238 BULLETIN 56^ UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM.. 



and several pairs of large horns at various places in Cataract Creek 

 Canyon. Horns were seen at other places along the high bluffs of 

 the Colorado Canyon, west of Cataract Creek, as far as Vitz's Cross- 

 ing, 17 miles north of Pine Springs, Avhere a handsomely carved 

 fresh horn was seen in the possession of Hualapai Indians; and sheep 

 were known to be common throughout the length of the Grand 

 Canyon of the Colorado at that time. On March 8, 1886, Maj. E. K. 

 Otey showed me the skull and horns of _ a bighorn, killed by Mr. 

 Durfee at Bill Williams Mountain, Arizona. The Hopi Indians call 

 the mountain sheep Pang'-wilh. They said there w^ere some remain- 

 ing in the Ho])i Country, but only a few, as they killed as many as 

 possible for food. Mr. Stuart Daniels saw them three miles north of 

 Mesa Butte, Arizona, at a season when they were in winter pelage. 



In the Verde Basin, Arizona, from 1884 to 1888, the bighorn was 

 occasionally seen. The female w^as commonly called the " ibex," and 

 considered to be a different species from the male, on account of the 

 very different shape of its horns. Several weathered horns were 

 found near the (since abandoned) post of. Fort Verde. It was not 

 infrequently seen or shot in the surrounding mountains, and one was 

 lassoed by cowboys, in 1888, about 15 miles southwest of Fort Verde. 

 One was seen at Towel Spring, in the Box Canyon of the Verde 

 River, in 1887. Several were shot from a flock of about 30 on Hard- 

 scrabble Mesa, southeast of Fort Verde, in 1884. About the same 

 3'ear Mr. Jack Davis, who resided on Rye Creek, killed a number of 

 female sheep near the Natural Bridge, on Pine Creek, Arizona. 



The opinion is general among the white settlers along the Mexican 

 border that in that region the bighorn is doomed to extinction at an 

 early period. For this reason it is considered worth while to enter 

 into as detailed an account of its present or recent distribution as the 

 meager observations contained in my notebooks will admit. I have 

 be:;n told of the killing of mountain sheep in the mountains of south- 

 western Texas by several persons, among them Lieut. Charles H. 

 Grierson, who. in 1878, killed three adult males in a canyon of the 

 Guadalupe Mountains, at an altitude of 8.000 to 9,000 feet, the 

 highest elevation of the region being about 10,000 feet. Only these 

 three were seen, in a pocket of a rocky canyon, whence there were 

 but two outlets, one by which the hunter approached, and another 

 which the distracted game passed by in their efforts to escape. When 

 first seen all three leaped upon a high bowlder and gazed down at 

 the hunter. One was shot, and the others in rapid succession when 

 they stopped, out of curiosity, to look at the hunter. To judge by 

 our own experiences, this tameness or stupidity is characteristic, 

 and only the inaccessible nature of its retreats lias enabled the rem- 

 nant of the species to exist up to the present time. 



