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: MONTANA FISH AND GAME COMMISSION 21 i 



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More Fish and Game 



By THOMAS N. MARLOWE, Chairman, 

 Montana Fish and Game Commission. 



To the sportsmen of Montana nature has been kind indeed. Those 

 who came liere a score or more years ago, found a veritable sports- 

 men's paradise. In tliose days the lordly elk roamed supreme in our 

 forests. Deer were so plentiful the legal limit was 6 of either sex. 

 God only knows the illegal limit. Upon our roclty cliffs the mountain 

 goat and big horn sheep were on every hand. Black, brown and 

 grizzly bear, were in goodly numbers. Grouse of every variety were 

 found in profusion on our wooded hillsides and creek bottoms, with 

 thousands of sagehens and prairie chickens on the foothills and 

 prairies. Ducks of all kinds and the old Canadian Honker filled our 

 lakes, ponds and pot holes, and in our crystal lakes and sparkling 

 streams the gamy trout rose eagerly to take the tempting lure of the 

 angler. 



A game warden who tried to protect the fish and game in those 

 days was the most despised person on earth. The possibility of this 

 vast resource having any particular economic value was never thought 

 of. Its value, if any, was only sentimental. No one seemed to want 

 the fish and game protected. Game wardens themselves were imbued 

 with this idea and very few did anything at all toward protecting it. 

 The supply was so plentiful, no one dreamed it would even diminish, 

 let alone disappear. We had not learned the lesson we should have 

 learned from the extermination of the wild pigeon, the buffalo and 

 the antelope. The fact that fish and game was so plentiful, so easy to 

 take, was possibly the very reason why we were so wasteful. But 

 wasteful we were, and to a shameful degree. 



Much fish and game were taken in those days, not so much be- 

 cause it was needed, but simply for a seemingly ever-present desire 

 to kill and to detsroy. Nor have we later-day sportsmen improved the 

 situation to any great extent. There is a broad streak of vandalism in 

 our race, which simply defies competition and instead of taming with 

 the times, we are each year growing more and more efficiently fierce 

 in the taking of fish and game, with our tempting lures and tackles, 

 our high powered rifles, our shotguns of pump and automatic con- 

 struction. 



Not only this, but in the last 10 or 15 years, there has come into 

 common use an agency of wild life destruction which to my mind is 

 more deadly than the gun of the hunter or the tackle of the fisherman. 

 As we know, the automobile has placed almost every fishing water 

 and hunting ground at the very back door of that ever increasing 

 army of hunters and fishermen. On this account, the fisherman and 

 hunter of today put in more days and more hours per day hunting 

 and fishing than heretofore. His car enables him within a few hours to 

 reach places heretofore inaccessible. These heretofore inaccessible 

 places formerly acted as fish and game preserves and sanctuaries, so 

 to speak, and the overflow from them stocked up the accessible hunting 

 and fishing grounds. But now, on account of the auto, there are no 

 inaccessible places. The inaccessible have become the hunting and 

 fishing grounds of today and we have no overflow from any source. 



