190 EXTINCT AND VANISHING MAMMALS 



more skins were seen at Fort Rae than at any other post, and 

 these had been brought mainly from the Barren Grounds, 

 where the animal occurs more commonly than in the wooded 

 country. . . In the semibarren country along the southern 

 shore of Great Bear Lake, tracks of wolverenes were common. 

 . . . A large proportion of the wolverene skins which are 

 obtained from the Indians of the Mackenzie are shipped to 

 Fort McPherson and traded to the Eskimo, who prize this fur 

 highly for trimming their clothing." Pike and other travelers 

 mention it as being met with across the Barren Grounds. 

 Trappers in the Yukon region secure a few annually. A. J. 

 Stone (1900) in the Canadian Northwest found them in timber 

 and on the barrens and mentions seeing them "far out on the 

 ice of the deep bays along the coast." Osgood (1901) speaks of 

 them as "apparently rather common" in the Yukon and also 

 in the Cook Inlet region of Alaska, whence a number of skins 

 annually are sent via St. Michael to trading posts on the 

 Yukon. 



In British Columbia, on the other hand, wolverenes seem to 

 be diminishing in numbers. Cowan, in 1939, writes that they 

 are "rare in the Peace River .district, but according to certain 

 reports are more plentiful in the Rocky Mountains." He 

 mentions one trapped on Pine River in 1936. On Vancouver 

 Island a few wolverenes still exist, according to Swarth (1912), 

 but are confined to the higher mountains and are seldom 

 trapped, except by the Indians, who bring in "one or two every 

 year." 



In the Rocky Mountains south of the Canadian border a 

 small number of these mammals remain. Fifty years or more 

 ago Merriam (1891) wrote that wolverenes were "tolerably 

 common in the Saw Tooth Mountains" of Idaho, where in the 

 previous winter a trapper had caught five. Another had been 

 taken a few years before 1891 in the Blackfeet Mountains. 

 No doubt their numbers have since diminished, for Vernon 

 Bailey in 1918, writing of the mammals of Glacier National 

 Park in northwestern Montana, says that although in 1895 he 

 was told by trappers in the St. Mary Lake region that a few 

 existed there and one was occasionally caught, and that a few 

 were trapped each year before the park was made a reserve, 

 there were thought to be none left in the park at the time of 

 writing. In the high forests of the wilder parts of Colorado 



