Owing to the immensity of this wilderness, the well-nigh total lack of railroads and also of navigable waters, excepting the Yukon, it will not be thoroughly "opened up" for a quarter of a century. The few resolute and pneumonia-proof sportsmen who can wade into the country, pulling boats through icy-cold mountain streams, are not going to devastate those millions of mountains of their big game. The few head of game which sportsmen can and will take out of the great northwestern wilderness during the next twenty-five years will hardly be missed from the grand total, even though a few easily-accessible localities are shot out. It is the deadly resident trappers, hunters and prospectors who must be feared! And again,—who can control them? Can any wilderness government on earth make it possible? Therefore, in time, even the great wilderness will be denuded of big game. This is absolutely fixed and certain; for within much less than another century, every square rod of it will have been gone over by prospectors, lumbermen, trappers and skin-hunters, and raked again and again with fine-toothed combs. A railway line to Dawson, the Copper River and Cook Inlet is to-day merely the next thing to expect, after Canada's present railway program has been wrought out.
Yes, indeed! In time the wilderness will be opened up, and the big game will all be shot out, save from the protected areas.
The Mountain Goat. —Even yet, this species is not wholly extinct in the United States. It survives in Glacier Park, Montana, and the number estimated in that region by three guide friends is too astoundingly large to mention.
This animal is much more easily killed than the big-horn. Its white coat renders it fatally conspicuous at long range during the best hunting season; it is almost devoid of fear, and it takes altogether too many chances on man. Thanks to the rage for sheep horns, the average sportsman's view-point regarding wild life ranks a goat head about six contours below "old ram" heads, in desirability. Furthermore, most guides regard the flesh of the goat as almost unfit for use as food, and far inferior to that of the big-horn. These reasons, taken together, render the goats much less persecuted by the sportsmen, ranchmen and prospectors who enter the home of the two species. It was because of this indifference toward goats that in 1905 Mr. John M. Phillips and his party saw 243 goats in thirty days in Goat Mountain Park, and only fourteen sheep.
Unless the preferences of western sportsmen and gunners change very considerably, the coast mountains of the great northwestern wilderness will remain stocked with wild mountain goats until long after the last big-horn has been shot to death. Fortunately, the skin of the mountain goat has no commercial value. I think it was in 1887 that I purchased, in Denver, 150 nicely tanned skins of our wild white goat at fifty cents each! They were wanted for the first exhibit ever made to illustrate the extermination of American large mammals, and they were shown at the Louisville Exposition. It must have cost the price of those skins to tan them; and I was pleased to know that some one lost money on the venture.
MAP OF THE FORMER AND EXISTING RANGES OF THE AMERICAN ELK
From "Life History of Northern Animals," Copyright 1909 by E.T. Seton