210 THE PRESENT AND FUTURE 



the sand for safety, they think their female sheep are pro- 

 tected ! As a matter of fact, wherever rams are killed, ewes 

 are hilled ! Of course it is unlawful; but it is done. Every- 

 where the ewes are killed just as rapidly as the rams, and the 

 mothers of the species are vanishing. And this in Wyoming, 

 Montana, Idaho and Washington, in 1914! 



That these four states should still continue to permit sheep- 

 slaughter is outrageous. Their answer is that 'the sports- 

 men won't stand for stopping it altogether." I will add: 

 and the great mass of the people of those states are too crim- 

 inally indifferent to take a hand in the matter, and do their 

 duty regardless of the men of blood. 



The seed stock of big-horn sheep now alive in the United 

 States aggregates a pitifully small number. After twenty- 

 five years of unbroken protection in Colorado, Dillon Wallace 

 estimates, after an investigation on the ground, that the 

 state possesses perhaps thirty -five hundred head. He credits 

 Montana and Wyoming with five hundred each — which I 

 think is far too liberal a number. I do not believe that either 

 of those states contains more than one hundred unprotected 

 sheep, at the very utmost limit. If there are more, where are 

 they? 



In the Yellowstone Park there are two hundred and ten 

 head, safe and sound, and slowly increasing. I cannot under- 

 stand why they have not increased more rapidly than they 

 have. In Glacier Park, now under permanent protection, three 

 guides on Lake McDonald, in 1910, estimated the number of 

 sheep at seven hundred. Idaho has in her rugged Bitter Root 

 and Clearwater Mountains and elsewhere, a remnant of pos- 



