THE WAPITI 



257 



colonial days so little heed was paid by writers to the 

 teeming myriads of game that it is difficult to trace the 

 wapiti's distribution in the Atlantic coast region. It was 

 certainly killed out of the Adirondacks long before the 

 period when the backwoodsmen were settling the val- 

 leys of the Alleghany Mountains; there they found the 

 elk abundant, and the stately creatures roamed in great 

 bands over Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana 

 when the first settlers made their way into what are now 

 these States, at the outbreak of the Revolution. These 

 first settlers were all hunters, and they followed the wapiti 

 (or, as they always called it, the elk) with peculiar eager- 

 ness. In consequence its numbers were soon greatly 

 thinned, and about the beginning of the present century 

 it disappeared from that portion of its former range lying 

 south of the Great Lakes and between the Alleghanies 

 and the Mississippi. In the northern Alleghanies it held 

 its own much longer, the last individual of which I have 

 been able to get record having been killed in Pennsyl- 

 vania in 1869. In the forests of northern Wisconsin, 

 northern Michigan, and Minnesota wapiti existed still 

 longer, and a very few individuals may still be found. 

 A few are left in Manitoba. When Lewis and Clark and 

 Pike became the pioneers among the explorers, army of- 

 ficers, hunters, and trappers who won for our people the 

 great West, they found countless herds of wapiti through- 

 out the high plains country from the Mississippi River 

 to the Rocky Mountains. Throughout this region it was 

 exterminated almost as rapidly as the bison, and by the 

 early eighties there only remained a few scattered indi- 



