Page 187 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

Locality
Yellowstone Park and vicinity
Authority U. S. Biological Survey.
Game Warden Chris. Morgenroth.
State Conservation Commission.
Idaho (permanently),
THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF BIG GAME 165
roughly calculated the former range of canadensis at two and a half million square miles, and adds: "We are safe, therefore, in believing that in those days there may have been ten million head."
Therangeoftheelkcoveredamagnificentdomain. Themappre- pared by Mr. Ernest T. Seton, after twenty years of research, is the lastwordonthesubject. Itappearsonpage43,Vol.I,ofhisgreatwork, "Life Histories of Northern Animals," and I have the permission of author and publisher to reproduce it here, as an object lesson in wild- animal extermination. Mr. Seton recognizes (for convenience, only?) four forms of American elk, two of which, C. nannodes and occidentalism still exist on the Pacific Coast. The fourth, Cervus merriami, was un- doubtedly a valid species. It lived in Arizona and New Mexico, but became totally extinct near the beginning of the present century.
In 1909 Mr. Seton published in the work referred to above a remark- ably close estimate of the number of elk then alive in North America. Recently, a rough count—the first ever made—of the elk in and around the Yellowstone Park, revealed the real number of that largest contingent. By taking those results, and Mr. Seton's figures for elk outside the United States, we obtain the following very close approximation of the wild elk alive in North America in 1912:
Number 47,000 600 Washington 1,200 Oregon 500 California 400 New York, Adirondacks 400 Minnesota 50
E. T. Seton. Vancouver Island 2,000 E. T. Seton. British Columbia (S.-E.) 200 E. T. Seton.
Alberta 1,000 Saskatchewan 500 In various Parks and Zoos 1,000
Total, for all America. 54,850
E. T. Seton. E. T. Seton E. T. Seton.
In 1905, a herd of twenty of the so-called dwarf elk of the San Joaquin Valley, California, were taken to the Sequoia National Park,and placed in a fenced range that had been established for it on the Kaweah River.
The extermination of the wapiti began with the settlement of the American colonies. Naturally, the largest animals were the ones most eagerly sought by the meat-hungry pioneers, and the elk and bison were thefirstgamespeciestodisappear. Thecolonistsbelievedinthesurvival ofthefittest,andwearegladthattheydid. Theonethingthatahungry pioneer cannot withstand is—temptation—in a form that embraces five hundred pounds of succulent flesh. And let it not be supposed that in the eastern states there were only a few elk. The Pennsylvania salt licks were crowded with them, and the early writers describe them as existing in "immense bands" and "great numbers."