GREAT QUESTION IN JACKSON'S 245 



ranchman was prepared to make an affidavit 

 that within a small area in the lower end of the 

 Hole he had actually counted the bodies of 

 sixteen hundred dead elk, in the spring of 1909. 

 Another stated that when the snow of that 

 spring melted two thousand bodies lay within 

 a radius of one mile of his house. Another 

 said that within a like radius at another point 

 he had seen five thousand bodies. 



Many other reputable ranchmen, in describ- 

 ing the awful stench arising in early summer 

 from the putrefying bodies of dead animals, as- 

 serted that several families had been compelled 

 temporarily to abandon their homes, made un- 

 inhabitable by the odor. Every one told of the 

 water in early summer, slimy and reeking with 

 decaying elk flesh and made unwholesome for 

 man or beast. One ranchman asserted that 

 within a period of twenty years' residence in 

 Jackson's Hole he had seen upwards of fifty- 

 thousand elk perish from starvation. 



Let us look at the causes that lead to this 

 condition. It is an unnatural condition and the 

 causes are easily traceable, though the reme- 

 dies may not be so easily administered. 



In the year 1872 Congress set aside the Yel- 

 lowstone National Park, embracing an area of 

 approximately thirty-six hundred square miles, 



