THE WAPITI 
Such examples cannot be procured to-day, for the great wapiti are gone 
for ever. 
Prior to 1840 enormous bands of wapiti, possibly even exceeding in 
number those of the Rockies, roamed the great San Joaquin Valley in 
California. They lived entirely in the open like the buffalo, and before the 
great advent of miners in 1849 were practically free from molestation. 
The gold-seekers, however, wanted meat, and made great inroads upon 
them, for the deer were then tame and easily shot. It is interesting to note 
that Alexandre Dumas, the great novelist, turned market hunter as soon 
as he landed in California, and one of the first things he did was to kill an 
elk in the Sacramento Valley. 
The new-comers, to get their game easily, made great corrals with 
lateral fences, miles in length, exactly of the same pattern employed 
formerly by the Beothic savages of Newfoundland and the Cree Indians 
of Keewatin to-day for the destruction of the migrating caribou. Into 
these corrals they drove immense numbers of wild horses and cattle as 
well as wapiti and pronghorns, and so secured an abundance of meat 
which was sold fresh or dried in the sun. In consequence of this harassment 
the wapiti soon became more cunning and retired to the tule (reed) 
beds situated along the marshes and lagoons. 
On the dry ground behind these reed thickets are cattails and flags 
which themselves form dense cover, and this retreat, covering hundreds 
of thousands of acres in the Sacramento Valley and stretching right down 
to San Francisco Bay, seems to have been preferred by the great deer to 
the chaparral and timber of the neighbouring mountains. This was doubt- 
less owing to the better feeding. There they made great trails and shared 
with the wild hogs comparative immunity from molestation, as men 
could not hunt there on horseback owing to the mud and swamps. But 
at last the marshes began to be drained, and the process of drying the 
ground meant the destruction of the tule brakes and with them disappeared 
the wapiti. 
By 1875 the wapiti were almost extinct, whilst the last herd on the ranch 
of Messrs Miller and Lux near Bakersfield only owed their existence to 
preservation. In 1895, according to Mr T. S. Van Dyke, there were only 
twenty-eight left, but by close protection there are now thought to be 
over two hundred. These are the last wild wapiti left in the State where 
formerly they existed in tens of thousands. It is curious that the wapiti 
was never known in the Sierra Nevada nor in the great valley of the south, 
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