POREST AND STREAM. 
168 
1 he Wood Buffalo!Past and Present. 
The great interest which attaches to the almost extinct 
buffalo renders anything definite that may be published 
about it worth noting. 
Except for a small number of animals now protected in 
the Yellowstone Park, the only wild buffalo on the conti- 
nent are the wood buffalo, or bison, which still exist in 
western Canada. These buffalo — quite different in habit 
from their brothers of the plains — formerly existed in the 
timbered country of Canada from the Athabasca north as 
far as Great Slave Lake. But within the past century 
their numbers have been extraordinarily reduced, and the 
area over which they range is so great, that we know and 
can know little that is definite as to their numbers. Of 
late years they have been guessed at as numbering any- 
where from 1,500 to 100; but since they range over an 
area of perhaps 15,000 square miles between Peace River 
and the Great Slave Lake and from Slave River westward 
to the foothills of the mountains, these estimates are little 
more than guesswork. 
Mr. Warburton Pike and -Mr. Caspar Whitney have 
both written of these animals, but saw little or nothing of 
them. Much more recently an official of the Hudson's 
Bay Company endeavored to secure information from 
natives along the McKenzie River and the streams which 
form it, taking care, as far as he could, not to count the 
;Same buffalo twice. His conclusions were that the num- 
iber of buffalo left alive at that time were more than 500. 
In the London Field last summer appeared an interest- 
»ng account of the country in which the buffalo range, 
•wgh an estimate of their numbers, which, however, is not 
awftch more valuable than others which, went before it. 
What is said of the range, present and past of this sub- 
spacies is, however, very well worth reading. 
It wiirbe remembered that a few years ago Mr. S. N. 
Rhoads described this subspecies under the name of Bison 
americanus athabasccs. No skulls of this form, so far as 
we recall, had previously been examined. Mr. Rhoads' 
specimen came from the Rocky Mountains west of Great 
Slave Lake. It ^ larger and with more slender horns, 
than the plains form, and perhaps is thus nearer to the 
European bison, though we know too little of the 
northern form to draw conclusions about it. The writer 
says : ] 
"The whole interior of the country is unmapped and 
unexplored, and is traversed only in the winter time by a 
few roving bands of Indians. In the summer-time these 
Indians collect at the different Hudson's Bay posts, Forts 
Chipewyan, Smith and Resolution, getting a little- tem- 
porary employment from the fur traders as boatmen and 
voyagers, or in making hay, and eking out a miserable 
existence on what fish they can catch in the rivers. A few 
of them build log houses and raise some vegetables, but 
the majority are too lazy even to do this, and live in cot- 
ton tents and flimsy canvas lodges that have almost en- 
tirely replaced the more substantial ones of deer skin. 
Those who trade at Smith and Resolution belong to the 
great Chipewyan tribe, and are a bad lot, particularly the 
younger generation. A few Crees find their way into 
,the country from the south, and on the west is the fast- 
wanishing tribe of Beavers. To the east, across the Slave 
iRiver, is the country of the Caribou Eaters, another 
fcranch of the Chipewyan tribe, speaking a slightly dif- 
ierent dialect, who get their name from living on the cari- 
Ibou of the barren lands. 
"A few years ago the wood buffalo were found over a 
very much larger area than at present, for we hear of 
them having been killed as far west as Fort St. John 
and Fort Liard, along the foothills of the Rocky Moun- 
tains, eastward across the Slave and Athabasca rivers, 
"and southward toward the height of land. That they were 
very rare as far northwest as Fort Liard is shown by the 
fact that in 1866, when the tracks of one bull were seen 
by the Indians about twenty miles north of the post, they 
did not know what it was, and were afraid to shoot it, 
until a man from the south came to the place and went 
out and shot it. There is a general opinion that they never 
went further north than Great Slave Lake; but among 
the records of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Simp- 
son there is an item which apnears in the journal for the 
year 1835, showing that during the winter six wood buf- 
falo were killed by the fort hunters on the east side of 
the Mackenzie River, near Marten Lake, and nearly 100 
miles north of the outlet to Great Slave Lake. But this 
is the only case on record, and it was probably a herd that 
strayed much further north than usual. Ten or twelve 
years ago there was a small band of a dozen or twenty 
to be found south of the Peace River, near Fort McMur- 
ray; but recently they have not been heard of, and have 
probably been killed off, and at present the only place that 
one does find them is in the country north of the Peace 
River and south of Great Slave Lake, betvveen the Slave 
River and the Caribou Mountains, and particularly on the 
Salt Plain near the brine springs. 
"Several people have attempted to make an estimate of 
the number of buffalo in this region, and among them 
Caspar Whitney, who makes their number to be about 
400. This is rather a difficult thing to do, as they are not 
collected together in one large herd, but are scattered over 
the whole area in small bands, of from ten to twenty in a 
band. Pike reports seeing eight in one band, while the 
largest band that we came in contact with contained about 
twelve. Estimates as to their numbers obtained from the 
natives who hunt in this country varied all the way from 
eighty up to 400. The mean of these two extremes is 
240, and this, I should 'judge, would be the outside limit. 
It is said, too, that an unusually large proportion of these 
are old bulls. 
"Though it is now nearly seven years since the killing 
of the wood buffalo was prohibited by the Dominion 
Government, and four years since the last one was known 
to have been shot, there does not seem to be any marked 
increase in their numbers. But perhaps it may be too 
^oon to notice it. The natives account for this by the 
number of large timber wolves that frequent the same 
district, and kill the young ones in the early spring before 
they are strong enough to take care of themselves. The 
price paid by the fur traders for their skins is in itself 
not a sufficient inducement for the Indians to go in largely 
for trapping wolves, particularly as the country still 
abounds in many of the more valuable fur-bearing ani- 
mals, such as beaver and marten, and unless some effort 
is made to exterminate them, or even keep down their 
numbers,, the wolves will increase at the expense of the 
buffalo. That the wood buffalo were once very much 
more numerous than at present may be inferred froin the 
number of old tracks and wallows that are seen on the 
ridges and some of the more open places; and if we go 
back to the time of the, discovery of Great Slave Lake, in 
December, 1771, wc see that at that time Samuel Hearne 
reports the buffalo in hundreds near where Fort Resolu- 
tion now stands at the mouth of the Slave River, and 
later explorers confirm the same report. The same indis- 
criminate slaughter was never practiced among the wood 
buffalo hy the Indians and others as among the buffalo of 
the prairies, as, because living in a wooded country, they 
had to be hunted on foot. They are not very difficult to 
hunt, but the hunter has not the chance of firing more 
than three or four shots before the band is out of sight. 
It is said that about forty years ago, some time in the 
sixties, there came a heavy fall of rain in the middle of 
the winter, completely saturating the snow. When this 
again froze a thick icy crust was formed, so that the 
buffalo were unable to paw it away to get food, and in at- 
tempting to do so the tendons of their forefeet were cut, 
As a result, hundreds of them died of starvation. This 
story is corroborated by the officers of the Hudson's Bay 
Company, and appears in the journals of some of their 
posts, so that it must have some foundation, and the fact 
would account for the disappearance of some, though not 
all, of the animals. . . 
"The question whether they are a distinct species from 
the prairie buffalO' has often been raised; but they are un- 
questionably the same, and, though the wood buffalo 
stands perhaps four inches higher, and is proportionately 
heavier, the size of one is merely the result of his environ- 
ment. They had probably wandered northward into the 
Peace River Valley from the prairie to the south, and, 
finding the winters not severe enough to drive them 
southward again, they remained there. The climate of 
this country is not any severer than that of the prairies 
to the south, and, living in a fairly well wooded region, 
are not exposed to the fierce blizzards that sometimes 
rage over the open or sparsely timbered districts of 
Alberta, Assiniboia and Manitoba. This, together with 
some difference in the nature and quality of their food, 
has resulted in the production of a larger animal. It does 
not follow, however, that the same conditions would pro- 
duce similar results in al} the animals found in this coun- 
try. Moose and bear, which are very numerous, are no 
larger than those found elsewhere through Canada; but 
then the cases are not parallel, for neither of these two 
animals inhabit a prairie country as the buffalo did. A 
parallel case would be that of the wolves. Wolves living 
in a wooded country are always larger than the prairie 
wolves. 
"The country occupied by the wood buft'alo is interest- 
ing in many respects, though the topography is very 
simple. Going westward from the Slave River, the land 
rises in a series of low, flat-topped escarpments composed 
of limestone, culminating eventually in the Caribou Moun- 
tains at a height of 2,000 feet at something over 100 miles 
from the river. Lakes are few, and the few small creeks 
and streams flowing northward to Great Slave Lake, or 
south to the Peace River, meander in an exasperatingly 
crooked manner through their wide shallow valleys, only 
broken here and there by shallow rapids, or less fre- 
quentl^' plunging in waterfalls over the face of an escarp- 
ment. One of the most interesting of these waterfalls is 
that on the Little Buffalo River. At the time of my visit 
in August, the volume of water in the river was not great. 
The drop is only about 50 feet, but the peculiar thing is 
that one can actually cross to the opposite side of the 
river by walking underneath the falls ; not, however, with- 
out getting wet from the spray. The cause of this is that 
the upper strata of limestone are harder and more re- 
sistant than the lower, and consequently the upper over- 
hang. Below the falls is a deep circular basin and a 
narrow gorge, cut to a depth of 100 feet or more in the 
solid rock, and having almost vertical walls. The gorge 
is seven miles in length, and marks the distance the falls 
have retreated from the face of the escarpment since the 
genesis of that part of the river. The whole thing is 
representative of the Niagara Falls and gorge in minia- 
ture. The Big Buffalo and Hay rivers to the west both 
flow over this same escarpment, and with exactly similar 
results of falls with gorges below them. 
"The greater part of the country is densely wooded, 
with the usual northern forest of spruce, poplar, tamarac 
and birch. The small openings which are dignified by the 
name of prairies are rather scattered, and are usually only 
200 or 300 yards in length ; but it is on these that one is 
very likely to run across the buffalo. The Salt Plain, 
which covers an area of perhaps seventy-five square miles, 
and which gets its name from having several brine springs 
situated on it, is not an unbroken stretch of prairie land, 
but is dotted here and there with clumps or groves of 
poplar. Part of it is covered with a luxuriant growth of 
grasses and different flowering plants, and looks very 
beautiful when these are in bloom, and part is barren and 
alkaline. It lies only a few miles west of the Slave River, 
and a few years ago was the favorite feeding ground of 
the buffalo, who used to come to lick the salt. Bear and 
moose still frequent the neighborhood of the brine springs^ 
but the buffalo have gone further inland, and little trace 
of them is left but a few bleached skulls. 
"One need have no difficulty at all in getting game any- 
where, for the country abounds in moose, caribou, bear, 
and some of the smaller animals. We found in one of the 
numerous sink holes which occur all through, and which 
are characteristic of any area underlaid by beds of 
gypsum, a moose imbedded in the ice at the bottom of the 
hole, with only his horns protruding. He had probably 
fallen in, and as the sides were overhanging, he was un- 
able to get out, and died there." 
A "Wild Turkey Gross. 
Mqrgantown, W. Va. — Editor Forest and Stream:, 
Recently a West Virginia paper contained the fol- 
lowing: "William Warner, of Pendleton county, 
who is making a specialty of domesticating and 
marketing wild turkeys, sold fifty on last Saturday.: 
They were the finest lot ever seen in th.Tt county, and 
the aggregate weight was 615 pounds. The experiment 
of raising wild turkeys has often been tried, with only 
moderate results, Mr. Warner seems to have mastered 
the secret. His method is to procure the Vild eggs and 
hatch them out under tame hens." 
Believing as I did that it was unusual to domesticate 
wild turkeys, even though hatched by domestic fowls, I 
learned the address of Mr. Warner, and wrote him for; 
particulars concerning his experiments, and received in 
reply the following information. He found two wild 
turkey eggs in the woods, and set them under a hen ; both 
hatched and did well, and proved to be a hen and gobbler. 
They were allowed to run at large; when they were one 
year old the hen' got hurt and died. He put the gobbler 
with his bronze turkey hens and raised seventy-five of the 
finest young turkeys he had ever seen. When he mar- 
keted them in the fall, they weighed twenty pounds each. 
He says the gobbler was the finest bird he ever saw; it 
would come up and eat out of his hand, but a stranger 
could not get near it. He declares he would not have 
taken ten dollars for it. He had a cornfield some distance 
from the house where the gobbler would go every day, 
and some hunter killed it, and that was the end of his wild 
lurkey raising. However, his neighbors have caught 
young wild turkeys and put them with their tame ones, 
and they did well, and got much larger than the tame 
ones, and brought better prices. No bird is so closely 
associated with the pioneer history of our country, and it 
would be interesting and no doubt profitable if some of 
the dwellers in localities where they can yet be found 
were to secure some of these noble birds and preserve the 
species before they pass away, as they must sooner or later; 
do in their wild state. Emerson Carney. 
White Shovellers* 
Mr. Chas. Hallock, now wintering in Southern Cali- 
fornia, sends us an extract from a letter which he has 
received from Mr. W. B. Boardman, of Minneapolis, 
Minn., son of the late Geo. A. Boardman. The reference 
to albinos will interest some of our readers. Mr. Boar.d- 
man writes : 
: "I trust you will have a pleasant winter in California 
and enjoy yourself with nature, which pleasure we are 
denied in this cold countrj' during the winter. It was 18 
degrees below zero this morning. 
"I was in Winnipeg last month, and when on my way 
to the station, noticed a number of mounted natural his- 
tory specimens in a window, including both birds and 
animals, on which there was a sign stating that they 
were for sale. Among the collection were three pure white 
spoonbill ducks. I tried to ascertain from the man in 
the store something regarding them, but he knew nothing 
about them — said the man in that side of the store was 
out. 
"Knowing how much my father was interested in 
albinos, it occurred to me that possibly some of your 
friends might like to secure one or more of these speci- 
mens. If so, I think I might possibly secure the name of 
the owner from some of my acquaintances in Winnipeg." 
European Widgeon in California* 
Lcs Angeles, Cal., Feb. 10. — Editor Forest and Stream: 
On the 5th inst, on a marsh near this city, I shot a fine 
specirnen of the European widgeon {Mareca penelope). 
rhe bird came in to the decoys with five of the common 
American widgeon. It was a male, in full winter plumage, 
and weighed two pounds and one-half ounce. 
About a year ago another specimen of this widgeon 
was brought to bag by a friend of mine, Mr. Joseph 
Welsh, of Pasadena, shooting on another part of the same 
marsh. 
M. penelope is a rare straggler on the western coast, 
although I believe it is somewhat more common on the 
Atlantic seaboard. Robert Erskine Ross. 
[The books say that M. penelope is rather abundant, 
and breeds in Alaska, and that it is not very uncommon 
on the northwest coast. It is of rather rare occurrence 
on the Atlantic Coast. Every occurrence, however, should 
be noted.] 
An interesting trial under Ihe Lacey act carne off last 
week before Judge Boarman in Florida. It appears that 
one John R. Jack, of Punta Gorda, a commercial collector 
of bird skins, had long been engaged in collecting the 
skins of small birds and shipping them out of the State 
to collectors elsewhere. The National Committee of 
Audubon Societies learned of this, and after procuring 
evidence against the man, submitted the facts and the tes- 
timony to the Department of Justice at Washington. 
The case was put in the hands of the U. S. District 
Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, the accused 
man was arrested and put under bonds. The defendant, 
recognizing that he had no case, plead guilty and was 
duly_ fined. He confessed that his shipments had been 
considerable, and stated that within a comparatively short 
time he had shipped out of the State — of course in contra- 
vention of the law— not less than forty ivory-billed wood- 
peckers, a species which is on the verge of extinction. 
