212 CRUISItfGS IN THE CASCADES. 



when the parties got up the next morning they found 

 the antelopes quietly grazing in the hotel yard. 

 The Mexican left town in disgust followed by his 

 lame, sore-footed dogs, and muttering that he 

 " never seed no varmints run like them things did." 



The antelope, one of the brightest and most grace- 

 ful and beautiful of all our Western game animals, 

 is fast disappearing from our broad plains, owing to 

 the ceaseless slaughter of it that is carried on by 

 u skin hunters," Indians, "foreign noblemen," and 

 others who come to this country year after year and 

 spend the entire summer in hunting. Hundreds 

 of them are killed every summer by this latter class, 

 and left to rot where they fall, not a pound of meat, 

 a skin, or even a head being taken from them. I 

 have seen with my own eyes this butchery carried 

 on for years past, and know whereof I speak. 



Nearly all the Territories have stringent laws 

 intended to prohibit this class of slaughter, but in 

 these sparsely settled countries the provisions for 

 enforcing them are so meagre that these men violate 

 them day after day and year after year with impu- 

 nity. This is one of the instances in which prohi- 

 bition does not prohibit. And what I have said of 

 the antelope is true of all the large game of the 

 great West. The elk, deer, mountain sheep, etc., 

 are being slaughtered by the hundreds ev^ry 

 year tenfold faster than the natural increase. And 

 -the time is near, very near, when all these noble 

 species will be extinct. The sportsman or natural- 

 ist who desires to preserve a skin or head of any 

 of them must procure it very soon or he will not 

 be able to get it at all. 



