comment. Notwithstanding Mr. Stone's gloomy view of the future of this
species, we may hope that the enforcement of the game laws in Alaska
will long preserve this beautiful animal.