"The largest bunch of sheep that I have seen was in the fall of 1893. I estimated the band at 75 to 100. In that bunch there were no rams, and they remained in sight for quite a long time; so that I had a good opportunity to estimate them.
"I do not profess to know where the majority of these sheep winter, but, undoubtedly, a great number winter on the table-lands before mentioned, where a rich growth of grass furnishes an abundance of feed. At this altitude the wind blows so hard and continuously, and the snow is so light and dry, that there would be no time during the whole winter when the snow would lie on the ground long enough to starve sheep to death. Several small bunches of sheep winter on the Big Gros Ventre River. These, I think, are the same sheep that are found in summer time on the Gros Ventre range. I have occasionally killed sheep that were scabby, but I have no positive knowledge that this disease has killed any number of sheep. In the fall of 1894 I discovered eleven large ram skulls in one place, and since that time found four more near by. My first impression was that the eleven were killed by a snowslide, as they were at the foot of one of those places where snowslides occur, but finding the other four within a mile, and in a place where a snowslide could not have killed them, it rather dispelled my first theory. As mountain sheep can travel over snow drifts nearly as well as a caribou, I do not believe that they were stranded in a snowstorm and perished, and no hunter would have killed so great a number and left such magnificent heads. The scab theory is about the only solution left. The sheep are not hunted very much here, and I believe their greatest enemy is the mountain lion.
"There is one isolated bunch of mountain sheep on the Colorado Desert, situated in Fremont and Sweetwater counties, Wyo., which seems to be holding its own against many range riders, meat and specimen hunters, as well as coyotes. They are very light in color, much more so than their cousins found higher up in the mountains, and locally they are called ibex, or white goats. The country they live in is very similar to the bad lands of Dakota, and I dare say that their long life on the plains has created in them a distinct sub-species of the bighorn."
The Colorado Desert is situated in Wyoming, between the Green River on the west, and the Red Desert on the east. The sheep are seen mostly on the breaks on Green River. They are sometimes chased by cowboys, but I have never known of one being caught in that way.
I am told that in some bad lands in the Red Desert, locally known as Dobe Town, there is a herd of wild sheep, which are occasionally pursued by range riders. Rarely one is roped.
Mr. Fred E. White, of Jackson, Wyo., advised me in 1898 of the existence of sheep in the mountains which drain into Gros Ventre Fork, the heads of Green River and Buffalo Fork of Snake River. Mr. White was with the Webb party, some years ago, when they secured a number of sheep. The same correspondent calls attention to the very large number of sheep which in 1888, and for a few years thereafter, ranged in the high mountains between the waters of the Yellowstone and the Stinking Water. This is one of the countries from which sheep have been pretty nearly exterminated by hunters and prospectors.
Within the past twenty or thirty years mountain sheep have become very scarce in all of their old haunts in Wyoming and northern Colorado. This does not seem to be particularly due to hunting, but the sheep seem to be either moving away or dying out. Mr. W.H. Reed, in 1898, wrote me from Laramie, Wyo., saying: "At present there are perhaps thirty head on Sheep Mountain, twenty-two miles west of Laramie, Wyo.; on the west side of Laramie Peak there are perhaps twenty head; on the east side of the Peak twelve to fifteen head, and near the Platte Canon, at the head of Medicine Bow River, there are fifteen. In 1894 I saw at the head of the Green River, Hobacks River, and Gros Ventre River, between two and three hundred mountain sheep. There are sheep scattered all through the Wind River, and a very few in the Big Horn Mountains; but all are in small bunches, and these widely separated. Some of the old localities where they were very abundant in the early '70's, but now are never seen, are Whalen Canon, Raw Hide Buttes, Hartville Mountains, thirty miles northwest of Ft. Laramie, Elk Mountains, and the adjacent hills fifteen miles east of Fort Steele, near old Fort Halleck. They seem to have disappeared also from the bad lands along Green River, south of the Union Pacific Railroad, from the Freezeout Hills, Platte Canyon, at the mouth of Sweetwater River, from Brown's Canyon, forty miles northwest of Rawlins, from the Seminole and Ferris Mountains, and from many other places in the middle and northeastern part of Wyoming."
In Colorado, the mountains surrounding North Park and west to the Utah line, had many mountain sheep twenty-five years ago, but to-day old hunters tell me that there are only two places where one is sure to find sheep. These are Hahn's Peak and the Rabbit Ears, two peaks at the south end of North Park.
There were sheep in and about the Black Hills of Dakota as late as 1890, for Mr. W.S. Phillips has kindly informed me that about June of that year he saw three sheep on Mt. Inyan Kara. These were the only ones actually seen during the summer, but they were frequently heard of from cattle-men, and Mr. Phillips considers it beyond dispute that at that time they ranged from Sundance, Inyan Kara and Bear Lodge Mountains—all on the western and southwestern slope of the Black Hills, on and near the Wyoming-Dakota line—on the east, westerly at least to Pumpkin Buttes and Big Powder River, and in the edge of the bad lands of Wyoming as far north as the Little Missouri Buttes, and south to the south fork of the Cheyenne River, and the big bend of the north fork of the Platte, and the head of Green River. This range is based on reports of reliable range riders, who saw them in passing through the country. It is an ideal sheep country—rough, varying from sage brush desert, out of which rises an occasional pine ridge butte, to bad lands, and the mountains of the Black Hills. There are patches of grassy, fairly good pasture land. The country is well watered, and there are many springs hidden under the hills which run but a short distance after they come out of the ground and then sink. Timber occurs in patches and more or less open groves on the pine ridges that run sometimes for several miles in a continuous hill, at a height of from one to three or four hundred feet above the plain. The region is a cattle country.
In 1893 and '97 fresh heads and hides were seen at Pocotello, Idaho, and at one or two other points west of there in the lava country along Snake River and the Oregon short line. The sheep were probably killed in the spurs and broken ranges that run out on the west flank of the main chain of the Rockies toward the Blue Mountains of Oregon.