THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
as possible; the legs of the hunters were smeared with white or grey clay, 
and certain precautions were taken to destroy the human scent. 
George Bird Grinnell tells of an interesting episode which a Cheyenne 
Indian related to him: “A war party was sent out to take horses from the 
Shoshone. One morning, just at sunrise, the fifteen or sixteen men were 
travelling along on foot in single file through a deep canon of the moun- 
tains, when one of them spied on a ledge far above them the head and shoul- 
ders of a great mountain sheep which seemed to be looking over the valley. 
He pointed it out to his fellows, and as they walked along they watched it. 
Presently it drew back, and a little later appeared again further along the 
ledges, and stood there on the verge. As the Indians watched, they suddenly 
saw shoot out from another ledge above the sheep a mountain lion, which 
alighted on the sheep’s back, and both animals fell whirling over the cliff 
and struck the wide rock below. The fall was a long one, and the Cheyennes, 
feeling sure that the sheep had been killed, either by the fall or by the 
lion, rushed forward to secure the meat. When they reached the spot the 
lion was hobbling off with a broken leg, and one of them shot it with his 
arrow, and when they made ready to skin the sheep, they saw to their aston- 
ishment that it was not a sheep, but a man wearing the skin and horns of 
a sheep. He had been hunting, and his bow and arrows were wrapped in 
the skin close to his breast. The fall had killed him. From the fashion of 
his hair and his moccasins they knew that he was a Bannock.” 
In olden days the Blackfeet Indians killed large numbers of mountain 
sheep that lived about the prairies and buttes in Wyoming and Montana. 
Their method was to drive the sheep off the prairie on to one of these 
isolated buttes. A few young men ascended the little hill and chased the 
sheep from the hill, and when they were well on the prairie they were run 
down and killed by the mounted men, who soon encircled them. 
Until quite recently the Sheep Eater Indians hunted sheep regularly 
about what is now the Yellowstone Park, where their chief strongholds 
were the head of Gray Bull, Meeteetsee Creek and Stinking Water. The 
Indians built long fences on the edge of the ridges, but did not use the pen 
at the apex as the prehistoric Indians did, but lay in wait for the game 
behind the fences and shot them with arrows as they passed at close range. 
Until 1886 there were quite a number of sheep on the Stinking Water 
ridges, but their pursuit by skin, head and meat hunters after the Sheep 
Eaters left soon made them so scarce that they were reduced to small 
numbers. Moreover, they were further reduced by scab, a disease that 
334 
