324 OUR FEDERAL LANDS 



camp and hotel centres along the road circuit in Yel- 

 lowstone have lost their primitive quality. But else- 

 where in Yosemite National Park's eleven hundred 

 and twenty-five square miles and Yellowstone Na- 

 tional Park's thirty-three hundred and forty-eight 

 square miles primitive conditions are appreciably un- 

 disturbed. We are fortunate that the desire and 

 habit of the motorist make this condition possible. 



Loss of the balance of life in National Parks, 

 then, is not due to trampling of vegetation by tourist 

 throngs, as many suppose, but to destruction of 

 birds and animals during the Great Slaughter be- 

 fore parks were created or safe-guarding laws 

 passed, from which there has been little recovery, 

 and to the policy since of killing off predatory beasts 

 in protection of the gentler creatures which are more 

 easily seen by visitors. This loss can never be re- 

 paired, and to this extent National Park conservation 

 fails in practise. Once broken, the life circuit can- 

 not be restored. 



Yellowstone elk, also, have produced an artifi- 

 cial condition of some magnitude. The enormous 

 numbers in both northern and southern herds, once 

 greatly in excess of their present twenty thousand 

 each, compelled originally a very large winter feed- 

 ing area outside park limits. Encroachments of cat- 

 tle men and ranchers on this precipitated years of 

 more or less bitter contentions of several sorts, out 

 of which at last sanity and co-operation is following 

 upon greater knowledge. Solution, however, will 



