THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS. 15 



of them, along the coast, the rain-shrouded 

 mountain chains of Oregon and Washington, 

 matted with the towering growth of the 

 mighty evergreen forest. 



The white hunters, who from time to 

 time first penetrated the different parts of 

 this wilderness, found themselves in such 

 hunting grounds as those wherein, long ages 

 before, their Old-World forefathers had 

 dwelt; and the game they chased was much 

 the same as that their lusty barbarian an- 

 cestors followed, with weapons of bronze and 

 of iron, in the dim years before history dawned. 

 As late as the end of the seventeenth century 

 the turbulent village nobles of Lithuania and 

 Livonia hunted the bear, the bison, the elk, 

 the wolf, and the stag, and hung the spoils in 

 their smoky wooden palaces ; and so, two 

 hundred years later, the free hunters of Mon- 

 tana, in the interludes between hazardous 

 mining quests and bloody Indian campaigns, 

 hunted game almost or quite the same in 

 kind, through the cold mountain forests sur- 

 rounding the Yellowstone and Flathead lakes, 

 and decked their log cabins and ranch houses 

 with the hides and horns of the slaughtered 

 beasts. 



Zoologically speaking, the north temperate 

 zones of the Old and New Worlds are very 

 similar, differing from one another much less 

 than they do from the various regions south 

 of them, or than these regions differ among 

 themselves. The untrodden American wilder- 

 ness resembles both in game and physical 

 character the forests, the mountains, and the 

 steppes of the Old World as it was at the 



