Within the United States the mountain goat is only found in Idaho, western Montana, Washington, and Oregon. There is no evidence whatever of the white goat having existed in Wyoming. In examining the rumors respecting the occurrence of goat one must remember that only a few years ago very little was known about this animal, and few people had seen it. In the south, escaped domestic goat and old mountain sheep ewes with bleached coats and straight horns, have probably been the basis of many such stories. In some places such animals have been mistaken for white goat and elsewhere, notably in Alaska, for the legendary ibex. Until the discovery and description of Dall's white sheep, in 1884, all white animals in the north were called goat and white mountain sheep meat is sold to-day in Dawson City restaurants under that name.
There is no reason whatever to believe that the limits of the distribution of the white goat were ever much different from what they are now, except in outlying localities along their southern limits. The center of the greatest abundance of goat appears to be in the coast ranges in British Columbia and southern Alaska and it is here that they are found low down the mountain sides and often close to salt water.
COMPARISON WITH SHEEP.
It is due to ignorance of the character of the country inhabited by mountain goat that so much has been written about an alleged antipathy between Oreamnos and the mountain sheep. It is singular that writers should go so far afield as to conjure up an imaginary mutual hatred to account for the undoubted fact that sheep and goat seldom live together. In some places, however, notably the Schesley Mountains, sheep and goat can be found on the same mountain side. Sheep belong to the rugged hills and lower slopes and at one time ranged far eastward into the plains wherever the character of the country was at all rough, as in the Black Hills and in the Bad Lands of the upper Missouri.
The sheep is furthermore, a grass-eating animal, while the goat is a browser, finding his food mainly on the buds and twigs of the forests that grow to the very foot of the goat rocks. All through the goat country occur patches of forest and it is there that the goat is found, between timber-line and the snow fields. So far as we know the only grazing done by the goat, beyond nibbling at small plants, is on the slides when the grass first appears and it is probable that to this habit the greatest mortality of this animal is due, as many are killed each spring by the avalanches on these snow slides.
TWO GOAT KIDS AND MOUNTAIN SHEEP LAMB, BORN IN THE SPRING OF 1904
CAPTURED NEAR FORT STEELE, BRITISH COLUMBIA.
Now living and on exhibition in the New York Zoological Park.