448 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



[Dec. 26, 1889. 



remember, were known as Saxony merinoes," a small- 

 boned, fine-wooled race, which were too tender for our 

 climate, and which I have seen die of the " foot rot " by 

 the thousand. They have been sent to the West, where in 

 Michigan and Iowa' their frames have grown larger and 

 their fleeces longer. And the sons of the farmers have 

 followed the sheep. 



I do not agree with the common statement that the 

 farmers' sons have gone to the cities. It has been the 

 sons of the village minister and lawyer, the doctor, the 

 tavern keeper, and the country merchant, who have made 

 the exodus to the large towns. The farmers' sons have 

 stuck well by the soil, and have gone where it is less 

 rocky and more fertile. I have often talked with my 

 farmer friends about restoring the sheep husbandry by 

 the introduction of the coarser-wooled and more hardy 

 Cheviot sheep, which would furnish good mutton as well 

 as wool, for the flesh of these grassy- wooled " Saxonies " 

 was too rank to be agreeable and too small to be profit- 

 able; but they pronounce my notion impracticable, and 

 say the pastures are worn out. As the lands lie now they 

 would hardly give a comfortable living to a family of 

 skunks, much less of Scandinavians ! 



Here and there are patches where long tongues of sap- 

 ling pines or white birches are stretching out into them; 

 but the greater part of them are given up to sweet fern, 

 hardback and thistles. The rocky ribs stick out in all 

 directions through the thin soil, in which burning and 

 grazing seem to have destroyed all the seeds and sprouts 

 of the trees. The birches and maples spring up along the 

 stone walls by the roadside, mingled with sumachs and 

 blackberries, and here and there an oak, a butternut or 

 an apple gives evidence of the droppings of some wan- 

 dering squirrel or jay. 



It seems to me that the great need, not only of New 

 England, but of the whole of the Northern States to-day, 

 is a knowledge of some system of judicious forestry. 

 Coal is in some part taking the place of wood for fuel, 

 but the old hardwoods are being constantly used up for 

 railway ties, furniture, baskets, bobbins, etc., etc., and 

 are now being largely drawn upon for wainscoting and 

 floors, to take the place of the pine, which is practically 

 gone. I trust I have not wearied your readers, but as I 

 look from my window on the range of hills once covered 

 with old forest, now bare and rocky, or slowly starting 

 into a fresh growth, which I shall never live to see 

 developed, I cannot help being somewhat prolix on the 

 question, and hope that I may find some to sympathize 

 with me. 



Although, as I have said, never intended by nature for 

 an agricultural region, New Hampshire is becoming year 

 by year more and more the great sanitarium for the 

 northeastern seaboard States. 



Thousands of visitors from Boston, New York and 

 Philadelphia fill her hillsides and valleys every summer 

 in search of health and recreation; and the number stead- 

 ily increases. Restore her forests and you restore her 

 fisheries, and the $3,000, which is the extreme that the 

 State has ever spent in any year for her Fish Commission, 

 is repaid an hundred fold annually by the anglers who 

 visit her waters. If New Hampshire cannot produce 

 beef and wheat to compete with the prairies of the "West, 

 she can devote her energies to raising strong and healthy 

 men and women, and the State which has furnished 

 Lewis Cass to Michigan, John A. Dix to New York, Jere- 

 miah Mason and John Sullivan to Massachusetts, and 

 Daniel Webster to the Union, need not be ashamed of her 

 products. VoN 



THE WHITE GOAT IN CAPTIVITY. 



BY JOHN FANNIN AND GEO. BIRD GRINNELL. 



THE fact that Mazama montana produces a wool 

 which may be valuable lends an added interest to 

 the question of its possible domestication. The following 

 paragraphs include all the cases known to the writer's in 

 which individuals of this species have been held in cap- 

 tivity. We should be gratified to learn of other instances 

 of this kind, and will gladly receive communications on 

 this subject, which should be addressed to the office of 

 the Forest and Stream. 



Some time about the 15th of May, 1881, an Indian 

 came to my house, at Burrard Inlet, with the request 

 that I would accompany him to his canoe and look at a 

 tenctss mowitch (small animal) which he wanted to sell 

 me. I followed the old fellow down to the water, and 

 stood by while he drew the thing out from the folds of 

 an old blanket and stood it on the beach. A little bullet- 

 shaped head surmounted by a pair of tiny, sharp-pointed 

 ears, a mere handful of a body propped up on four long 

 and clumsy-looking legs, it was certainly the most un- 

 gainly animal I had ever seen. Its coat was of pure 

 white wool, very short and slightly curly, and with very 

 little appearance of hair except in the beard, which just 

 showed itself beneath the lower jaw. There was no 

 sign of horns, although slight protuberances could be felt 

 beneath the skin where these would come. It was a male 

 and probably not over a week old, and the Indian had 

 run it down on the side of a mountain after shooting its 

 mother. I gave the Indian his price, %%, and, picking 

 the little waif up in my arms, carried it to the house. 



For two weeks I fed it on cow's milk weakened with 

 water, feeding it about every hour and allowing it only a 

 very little milk at a time. Then for a day or two I added 

 a little oatmeal to the milk, and before long almost any- 

 thing of a vegetable nature was eagerly gobbled up by 

 it. It appeared to be always hungry, but strange to say 

 it would allow no one to feed it but myself. It soon be- 

 came a little troublesome , though, for, no matter where I 

 went, the goat followed at my heels like a dog. At meal 

 tim a s it would accompany me to the. hotel, and repose at 

 my feet under the table. It would follow me into the 

 woods, on my short trips after grouse, and the report of 

 my gun had little or no effect on it. If I climbed up on 

 a stump and sat down for a smoke, the goat would climb 

 up too and sit down on its haunches by my side, and with 

 its nose straight out in front gazing solemnlv into the 

 gloom of the deep forest, so long as I kept quiet it woidd 

 remain motionless. The chirrup of a squirrel or twitter 

 of a bird failed to attract its attention in the slightest 

 degree, but if I made the least motion to get down, it 

 was up at once and ready for a spring. 



It had a great passion for high places, which I imagine 

 is born with the animal. When I first got it, I made a 

 bed in one corner of the shed by filling a low box with 

 clean, soft hay, the goat standing by watching the oper- 

 ation. When it was finished I picked him up and put 

 him on the hay, pulling his legs from under him and mak- 

 ing him lie down; in fact giving him t£> understand that 

 that was to be his bed. But as soon as I took my hands 

 off him he jumped out of the box. At the further end of 

 the shed, which was about fifteen feet long, stood a pile 

 of fir bark, six feet high, corded up in the usual way of 

 cording firewood. When he jumped out of the box he 

 walked over to this pile and stood for a moment looking 

 up at the top of it. Then he backed away from it till 

 within a few feet of where I stood, and taking a run 

 climbed up that bark like a eat, and lying down on the 

 top looked at me as much as to say, "This is the way we 

 do in the mountains." From then till the day he died his 

 bed was always on the top of that bark. 



He was an early riser, and long before my usual time 

 of getting up he would rout me out by butting against the 

 door. There were two domestic animals it could not bear 

 t he sight of — a cow and a dog. But while it would al- 

 most break its neck in its endeavors to get away from the 

 former, the appearance of the latter aroused all the com- 

 bativeness of its nature. One day a gentleman came 

 into my shop accompanied by a setter dog, when the goat 

 immediately assumed a belligerent attitude, walking 

 around the room Stiff-legged, his little hoofs coining down 

 on the floor with a loud tap at every step. Finally he 

 halted at a respectful distance from the dog, and with 

 his head lowered, bracing himself for a last effort, he 

 seemed to be awaiting, or about to begin, an attack. The 

 dog surveyed the little creature for a moment, and then, 

 probably thinking it scarcely worth bothering with, lay 

 down on the floor and went to sleep. As the dog re- 

 mained motionless, the goat relaxed its rigid attitude 

 and moved cautiously nearer, until, by stretching its 

 neck, it brought its nose within an inch of that of the 

 dog. Just then a fly disturbed the dog's slumbers, and 

 in bringing up its paw to brush away the insect, it hit the 

 goat a sharp tap on the nose. Like the Tecoil of a steel 

 spring, quick as a flash, the goat sprang into the air, and 

 in coming down and trying to alight as far away from 

 the dog as possible, he got tangled up in the legs of a 

 wooden chair, which, in his hurry to get out of the house, 

 he carried off with him. When he shook himself clear 

 of the chair and looked round and found that the house 

 had not fallen and that the dog was perfectly quiet, he 

 put on a look of utter disgust and skulked off into a 

 corner of the yard, where he lay down in a clump of 

 weeds and remained out of sight till the dog was clear of 

 the premises. 



As a general rule he was quiet, in fact mopish ; but 

 when he did break out in a playful mood, some of his 

 tricks were simply ludicrous. One day I was sitting 

 with a friend in front of my house, when the goat, which 

 had been cutting up pranks, evidently for our amuse- 

 ment, came and lay down at my feet. The cutting for 

 the stage road, which ran past the house about 50ft. 

 away, had left a steep bank about 5 or 6ft. high; that is, 

 the road was so much lower than the plot on which we 

 were sitting. Presently the goat got up, and walking 

 over to the edge of this bank, stood looking down this 

 miniature precipice to the road. Suddenly he sprang 

 into the air and pitched headforemost down the bank. I 

 ran across, expecting to find the little brute with its neck 

 broken, instead of which he was standing at the bottom 

 shaking the sand out of his eyes and nostrils. When he 

 got through he climbed up the bank, and turning round, 

 performed the same act again, turning a complete sum- 

 mersault on the way down. He did this about half a 

 dozen times, occasionally throwing himself on his side 

 and rolling down, covering himself from head to tail 

 with dirt and sand. 



I allowed him the full liberty of the house, in fact I 

 could not control him, and it was this unlimited freedom 

 that cost him his life. He was always with me in my 

 work shop, and would always jump up on my bench and 

 stand sagely watching every movement I made. He had a 

 great habit of picking up and chewing anything he came 

 across, and one day he did this with one of my poisoned 

 bh-d skins. He had taken the skin outside the house, 

 and the first I knew about it was when the little fellow 

 came running through the door toward me, and fell 

 before he quite reached me. I suspected what was the 

 matter, and lifting him up poured some sweet oil down 

 his throat, but he died in about half an hour. 



His horns at this time were about one inch long, and 

 considering that the horns of some young males in Sep- 

 tember are from four to five inches long, it is more than 

 probable that these appendages are of rapid growth the 

 first year. J. F. 



Unusual as is the white goat, and few as are the hunters 

 who have killed it, there are yet known many instances of 

 its having been captured and kept alive in a state of semi- 

 domestication. The results of our investigations into 

 this matter have somewhat surprised us. and show that 

 with ordinary care there is no reason why this species, 

 if captured young and permitted to remain in its native 

 country, may not be reared in captivity and become as 

 tame as any domestic animal. 



It has been reported that a number of years ago — the 

 dates vary from 1869 to 1876— several white goats were 

 caught alive in the mountains somewhere near Deerlodge, 

 Montana, and we have seen a carte cle visite photograph 

 of what appears to be a large male, which is said to have 

 been of one of these animals. Of these individuals we 

 have been able to obtain no detailed account. More re- 

 cent, and more to the purpose, is the narrative of the cap- 

 ture in 1879, near what is now Phillipsburgh, Montana, of 

 eight individuals of this species, the details of which 

 were related to us by Mr. David Dobson, one of the three 

 men who took part in the hunt. David Dobson, bis 

 brother Thomas and a man named Palmer made up the 

 party, and the ground where they captured the goats 

 was the nearly flat top of a rock-covered mountain 

 about 20 miles from the head of the Bighole, near where 

 Phillipsburgh now is. Above the general level of the 

 mountaintop rose, here and there, isolated pinnacles of 

 rock. This flat mountaintop was the home of a band of 

 about thirty goats. They had been discovered by the 

 men , who supposed that live specimens of Mazama could 

 be sold for large sums of money. Having provided them- 

 selves with a number of dogs, one or two of which had 

 been trained to this chase, they started out about June 10, 



1879. Proceeding with their horses as far up the moun- 

 tain as convenient, they camped, and the next morning- 

 ascended the rocks on foot, taking with them their dogs 

 and ropes. The goats, conspicuous by their whiteness 

 against the gray rocks, were soon discovered. They were 

 quite unsuspicious, and permitted a near approach 

 When they began to move off, the men loosed the dogs, 

 which soon drove a part of the band up on to a rocky 

 pinnacle, where they stood at bay, defending them- 

 selves by fierce thrusts of their sharp horns at the dogs. 

 They paid little heed to the men, who were able to ad- 

 vance so close to them as to throw the noose of a rope 

 over the head of one of them. This having been done, 

 the loop of a second rope was slipped over the first one 

 and run up close to the animal, when it was dragged 

 from its perch. Two men, one on either side of it, each 

 holding a rope, could so far control the creature as to 

 keep it from reaching either of them. In this way they 

 caught in three trips up the mountain eight goats. At 

 each visit, the goats were wilder than they had been the 

 time befoie, and after they were chased the third time, 

 they deserted the mountain, and were seen on it no more! 



The animals when first caught resisted fiercely and 

 made vigorous efforts to attack their captors. So vio- 

 lent were their struggles that several of them were 

 seriously injured and afterward died from this cause. 

 They were necessarily handled roughly, for they would 

 not lead, and the men were obliged to throw them down, 

 tie them and then carry them on a litter down the moun- 

 tain to a point where a horse could come. Here they 

 were transferred to a travois, and so transported to the 

 camp, where they were picketed out. Of these animals 

 four were young and four were adults; there were three 

 males and five females. The young ones soon became 

 tame, but the old were always savage and morose. All 

 of the latter died within a few days, either from injuries 

 received at the time of their capture or from hurting 

 themselves by dashing about when picketed. One of 

 the young ones died, probably from having been given 

 some molasses to eat. 



Mr. Dobson stated that of the three survivors one was 

 given to the owners of the trained dogs, in return for the 

 use of the latter; one was pledged for provisions, and 

 one was left at a ranch to be cared for, and is supposed 

 to have died. The subsequent history of these animals is 

 not known, but it is possible that one or more of them 

 may be identical with other captive goats to be men- 

 tioned later — those, owned by Mr. Dickson. 



Nearly ten years ago our friend, J. C. Hughes, told us 

 of having seen, some 1 ears before, at Yale, B. C., two 

 young goats which had been captured and brought into 

 the town by some Indians. He stated to me as an ex- 

 ample of the jumping and balancing powers of these 

 animals, that if put in an empty barrel these little things 

 would jump out of it, and balance themselves on the 

 chine of the barrel. 



Captain Chas. E. Bendire, about the year 1876, in 

 Idaho, between the towns of Rocky Bar and Atalanta, in 

 Alturas county, heard of three tame white goats. These 

 belonged to a German citizen of the former place, were 

 allowed full liberty, and were often seen on the stage 

 road between these two points. We have tried to obtain 

 some detailed information about these specimens, but so 

 far without success. 



Through the kindness of Mr. Howard Rogers, of Fern- 

 dale, Washington, we are able to give an account of a 

 tame white goat received by him from the Rev. John A. 

 Teniiant, an early settler of Washington Territory, who 

 writing to Mr. Rogers about this individual, says: 



"I saw the goat on the Columbia River, at the mouth 

 of the Wenatchie, in the winter of 1871-72, I think in 

 December, 1871. It was caught by an Indian hunter in 

 the Cascade Mountains, near the headwaters of the 

 Wenatchie, where they are quite abundant. It was very 

 small when taken, and was given to a trader living at 

 Wenatchie, and raised by him. It was a male and less 

 than a year old, but seemed nearly grown. It ran around 

 the house and was a great nuisance, as it could not be 

 kept out of the house, but would hide itself under beds 

 or wherever it could, and would be found in the morn- 

 ing sleeping on the cook stove. It would go out and eat 

 hay with the cattle, and was most pugnaciously inclined, 

 and woe to the cow that dared provoke its wrath, as it 

 would follow her for half a day. butting her at every 

 opportunity. Like the true goat it was omnivorous, and 

 this caused its death, as it found a pair of old buckskin 

 pants and devoured the same, which was the cause of 

 its untimely decease shortly after I saw it. From what I 

 saw of it I think there would be no difficulty in domesti- 

 cating the animal if taken young." 



There is said to have been, about twel ve or fifteen years 

 ago, a white goat on exhibition at Woodward's Gardens, 

 in San Francisco, Cal. We have been unable to learn 

 any details of the history of this specimen, but through 

 the kindness of Mr. F. Gruber we are given to under- 

 stand that it reached the gardens in bad health and lived 

 but a very short time. We have an impression that it 

 came from British Columbia. Its mounted skin is at 

 present on exhibition at the gardens. 



In the year 1888 we heard from Mr. Joseph Kipp, Indian 

 trader at the Blackfeet Agency in northern Montana, of 

 some domesticated goats at one time owned by a resident 

 of Silver Bow or Butte, Montana. His information about 

 these animals came from Mr. James Ross. It was stated 

 that they were perfectly tame and roamed at liberty over 

 the country. Usually they were docile, playful and 

 good-natured, but at times they would be seized with 

 sudden fits of anger and would attack calves and dogs, 

 inflicting severe and often fatal wounds with their sharp 

 horns. So troublesome did they become in this way, 

 and so expensive to their owner, that he had brass knobs 

 put on their horns to protect the animals which they at- 

 tacked. 



Soon after hearing of these goats we wrote to Mr. 

 Ross on the subject and received a reply stating that 

 the owner of the goats referred to by Mr. Kipp was Frank 

 Dickson, of Butte City. Mr. Ross says, further: "When 

 I left Butte City, four years ago, he had three of these 

 animals. Whether they bred or not I am not able to 

 answer. He (Dickson) was living close to the timber 

 and allowed the goats perfect freedom to go where they 

 pleased. I myself have seen them in the timber, several 

 miles away from home, but they were always sure to be at 

 home by sunset. They were captured when about six weeks 

 old, in the Cable Mountains, about eighteen miles from 

 the present city of Anaconda, or about thirty-six miles 

 from Butte." Mr. Ross further said that he would com- 



