That Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington still continue to permit sheep slaughter is outrageous. Their answer is that "The sportsmen won't stand for stopping it altogether." I will add:—and the great mass of people are too criminally indifferent to take a hand in the matter, and do their duty regardless of the men of blood.
The seed stock of big-horn sheep now alive in the United States aggregates a pitifully small number. After twenty-five years of unbroken protection in Colorado, Dillon Wallace estimates, after an investigation on the ground, that the state possesses perhaps thirty-five hundred head. He credits Montana and Wyoming with five hundred each—which I think is far too liberal a number. I do not believe that either of those states contains more than one hundred unprotected sheep, at the very utmost limit. If there are more, where are they?
In the Yellowstone Park there are 210 head, safe and sound, and slowly increasing. I can not understand why they have not increased more rapidly than they have. In Glacier Park, now under permanent protection, three guides on Lake McDonald, in 1910, estimated the number of sheep at seven hundred. Idaho has in her rugged Bitter Root and Clearwater Mountains and elsewhere, a remnant of possibly two hundred sheep, and Washington has only what chemists call "a trace." It has recently been discovered that California still contains a few sheep, and in southwestern Nevada there are a few more.
In Utah, the big-horn species is probably quite extinct. In Arizona, there are a few very small bands, very widely scattered. They are in the Santa Catalina Mountains, the Grand Canyon country, the Gila Range, and the Quitovaquita Mountains, near Sonoyta. But who can protect from slaughter those Arizona sheep? Absolutely no one! They are too few and too widely scattered for the game wardens to keep in touch with them. The "prospectors" have them entirely at their mercy, and the world well knows what prospectors' "mercy" to edible big game looks like on the ground. It leads straight to the frying-pan, the coyotes and the vultures.
The Lower California peninsula contains about five hundred mountain sheep, without the slightest protection save low, desert mountains, heat and thirst. But that is no real protection whatever. Those sheep are too fine to be butchered the way they have been, and now are being butchered. In 1908 I strongly called the attention of the Mexican Government to the situation; and the Departmento de Fomento secured the issue of an executive order forbidding the hunting of any big game in Lower California without the written authority of the government. I am sure, however, that owing to the political and military upheaval it never stopped the slaughter of sheep. In such easy mountains as those of Lower California, it is a simple matter to exterminate quickly all the mountain sheep that they possess. The time for President Madero and his cabinet to inaugurate serious protective measures has fully arrived.
Both British Columbia and Alberta have even yet fine herds of big-horn, and we can count three large game preserves in which they are protected. They are Goat Mountain Park (East Kootenay district, between the Elk and Bull Rivers); the Rocky Mountains Park, near Banff, and Waterton Lakes Park, in the southwestern corner of Alberta.
In view of the number of men who desire to hunt them, the bag limit on big-horn rams in British Columbia and Alberta still is too liberal, by half. One ram per year for one man is quite enough; quite as much so as one moose is the limit everywhere. To-day "a big, old ram" is regarded by sportsmen as a much more desirable and creditable trophy than a moose; because moose-killing is easy, and the bagging of an old mountain ram in real mountains requires five times as much effort and skill.
The splendid high and rugged mountains of British Columbia and Alberta form an ideal home for the big-horn (and mountain goat), and it would be an international calamity for that region to be denuded of its splendid big game. With resolute intent and judicial treatment that region can remain a rich and valuable hunting ground for five hundred years to come. Under falsely "liberal" laws, it can be shot into a state of complete desolation within ten years, or even less.
Other Mountain Sheep. —In northern British Columbia, north of Iskoot Lake, there lies a tremendous region, extending to the Arctic Ocean, and comprehending the whole area between the Rocky Mountain continental divide and the waters of the Pacific. Over the southern end of this great wilderness ranges the black mountain sheep, and throughout the remainder, with many sheepless intervals, is scattered the white mountain sheep.