Page 183 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF BIG GAME 161
intheMontanaBisonRange,atRavalli. In1911theBooneandCrockett- Club provided a fund which defrayed the expenses of shipping from the YellowstoneParkasmallnucleusherdtoeachofthoseranges. Eight weresenttotheWichitaRange,ofwhichfivearrivedalive. Oftheseven sent to the Montana Range, four arrived alive and were duly set free. While it seems a pity to take specimens from the Yellowstone Park herd, the disagreeable fact is that there is no other source on which to draw for breeding stock.
The Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, in Canada, still permit the hunting and killing of antelope; which is wholly and entirely wrong.
The Big-Horn Sheep.—Of North American big game, the big-horn of the Rockies will be, after the antelope, the next species to become extinct outside of protected areas. In the United States that event is fast approaching. It is far nearer than even the big-game sportsmen rea-lize. There are to-day only two localities in the four states that still think they have killable sheep, in which it is worth while to go sheep- hunting. OneisinMontana,andtheotherisinWyoming. IntheUnited States a really big, creditable ram may now be regarded as an impossi- bility. There are now perhaps half a dozen guides who can find killable sheep in our country, but the game is nearly always young rams, under live years of age.
That Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington still continue to permitsheepslaughterisoutrageous. Theiransweristhat"Thesports- menwon'tstandforstoppingitaltogether." Iwilladd:—andthegreat mass of peeople are too criminally indifferent to take a hand in the matter, and do their duty regardless of the men of blood.
The seed stock of big-horn sheep now alive in the United States aggregatesapitifullysmallnumber. Aftertwenty-fiveyearsofunbroken protection in Colorado, Dillon Wallace estimates, after an investigation on the ground, that the state possesses perhaps thirty-five hundred head. He credits Montana and Wyoming with five hundred each—which I think is far too liberal a number. I do not believe that either of those states contains more than one hundred unprotected sheep, at the very utmost limit. If there are more, where are they?
In the Yellowstone Park there are 210 head, safe and sound, and slowly increasing. I can not understand why they have not increased morerapidlythantheyhave. InGlacierPark,nowunderpermanent protection, three guides on Lake McDonald, in 1910, estimated the num- berofsheepatsevenhundred. IdahohasinherruggedBitterRootand Clearwater Mountains and elsewhere, a remnant of possibly two hundred sheep, and Washington has only what chemists call "a trace." It has recently been discovered that California still contains a few sheep, and
in southwestern Nevada there are a few more.
In Utah, the big-horn species is probably quite extinct. In Ar-
izona, there are a few very small bands, very widely scattered. They are in the Santa Catalina Mountains, the Grand Canyon country, the Gila Range, and the Quitovaquita Mountains, near Sonoyta. But who