Where, exactly, does the goat stop? That is something which no book (that I have seen) will tell you. The London book, which I have quoted already, names latitude 40° as the southern limit of his habitat. This is considerably farther south than I have ever heard of him. My knowledge of him goes no farther south than the Saw Tooth Range, which is in Idaho. These sharp ridges nourish the head waters of the Salmon River, and are in the southern-central part of the state. And I am inclined to say, in spite of Mr. Lydekker, but supported by Mr. Arthur Brown, that the Saw Tooth and Salmon River country in Idaho is about the southeastern corner of the goat’s province. Saving stray and accidental individuals, you are not likely to find him beyond that point, south or east. I have never talked with any hunter who had seen him in Wyoming, although (and here again I will re-enforce my own experience with Mr. Brown’s) there seems to be a sort of goat tradition in Wyoming, here and there. This myth is, to be sure, highly sublimated. You don’t hear that goat used to be upon this or that definite mountain, or that So-and-So saw a man who saw a goat, or whose wife or uncle saw one; it never comes as near you as that; yet still faintly in the air of the Continental Divide there hovers this vague rumor of the animal.
If he was ever in Wyoming as a domiciled resident, who shall say why he departed? Why is he not to-day upon the Washakie Needle, or in the abrupt country where heads Green River, or among the formidable Tetons, since to-day he is but a little farther west of the Tetons, in the Saw Tooth Range? And why, if man (or sheep) drove him from these Wyoming peaks, has he not been driven from the peaks of Idaho? Difference in neither heat, nor cold, nor humidity, nor accessibility, can be the explanation, for there is no difference; and as for difference in food, I find no suggestion of it in the pages of the authorities.
“What they eat in winter is a mystery. But it must be the little knobs of moss that grow at the edges of the steep rocks on top, where the snow cannot lie. They never come down into the valleys, as the mountain sheep do when the snow grows deep up above.”
This is no authority, but merely my camp notebook again; and the statement that the goat is never, like the sheep, driven to low pastures by the snow is but the popular account of him that I was able to gather from the inhabitants—the prospectors, the trappers—of the mountains where I hunted him. Yet it is interesting; and if generally true, it may furnish some clue to the capricious local separations between sheep and goat in the zone of their common habitat. But if the goat cannot, when the weather would drive him down, subsist upon the less lofty growths that then satisfy the sheep, you will remark how truly unlike the real goat is this narrow discrimination as to diet.
It is surprising, indeed, that at this late day, when investigation and verification are so easy, no naturalist seems anywhere to have written a plain, complete paragraph answering the plain, natural question: In what states and territories does the white goat live? It would seem the naturalist’s business to tell us this. We have the right to expect to open some single standard book, and find such facts at once. Well, I have had to open eight, gathering here a fact and there a fact in a manner not unlike the painful process of rag-picking. The result is far from covering the ground; let me acknowledge this, and beg friendly correction and amplification,—and let me say, nevertheless, that the following is the most detailed information to be found so far set down in any one place.
In Alaska and British Columbia we find the goat, and in northwest Montana, and in Idaho, but only in spots; he is also in the northern Cascades in Washington, but, oddly enough it appears, not in the Olympic Range. Nor is he in the southern Cascades, in Oregon. Elsewhere he is not, unless possibly in California. There is an ancient legend of him among the higher mountains of that state; the Spanish Padre de Salvatierra and his fellow-missionary, Padre Piccolo, are supposed to have seen him. We must uselessly wonder if they did; and I should have been more indebted to a foot-note in the “Biological Survey of Mount Shasta,” which touches upon the goat’s habitat in Oregon and Washington, were it not wholly silent as to the animal’s presence or absence, past or present, in the state of California.
The farther we follow the story of the white goat, the more do we find his steps attended with the mists of confusion; and for the gloomy critic this would be a timely moment to write some sentences about the longevity of error. But it all came out right in the end; and we will get to the facts at once, and how I first began to meet the stream of uncertainty of which the fountain-source lies in the old romantic pages of Lewis and Clark.
A while ago I spoke of a goat tradition in Wyoming. Now it was not until the fall of 1889 that I believed there was such a thing as this goat anywhere. I thought—I could not then say why—that the unlettered mountaineers and plainsmen, whose talk I heard, were speaking of the sheep; and, also, they contradicted each other in a way so curious and persistent that the animal became in a manner fabulous to me, like the unicorn, or the wool-bearing horse. Now I would meet the assurance that “over there somewhere,” among the mountains near the Pacific, a snow-white goat lived, with long hair; again, I would meet a positive denial of this. Some sceptical old trapper or prospector would proclaim that he “guessed he had been most everywhere,” and nobody could “fool him about no goat” with long hair. Indeed, when I at last laid my own goat trophies, heads and hides, before the eyes of my old friend John Yancey of the Yellowstone Park, they gave him a genuine sensation. He had wasted small faith in any tales of goat. He stared at them, he touched them, he lifted them, he could not get over it; they caused me to rise in his esteem, and he refused to believe that circumventing a mountain sheep is a far more skilful exploit. He, too, like myself, had supposed that in some way this notion about goats could be traced to mountain sheep, and that they were one and the same animal. I found this error spread eastward to great cities.
