The Wapiti or Round -honied Elk 133 



record having been killed in Pennsylvania in 

 1869. In the forests of northern Wisconsin, 

 northern Michigan, and Minnesota wapiti existed 

 still longer, and one or two individuals may still 

 be found. A few are left in Manitoba. When 

 Lewis and Clark and Pike became the pioneers 

 among the explorers, army officers, hunters, and 

 trappers who won for our people the great west, 

 they found countless herds of wapiti through- 

 out the high plains country from the Mississippi 

 River to the Rocky Mountains. Throughout 

 this region it was exterminated almost as rap- 

 idly as the bison, and by the early eighties 

 there only remained a few scattered individuals, 

 in bits of rough country such as the Black Hills, 

 the sand-hills of Nebraska, and certain patches of 

 Bad Lands along the Little Missouri. Doubtless, 

 stragglers exist even yet in one or two of these 

 localities. But by the time the great buffalo 

 herds of the plains were completely exterminated, 

 in 1883, the wapiti had likewise ceased to be a 

 plains animal ; the peculiar Californian form had 

 also been well-nigh exterminated. 



Disregarding: the Pacific coast form of Van- 

 couver and the Olympian Mountains, the wapiti 

 was thenceforth a beast of the Rocky Mountain 

 region proper, and was especially abundant in 

 western Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. 

 Throughout these mountains its extermination, 



