CONDITION OF WILD LIFE IN ALASKA. 
[With 1 plate.] 
By Mapison GRANT. 
The opening of the twentieth century found the game in the old 
territories of the United States well on the road toward the condi- 
tions that precede extinction. The bison had been practically gone 
for two decades. The mountain sheep had been exterminated 
throughout a very large part of its original range, and the number 
remaining 1n remote mountains was sadly reduced. The wapiti, 
while still living in herds numbering many thousand, was rapidly 
withdrawing to the vicinity of its last refuge, the Yellowstone Park. 
The prong-horn of the plains was disappearing with increasing 
rapidity, partly due to the increasing use of the barb-wire fences on 
its former ranges. 
This rapid diminution of the game animals of the United States 
was, and is to-day, the inevitable consequence of the settlement and 
occupation of the best grazing lands. While there remain mountains 
where the game is relatively undisturbed, so far as the killing of 
individuals is concerned, and while these ranges in summer appear 
well adapted to sustain a large and varied fauna, their actual capacity 
to sustain life is limited to such animals as can there find sustenance 
during the heavy snows of winter. 
Before the arrival of white men, the animals, which lived in the 
mountains during the summer, sought refuge in the sheltered valleys 
and foothills during the cold season. ‘These favored localities, how- 
ever, were at once occupied by settlers, and the game was deprived 
of its winter feeding grounds. In my opinion, this has done more 
in recent years to exterminate the large animals of the West than the 
actual shooting of individuals. 
During the closing years of the nineteenth century the Ameri- 
can people had obtained no little experience in game protection, and 
had embodied it in Federal statutes and the game laws of the various 
@ Reprinted by permission from the Twelfth Annual Report of the New York 
Zoological Society, 1907. New York, January, 1908. 
521 
