132 Deer and Antelope of North America 



and far down into the mid-country of Virginia 

 and the Carolinas. It extended northward into 

 Canada, from the Great Lakes to Vancouver; 

 and southward into Mexico, along the Rockies. 

 Its range thus corresponded roughly with that of 

 the bison, except that it went farther west and not 

 so far north. In the early colonial days so little 

 heed was paid by writers to the teeming myriads 

 of game that it is difficult to trace the w r apiti's 

 distribution in the Atlantic coast region. It was 

 certainly killed out of the Adirondacks long 

 before the moose was exterminated. At the 

 close of the colonial period, when the backwoods- 

 men were settling the valleys of the Alleghany 

 Mountains, they there found the elk very abun- 

 dant, and the stately creatures roamed in great 

 bands over Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indi- 

 ana when the first settlers made their way into 

 what are now these states, at the outbreak of the 

 Revolution. These first settlers were all hunters, 

 and they followed the wapiti (or, as they always 

 called it, the elk) with peculiar eagerness. In con- 

 sequence its numbers were soon greatly thinned, 

 and about the beginning of the present century it 

 disappeared from that portion of its former range 

 lying south of the Great Lakes and between the 

 Alleghanies and the Mississippi. In the north- 

 ern Alleghanies it held its own much longer, the 

 last individual of which I have been able to get 



