68 NOBTH AMEKICAN FAUNA [No. 65 



eastern part of the State in 1915, Preble reported them as formerly 

 common in most of the rough desert ranges and on the canyon walls. 

 From Jordan Valley he wrote : 



Sheep have been harassed so long in these desert ranges that they have 

 been practically gone for many years and I have been unable to find any 

 heads. There are said to be a few in Red Canyon, in the Juniper Mountains 

 just east of the Oregon line, but there is no possibility of any in the ranges 

 north of here. 



Later he was told that there might be a very few in the northern 

 part of the Mahogany Mountains, east of the Owyhee River. On 

 the hills in the rough lava country about Cow Creek Lake in the 

 southern part of the Mahogany Mountains, he was told, they had been 

 very common, but had practically disappeared about 1885. W. F. 

 Schnabel told him that they had evidently died of some disease, 

 as they were found lying about everywhere. In a letter of March 

 21, 1916, Schnabel wrote : 



I can vouch for the extermination of the sheep. Many people think they 

 were killed by cowboys and game-hogs. It is not so. They all perished during 

 the winter of 1884 and 1885. They did not starve but were killed by some 

 disease. I found their carcasses everywhere and grass and feed were plentiful 

 in those days. 



H. D. Glover, in sending some old heads and horns of mountain 

 sheep from this region, wrote on February 13, 1916: "About the 

 last mountain sheep seen around here was along in the nineties. 

 There were a great many here in the eighties up to 1885." 



On April 6, 1917, R. M. Horn, of Nyssa, Oreg., wrote: 



There are no mountain sheep on the Owyhee near the Duncans Ferry country 

 nor have there been for 15 years. They had a disease similar to the scab 

 that affects domestic sheep and died from that disease. Old settlers tell 

 me they believe the mountain sheep caught the scab from the domestic sheep 

 as they had never been known to have it before the domestic sheep brought 

 it into the country. 



At Riverside in 1916 the writer learned from Harry Fairman 

 that two mountain sheep had been killed on the rimrock of the 

 high butte just north of the station about 1894, but these were the 

 last he had known in that section. 



In south-central Oregon the sheep also disappeared after the coun- 

 try was settled by white men. In 1905 James H. Gaut was told 

 by people living west of lower Klamath Lake that mountain sheep 

 had been numerous on the lava ridges near there up to 1885 and 

 that the last was killed in 1890. In 1916 the writer secured two 

 old heads, one with horns and the other without, from the lava 

 beds near lower Klamath Lake, but could get no direct information 

 on how long they had remained there nor when the sheep were 

 last known in these almost impenetrable lava fields. One of the 

 Klamath Indians said that, when he was a little boy, his father 

 used to go down there to kill them. In 1914 Harry Telford wrote 

 from Fort Klamath: 



I could find no record of mountain sheep ever occurring near Fort Klamath. 

 Mr. Reams who had cattle in the lava beds in the early days says they were 

 plentiful there up to the winter of 1879 and '80, when he thinks they were 

 winter-killed. A large number of cattle and sheep had been run in the lava 

 beds during the summer and fall of 1879 and had taken most of the feed, 

 and the hard winter following finished them, 



