92 Sport and Life. 



"goat" stories with a good deal of suspicious reserve. I heard a 

 great number of such tales. Men told me that they had shot, 

 knifed, lassoed, stalked, staked in pitfall, and otherwise "gone for" 

 the mysterious beast. And in their turn they had been gored, 

 spitted, "treed," butted, trampled on, and generally roughly handled 

 by redoubtable old rams, and though the stranger in the land in this 

 instance declined to be " filled up, boots and all," with these hoary 

 old myths of the ultra Western type, they yet generated in me an 

 irrepressible desire to get at the bottom of these wonderful natural 

 history revelations. A letter I received in May, 1882, from a 

 reliable friend residing in western Montana, declaring that he had 

 actually seen not a live, but, what was the next best thing, a dead 

 mountain goat, made me pack my trunks and engage my passage 

 in hot haste. 



Two or three weeks later I was in Butte City, that promising 

 mining town, the " Leadville " of Montana territory. Here I 

 "outfitted," and, joined by my aforementioned friend, we were in a 

 few days on our way to the Bitter-Root Mountains. Our party had 

 a businesslike look about it; the men and the seven or eight horses 

 were old friends of former seasons, and our minds were of equally 

 businesslike bent. We wanted goat, and goat we would get or 

 perish in the attempt. As the country we were about to visit 

 was strange to us, w r e decided, on reaching the last outpost 

 of civilization, to hire a local guide acquainted with the trails 

 that led up into the chain on which the animals had been seen and 

 even killed. 



It was an isolated, long abandoned, old mining camp called 

 " Dead Man's Flat." The dozen or so " old-timers " who still 

 resided there were one and all willing to take their oath that they 

 had slaughtered goats since they could handle shooting-irons. We 

 picked out three from which the man was to be selected. The 

 choice was not the easiest. The first was known as the fellow 

 " who could stand more rest than any other man in the territory," 

 or, in other words, was supposed to be the laziest man in Montana. 

 The second was reputed to be decidedly a "bad" man, an old- 



