The Slaughter of Big Game, &c. 33 



were the worst instances, outfits would be "grub-staked" by 

 dealers who would provide everything that the men needed, and 

 share the profits, much in the same way that the buffalo hunters 

 were outfitted in the seventies in Kansas and Eastern Colorado. 



As a rule, the hide hunters took to this occupation as a make- 

 shift by which they could cover expenses during the winter, for all 

 hide hunting was done at that period. By profession they were 

 mostly miners, ranch hands, or navvies, whose regular occupation 

 came to an end with the advent of winter, while their means did 

 not permit of their returning for the season to their eastern 

 homes. 



In severe winters Nature seemed occasionally to assist the work 

 of extermination. Thus, in a severe blizzard which swept over 

 Colorado in the last week of January, 1893, a band of about 1000 

 wapiti became imprisoned by the snow on a high and heavily 

 timbered mesa in the mountains near Steamboat Springs. Ranch- 

 men, prospectors, and hide hunters, on hearing of this windfall, 

 " waded in," killing many with clubs, as the local papers reported, 

 and I believe not a single beast was allowed to escape. 



And what about the game laws ? the reader will exclaim. 

 Were there no laws which could be enforced to stop such 

 slaughter ? 



The laws, and sufficiently good laws, were there all right enough 

 on paper, and, what is more, they had been framed at a sufficiently 

 early date to have saved the bulk of the game, only there was 

 nobody to enforce them. That was the crux of the whole 

 question, as indeed it could not help being in those vast, then 

 thinly populated, regions where horse thieving was about the only 

 crime that roused a community to action, where men who had 

 committed half a dozen murders were the lions to whom it was 

 an honour for the newly arrived stranger to be introduced. 

 Though such lawlessness was never rampant in British Columbia 

 thanks to the strong hand of the late Chief Justice Begbie, a man 

 among ten thousand the evolution of the British Columbian game 

 laws manifest of late years a pettifogging meanness as well as 



D 



