6 Sport and Life. 



now States were then thinly populated Territories where settlements, 

 except in some few mining centres were often hundreds of miles 

 apart. Only a single line of rail connected the Atlantic with the 

 Pacific, while to-day some seven or eight trans-Continental lines 

 of rail communication, and scores of branch lines have assisted in 

 populating vast districts then still the home of the bison, wapiti, and 

 antelope. About that time the short-lived boom of the cattle-ranching 

 industry was commencing to deplete the pockets of English share- 

 holders, and to strew the plains with the bleaching carcases of tens 

 of thousands of kine, while in the companies' balance sheets they 

 were figuring for years afterwards as among the living and kicking 

 assets. The truth, now long recognised, concerning the fallacy of 

 the expert's opinion that, because the shaggy-coated bison could 

 withstand the blizzards and extreme winter cold, domestic cattle, 

 driven from the semi-tropical Texas, would evince a similar 

 hardiness, had then still to be demonstrated at the cost of millions 

 of dollars. 



Cattle ranching rang the death-knell of big game in some of the 

 very best game countries in the world. 



Some sixty years ago a distinguished traveller paid a lengthy 

 visit to the trans-Missourian hunting grounds, and has left us an 

 elaborate account of it. If one compares his narrative of what he 

 saw with the conditions of to-day, and with those of five and 

 twenty years ago, it will be seen that the "westward march of 

 empire " to use a favourite American phrase has been reaching 

 its goal on the shores of the Pacific at record pace. Civilisation in 

 the three hundred and fifty years preceding Prince Wied's visit had 

 covered less ground than in the past quarter of a century. In 

 A.D. 1832 it took this traveller forty-six days in a fast clipper to 

 get from Europe to Boston, and seventy-five days from St Louis 

 to Fort Union, at the junction of the Yellowstone and Missouri, 

 where for the first time he saw a bighorn. Twenty odd years ago 

 it took the writer only ten days to cross the ocean, but it took him 

 almost as long as it had done the traveller in 1832 to reach the 

 haunts of bighorn, while, as a matter of fact, the precise locality was 



