“And a very fine ram,” I assured him.
“He’s quite tyme,” the owner went on. “You can have him for five hundred.”
“You’re a long way from London,” was my comment; and he asked if I, too, were English. But I was not, nor had I any wish to bear away the ram, skipping and leaping into civilization.
Three hundred pounds would, I suppose, have been a little heavier than he was, but not much; he stood near as high as my waist, and he had at some period of his long, long ancestry marched across to us from Asia upon his lengthy un-sheeplike legs—skipped over the icy straits before Adam (let alone Behring) was in the world, and while the straits themselves waited for the splitting sea to break the bridge of land between Kamchatka and Alaska. This is the best guess which science can make concerning our sheep’s mysterious origin. Upon our soil, none of nature’s graveyards hold his bones preserved until late in the geological day; earlier than the glacial period neither he nor his equally anomalous comrade, the white goat, would seem to have been with us; and we may comfortably suppose that sheep and goat took up their journey together and came over the great old Aleutian bridge which Behring found later in fragments. Having landed up there in the well-nigh Polar north, they skipped their way east and south among our Pacific and Rocky Mountains, until, by the time we ourselves came over to live in the North American continent, they had—the sheep especially—spread themselves widely, and were occupying a handsome domain when we met them.
“Among other things we procured two horns of the animal … known to the Mandans by the name of ahsahta … winding like those of a ram.”
This, so far as I know, is the first word of the mountain sheep recorded by an American. Thus wrote Lewis on December the twenty-second, 1804, being then in winter camp with the Mandan Indians, not many miles up the river from where to-day the Northern Pacific’s bridge joins Bismarck to Mandan. We find him again, on the twenty-fifth of the May following, when he has proceeded up the Missouri a little beyond the Musselshell, writing, “In the course of the day we also saw several herds of the big-horned animals among the steep cliffs on the north, and killed several of them;” as to which one of his fellow explorers correctly comments in his own record, “But they very little resemble sheep, except in the head, horns, and feet.” It is not worth while to quote a later reference made when the party was near the Dearborn River, north, sixty miles or so, of where now stands the town of Helena.
Thus it is to be seen that Meriwether Lewis, private secretary to President Jefferson and commander of that great expedition, met the mountain sheep in Dakota, and from there to the Rocky Mountains grew familiar with him; though not so familiar as to prevent his later making a confusion between sheep and goats, which, being handed down, delayed for many years a clear knowledge of these animals. To this I shall return when goats are in question.
Until very lately, until the eighties, that is to say, sheep were still to be found in plenty where Meriwether Lewis found them among the Bad Lands of Dakota; and they dwelt in most ranges of the Western mountains from Alaska to Sonora. They had not taken to the peaks exclusively then; the great table-land was high enough for them. I very well recall a drive in July, 1885, when, from the wagon in which I sat, I saw a little band of them watching us pass, in a country of sage-brush and buttes so insignificant as not to figure as hills upon the map. That was between Medicine Bow and the Platte River. To meet the bighorn there to-day would be a very extraordinary circumstance; and as for Dakota, there too has civilization arrived; and you will find divorces commoner than sheep—and less valuable.