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 killed! 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- 
