Page 358 - Our Vanishing Wild Life

336 OUR VANISHING WILD LIFE
We can always carve up any useless surplus of the public domain, and restore it to commercial uses; but none of the men of to-day will live long enough to see so strange a proceeding carried into effect.
The game preserves of the United States government are so small (with the exception of the Yellowstone and Glacier Parks) , that very few peopleexerhearofthem,andfewerstillknowofthemindetail. Itseems to be quite time that they should be set forth categorically; and it is most earnestly to be hoped that this list soon will be doubled.
The Yellowstone National Park.—This was the first of the national parks and game preserves of the United States. Some of our game preserves are not exactly national parks, but this is both, by Act of Congress.
It is 62 miles long from north to south, 54 miles wide and contains a. total area of 3,348 square miles, or 2,142,720 acres. Its western border lies in Idaho, and along its northern border a narrow strip lies in Montana. It is under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior, and it is guardedbyadetachmentofcavalryfromtheUnitedStatesArmy. The Superintendent is now a commissioned ofhcer of the United States Army. The business of protecting the game is performed partly by four scouts, who are civilians specially engaged for that purpose, but the number has always been totally inadequate to the work to be performed.
At least one-half of the public interest attaching to the Yellowstone Park is based upon its wild animals. There, the average visitor sees, for the first time, wild mountain sheep, antelope, mule deer, elk, grizzly bears and white pelicans, roaming free. But for the tragedy of the Park bison herd,—slaughtered by poachers from 1890 to 1893, from 300 head down to 30—visitors would see wild bison also; but now the few wild bison remaining keep as far as possible from the routes of tourist travel. The bison were slaughtered through an inadequate protective force, and (then) utterly inadequate laws.
Lieut.-Col. L. M. Brett, U.S.A., Superintendent of the Yellowstone Park advises me (July 29, 1912) that the wild big game in the Yellow- stone Park in the summer of 1912, is as shown below, based on actual counts and estimates of the Park scouts, and particularly Scout McBride. "The estimates of buffalo, elk, antelope, deer, sheep and bear are based on actual counts, or very close observations, and are pretty nearly cor- rect." (Col. Brett).
Wild Buffalo Moose
Elk (in summer) Antelope Mountain Sheep Mule Deer White-tailed Deer Grizzly Bears Black Bears
49 550 35,000 500 210 400
100 . 50
100