294 BULLETIN 130, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



tral States, even as far south as northern Missouri; but now it 

 probably does not breed anywhere within the limits of the United 

 States, except possibl}' in some of the wilder portions of Montana 

 or Wyoming; civilization has pushed it farther and farther north 

 until now it is making its last stand in the uninhabited wilds of 

 northern Canada. E. H. Forbush (1912) has summed up the his- 

 tory of its disappearance very well, as follows : 



The trumpeter has succumbed to incessant persecution in all parts of its 

 range, and its total extinction is now only a matter of years. Persecution 

 drove it from the northern parts of its winter range to the shores of the Gulf 

 of Mexico ; from all the southern portion of its breeding range toward the 

 shores of the Arctic Ocean ; and from the Atlantic and Pacific slopes toward 

 the interior. Now it almost has disappeared from the Gulf States. A swan 

 seen at any time of the year in most parts of the United States is the signal 

 for every man with a gun to pursue it. The breeding swans of the United 

 States have been extirpated, and the bird is pursued, even in its farthest 

 northern haunts, by the natives, who capture it in summer, when it has molted 

 its primaries and is unable to fly. The swan lives to a great age. The older 

 birds are about as tough and unfit for food as an old horse. Only the younger 

 are savory, and the gunners might well have spared the adult birds, but it 

 was " sport " to kill them and fashion called for swan's-down. The large 

 size of this bird and its conspicuousness have served, as in the case of the 

 whooping crane, to make it a shining mark, and the trumpetings that were 

 once heard over the breadth of a great continent, as the long converging lines 

 drove on from zone to zone, will soon be heard no more. In the ages to 

 come, like the call of the wJiooping crane, they will be locked in the silence 

 of the past. 



The late E. S. Cameron prepared for me, in 1913 and 1914, some 

 very elaborate notes on the history of this species in Montana, which 

 Mrs. Cameron very kindly sent to me after her husband's death. 

 They are interesting and valuable enough to print in full, but my 

 space will permit only a few quotations and references. Regarding 

 recent records he says : 



The trumpeter swan, v/hicli 20 years ago was quite common in Montana, 

 has now become exceedingly scarce, and is probably on the verge of extinction 

 everywhere. My investigations during 1912-13 and 1914, show that trumpeters 

 are almost unrepresented among the large numbers of migrant swans which 

 biannually pass over Montana. It seems to be the melancholy fact that thou- 

 sands of whistling swans are seen to one trumpeter, and at the time of writ- 

 ing I have only two authenticated records of trumpeter swans for the three 

 years above nientioned, the specimens from St. ^Marys Lake and Cut bank. 

 Mr. J. H. Price informed me that an adult male trumpeter was shot by a 

 boy on the Yellowstone, near Miles City, Custer County, on October 27, 1905, 

 and I have since seen the mounted bird in a saloon keeper's window. At 

 the time of writing the finest specimen of a trumpeter swan, within my 

 knowledge, is the one killed by Mr. Robert Sloane, of Kalispell, when duck 

 shooting on the shore of Flathead Lake. We left Kalispell before daylight 

 on the morning of November 15, 1910, on our way to where the Flathead 

 River debouches from the flat alluvial floor of the valley through a fair-sized 



