Big-Game Refuges 



Since the inception of the Boone and Crockett 

 Club its plans and purposes have changed not a little. 

 Originally organized for social purposes, for the 

 encouragement of big-game hunting, and the pro- 

 curing of the most effective weapons with which to 

 secure the game, it has, little by little, come to be 

 devoted to the broader object of benefiting this and 

 succeeding generations by preserving a stock of large 

 game. It is still made up of enthusiastic riflemen, 

 and their love of the chase has not abated. But, since 

 the Club's formation, an astonishing change has come 

 over natural conditions in the United States — a 

 change which, fifteen or twenty years ago, could not 

 have been foreseen. The extraordinary development 

 of the whole Western country, with the inevitable con- 

 traction of the range of all big game, and the absolute 

 reduction in the numbers of the game consequent on 

 its destruction by skin hunters, head hunters and 

 tooth hunters, has obliged the Boone and Crockett 

 Club, in absolute self-defense, and in the hope that its 

 efforts may save some of the species threatened with 

 extinction, to turn its attention more and more to 

 game protection. 



The Club was established in 1888. The buflfalo had 

 already been swept away. Since that date two species 

 of elk have practically disappeared from the land, 



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