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.