Louisiana and Aaron Burr 355 



were great numbers of sage fowl, sharp-tailed prairie 

 fowl, and ducks of all kinds; and swans, and tall 

 white cranes; and geese, which nested in the tops 

 of the cottonwood trees. But the hunters paid no 

 heed to birds, when surrounded by such teeming 

 myriads of big game. Buffalo, elk, and antelope, 

 whitetail and blacktail deer, and bighorn sheep 

 swarmed in extraordinary abundance throughout the 

 lands watered by the upper Missouri and the Yellow- 

 stone; in their journals the explorers dwell contin- 

 ually on the innumerable herds they encountered 

 while on these plains, both when traveling up- 

 stream and again the following year, when they were 

 returning. The antelopes were sometimes quite 

 shy; so were the bighorn, though on occasions both 

 kinds seemed to lose their wariness, and in one in- 

 stance the journal specifies the fact that, at the 

 mouth of the Yellowstone, the deer were somewhat 

 shy, while the antelope, like the elk and buffalo, paid 

 no heed to the men whatever. Ordinarily all the 

 kinds of game were very tame. Sometimes one of 

 the many herds of elk that lay boldly, even at mid- 

 day, on the sand-bars or on the brush-covered 

 points, would wait until the explorers were within 

 twenty yards of them before starting. The buffalo 

 would scarcely move out of the path at all, and the 



tially unchanged from what it was in the days of Lewis and 

 Clark : game swarmed, and the few white hunters and trap- 

 pers who followed the buffalo, the elk, and the beaver were 

 still at times in conflict with hunting parties from various 

 Indian tribes. While ranching in this region I myself killed 

 every kind of game encountered by Lewis and Clark. 



