ANTELOPE 243 



One man who had lived at Snelling all his life (since about 1880) said that 

 the antelope had all gone before he became old enough to remember; but 

 that his father, who had resided at the place before 1880, had told him that 

 there used to be numbers of the animals there. 



When Mr. Dixon visited the vicinity of Mono Lake in 1916 he was told 

 that prior to 1910 one lone antelope had frequented the flat near the 

 railroad along the eastern side of Mono Lake; but nothing had been seen 

 of the animal after that year. 



Sierra Nevada Mountain Sheep. Ovis canadensis sierrae Grinnell 



Mountain Sheep or Bighorns originally inhabited the higher slopes and 

 ridges of the Yosemite region in numbers. To the south of the Yosemite 

 section, in the vicinity of Mammoth Pass and thence south to the neighbor- 

 hood of Mount Whitney, these animals still exist in moderate numbers, 

 but elsewhere in the Sierra Nevada they are things of the past. The rush 

 of white men to the mines of Tioga and Mammoth doubtless resulted in 

 many mountain sheep being killed for food; and later, when domestic 

 sheep were run into the mountains, it is known that the herders levied toll 

 on all the wild game to the limit of their hunting equipment; so we may 

 believe that they had a hand in the reduction of the native sheep. Some 

 of the killing of mountain sheep is to be laid to persons hunting for sport, 

 but such killing was probably a minor factor in their reduction in the 

 Yosemite region. Whatever the several agencies were, the fact remains 

 that mountain sheep, once well represented in the mountains of the 

 Yosemite region, are now entirely gone, with only faint prospect for 

 return, by gradual reinvasion from the more southern parts of the Sierra 

 Nevada or by introduction. 



John Muir in his Mountains of California (1894, pp. 308-324) tells 

 of meeting with a flock of 25 or so mountain sheep on the headwaters of 

 the San Joaquin River near Mounts Emerson and Humphrey, in the 

 autumn of 1873. He also tells of finding a weather-whitened skull on the 

 slopes of Mount Ritter. The only reference by him to wild sheep in the 

 Yosemite region proper is to a band of three "discovered snow-bound in 

 Bloody Caiion a few years" previously to 1874 and "killed with an ax 

 by mountaineers, who chanced to be crossing the range in winter." 



One of the men who served us as packer in 1915, Mr. George Smith, 

 told a member of our party that he saw mountain sheep in the summers 

 of 1876 to 1878 on the eastern slope of Sonora Pass, which is at the junction 

 of Alpine, Mono, and Tuolumne counties. During each one of these years 

 he would see about a dozen sheep. This location is some miles north of 

 the present boundary of the Park. Jim Bartel, a resident of Yosemite 



