110 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Jan. 24, 1914. 
The American Elk in Pennsylvania 
In 1826 Elk Roamed in Herds the Northern Woods of That State 
By DR. W. J. McKNIGHT 
T HE American elk was widely distributed in 
Northern Pennsylvania in 1794. The habitat 
of this noble game was the forest extending 
across the northern part of the State. These 
animals were quite numerous in the thirties. 
“When I started in 1826, to amuse and profit 
myself by following the chase in Northern Penn¬ 
sylvania,” said Colonel Parker, of Gardeau, Mc¬ 
Kean County, Pennsylvania, “elks were running 
in those woods in herds. I have killed elks a 
plenty in the Rocky Mountain country and other 
regions since but I never ran across any that 
were as big as those old-time Pennsylvania elks. 
I have killed elks on the Sinnemahoning and 
Pine Creek waters, and down on the Clarion 
River and West Branch, that were as big as 
horses. A one-thousand-pound elk was nothing 
uncommon in that country, and I killed one 
once that weighed twelve hundred pounds. 
These were bucks. The does would weigh any¬ 
where from six hundred to eight hundred 
pounds.” 
These elks had very short and thick necks, 
with a short and upright mane. Their ears were 
of enormous size, so large, in fact, that once 
Sterling Devins, a good hunter, too, saw a doe 
elk in the woods on Pine Hill near Ole Bull’s 
castle, in the time when elks had begun to grow 
scarce, and passed without shooting at it, think¬ 
ing it was a mule. When the elk bounded away, 
though, and disappeared among the thick timber. 
Sterling knew what it was, and felt like kicking 
himself harder than the elk could have kicked 
him, even if it had been a mule. 
The Pennsylvania elk's eyes were small, but 
sparkled like jewels. I have often seen a score 
or more pairs of these bright eyes shining in the 
dark recesses of the pine-forest, when the shad¬ 
ows might have otherwise obscured the presence 
there of the owners of those telltale orbs. An 
infuriated buck elk’s eye was about as fearful a 
thing to look at as anything well imaginable, but 
so quickly changeable was the nature of those 
huge beasts that two hours after having cap¬ 
tured with ropes one that had, from the vantage 
ground of his rock, gored and trampled the life 
out of a half-dozen of dogs, and well-nigh over¬ 
come the attacking hunters, it submitted to be¬ 
ing harnessed to an improvised sled and unre¬ 
sistingly hauled a load of venison upon it six 
miles through the woods to my cabin, and took 
its place among the cattle with as docile an air 
as if had been born and brought up among them. 
This same elk that Sterling Devins had mis¬ 
taken for a mule, he and Ezra Prichard fol¬ 
lowed all the next day, but lost its trail. 
Some fine tree hunters got on its (trail, 
dirove it to its rock, and roped it. When 
Devins and Prichard got back at night they 
found the Pine Creek hunters there and the elk 
in the barn eating hay and entirely at home. 
That elk had quite an interesting subsequent his¬ 
tory. Ezra Prichard had, previous to the capture 
of this one, secured a pair of elks, broke them, 
and for a long time drove them in farm work 
like a yoke of oxen. Sterling Devins was eager 
for a yoke of elk, and he offered the Pine Creek 
hunters one hundred dollars for the one they 
had captured. They refused the offer, but after¬ 
ward got into a dispute about its ownership, and 
it was sold to Bill Stowall and John Sloanmaker, 
of Jersey Shore. These men took the elk aoout 
the country, exhibiting it, and made quite a sum 
of money. Next fall, although the elk was a 
doe, it became very ugly and attacked its keeper, 
nearly killing him before he could get away. No 
one could go near her, and her owners ordered 
her shot. The carcass was bought by a man 
who had a fine pair of elk horns. He was a 
skilful taxidermist, and he managed to fasten 
the horns to the head of the doe elk in such a 
manner that no one was ever able to tell that 
they hadn’t grown there. This made of the 
head an apparently magnificent head of a buck 
elk, and it was purchased for one hundred dol¬ 
lars, under that belief, by a future governor of 
Pennsylvania. 
That doe elk was one of the last family of 
elks in the Pine' Creek country. She and tie 
buck and a fawn had been discovered some time 
before Sterling Devins ran across the doe, by 
Leroy Lyman, on Tomer’s run, near the 0 :e 
Bull settlement. Lyman got a shot at the buck, 
but the whole three escaped. The same party 
of hunters that captured :ne doe killed the buck 
afterward in in the woods on Kettle Creek. The 
fawn the dogs ran into a millpond, and there 
it was killed. 
Another peculiarity of the elks that used to 
frequent the Pennsylvania woods was the great 
size of their nostrils, and the keenness of then- 
scent was something beyond belief. A ser of 
elk antlers of five fee.t spread, and weighing 
from forty to fifty pounds, was not an infrequent 
trophy. George Rae, who was one of the_great 
hunters of Northern Pennsylvania in his day—and 
he was one of the greatest in the Rocky Moun¬ 
tains even to a recent day, in spite of his eighty- 
five years—lived along the Allegheny at Pcrt- 
ville. He had in his house, and in his barn, the 
walls almost covered with the antlers of elks he 
had killed, on the peak of his roof, at one end, 
being one that measured nearly six feet between 
the extremities. When George moved west for¬ 
ty years ago he left the horns on the buildings, 
and only a few years ago many of them were 
stil there, as reminders of what game once 
roamed our woods. 
It required more skill to hunt the elk than 
it did to trail the deer, as they were much more 
cautious and alert. For all that, an elk, wlien 
startled from his bed, did not instantly dasn 
away, like the deer, but invariably looked to see 
what had aroused him. Then, if he thought the 
cause boded him no good, away he went, not 
leaping over the brush, like the deer, but, with 
his head thrown back anti his great horns al¬ 
most covering his body, plunging through the 
thickets, his big hoofs clattering together like 
castanets as he went. The elk did not go at a 
galloping gait, but travelled at a swinging trot 
that carried him along at amazing speed. He 
never stopped until he had crossed water, when 
his instinct seemed to tell him that the scent of 
his trail was broken before the pursuing dogs. 
At the rutting season the elk, both male and 
female, was fearless and fierce, and it behooved 
the hunter to be watchful. An elk surprised 
at this season did not wait for any overt act on 
the part of an enemy, but was instantly aggres¬ 
sive. One blow from an elk’s foot would kill 
a wolf c-r a dog, and I have more than once been 
forced to elude an elk by running around trees, 
jumping from one to and her before the bulky 
beast, unable to make the turns quick enough, 
could recover himself and follow me too closely 
to prevent it, thus making my way by degrees 
to a safe refuge. I was once treed by a buck elk 
not half a mile from home, and kept there from 
noon until night began to fall. I haven’t the least 
doubt that he would have kept me there all 
night if another buck hadn’t bugled a challenge 
from a neighboring hill, and my buck hurried 
away in answer to it. I didn’t wait to see it. 
but there was a great fight between those two 
bucks that night. 
I visited the spot the next day. The ground 
was torn up and the saplings broken down for 
rods around, and one old buck lay in the brush 
dead, his body covered with bloody rips and 
tears. I didn’t know whether this was the elk 
that treed me or not, but I have always been 
fond of believing it was. 
The whistle of the buck elk, as the hunters 
used to call it, wasn’t a whistle, although there 
were changes in it that gave it something of a 
flute-like sound. The sound was more like the 
notes of a bugle. In making it the buck threw 
back his head, swelled his throat and neck to 
an enormous size, and with that as a bellows 
he blew from his open mouth the sound that 
made at once his challenge or call for a mate. 
The sound was far-reaching, and, heard at a dis¬ 
tance, was weird and uncanny, yet not unmusical. 
Near by it was rasping and harsh, with the 
whistling notes prominent. 
The Pennsylvania elks were never much scat¬ 
tered. When I first came to the Sinnemahoning 
country, the salt marsh that lay in the wilder¬ 
ness where my residence now is was trampled 
over by herds of elks and deer that came there 
to lick the salt from the ground as if a drove 
of cattle had been there. I have seen seventy- 
five elks huddled at that marsh. That was “the 
great elk lick” of legend, which the reservation 
Indians have often talked to me about when 1 
lived in Allegheny County, New York, as a boy, 
and it was to find that lick that my father and 1, 
following the rather indefinite directions of one 
Johnnyhocks, an old Shongo Indian, entered the 
Pennsylvania wilderness in 1826. 
To follow an elk forty miles before running 
it down was considered nothing remarkable. I 
have done it many a time. Leroy Lyman, Jack 
Lyman, and A. H. Goodsell once started on an 
elk-hunt from Roulette, Potter County, struck 
the trail at the head of West Creek, in McKean 
County, thirty miles from Roulette, followed it 
through Elk, Clarion and Clearfield Counties, 
and finally drove it to its rock eighty or ninety 
miles from where the trail was first struck. 
They had followed the elk many days, and fin¬ 
ally the quarry was found—an enormous buck— 
with a spread of horns like a young maple-tree. 
The hunters ran out of rations the second day, 
and were nearly starved when they ran the elk 
to its rock. All three of them put a bullet in the 
defiant elk and ended his career. Visions of 
elk-meat for supper had haunted the famished 
hunters, and when the buck fell they shouted 
for joy. Without delay they started in to carve 
expected juicy morsels from the carcass to cook 
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