American Big Game in Its Haunts - Various
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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:
"The Bear Paw Mountains were full of mountain sheep a dozen years
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.