230 THE PRESENT AND FUTURE 
the largest and best breeding bulls of the Mirimachi country, 
lest it finally reduce the size and antlers of the moose of that 
region; but only the future can tell us just what the result 
of this practice will be. 
The Biological Survey of the Department of Agriculture 
has by legal proclamation converted the whole of the Kenai 
Peninsula, in Alaska, into a moose preserve. This will save 
Alces gigas, the giant moose of Alaska, from extermination; 
and New Brunswick and the Minnesota preserve will save 
Alces americanus. But in the northwest we can positively 
depend upon it that eventually, wherever the moose may 
legally be hunted and killed by any Tom, Dick or Harry 
who can afford a twenty-dollar rifle and a license, the moose 
will surely disappear. 
The moose laws of Alaska are strict—toward sportsmen, 
only! The miners, “prospectors” and Indians may kill as 
many as they please, “for food purposes.” This opens the 
door to a great amount of unfair slaughter. Any coffee- 
cooler can put a pan and pick into his hunting-outfit, go out 
after moose, and call himself a “prospector.” 
I grant that the real prospector, who is looking for ores 
and minerals with an intelligent eye, and knows what he is 
doing, should have special privileges on game to keep him 
from starving. The settled miner, however, is in a different 
class. No miner should ask the privilege of living on wild 
game, any more than should the farmer, the steamboat man, 
the railway laborer or the soldier in an army post. The 
Indian should have no game advantages whatever over a 
white man. He does not own the game of a region any more 
