NORTH AMERICA AND THE WEST INDIES 359 



Nebraska, and to an undetermined distance westward probably 

 into eastern Montana and Wyoming, where it must have inter- 

 graded with the typical form of the Rocky Mountains. At 

 the present time it is believed to be extinct over all this region. 

 Audubon in ascending the Missouri River in 1843 first met with 

 the bighorn in western North Dakota above the mouth of the 

 Little Knife River, probably, as Bailey points out, at about 

 the same place where Maximilian ten years before had found 

 them. Probably this was very near the northeastern limit of 

 distribution, for Bailey quotes a resident long acquainted with 

 that region as stating that there "never were any mountain 

 sheep near the Missouri at Cannon Ball, but that formerly 

 the Indians went farther west to hunt them." Dr. George 

 Bird Grinnell (1928) pointed out that in those days sheep were 

 far less shy than later, when the white hunter with his rifle 

 proved a deadly enemy; it was then common to find the 

 bighorn grazing on open prairie near the high buttes to which 

 they could escape if threatened with danger. The Platte 

 River in southern Nebraska marked about the southeastward 

 extent of the range. Grinnell recalls that in earlier days, 

 about the middle of the last century, "on that stream certain 

 isolated buttes and pinnacles were their favorite resorts, but 

 when the country about these high points for example, 

 Scott sbluff began to settle up, the sheep were cut off from the 

 mountains and could neither escape to other refuges nor could 

 their numbers be added to by others of their kind from the 

 mountains. 



"In the early eighties Theodore Roosevelt . . . hunted 

 mountain sheep in the Badlands along the Little Missouri," 

 but their numbers were apparently not large. In 1888 three 

 were killed near the present town of Oakdale, in the Killdeer 

 Mountains, North Dakota. Three others were killed from a 

 little band of five in the Badlands of the Little Missouri in 

 1898. The last positive record for the bighorn in North 

 Dakota is said by Bailey to be an old ram killed about 1905 on 

 Magpie Creek, in the Killdeer Mountains. There are later 

 reports, however, for the Badlands of South Dakota. Ap- 

 parently the sheep held out longest in the Black Hills region, 

 where in 1895 Dr. Walter Granger was told of the presence of 

 a small herd in the vicinity of Harney Peak. "In the Bad 

 Lands," he wrote (in J. A. Allen, 1895), "they are quite com- 



