March, 1918 
FOREST AND S T R E A M 
139 
there had been “very heavy losses.” 
As an off-set to these sickening details 
of slaughter the Biological Survey can 
show you pictures of three thousand elk 
in one band near the government ranch in 
the Jackson’s 
Hole country 
south of the 
Park—for, as we 
must know, the 
governm en t 
drives the elk off 
their natural 
range, where 
they can feed 
themselves, into 
a country where 
they must be fed 
artificially. Look 
at one of these 
great elk pic¬ 
tures, of which 
there are very 
many, and you 
will be able to 
say with great 
enthusiasm wfith 
the scientists and 
the New York 
sportsmen, “How 
wonderful !” 
There are just 
as many elk as 
there ever were. Let us go kill them all 
at once. Let us by preference kill five 
thousand cows first!” 
Last year the Forest Service allowed the 
grazing down of the country south of the 
Yellowstone Park. The elk marched 
south, thin and starving, over fifty miles 
of bare ground. They got to the Gov¬ 
ernment hay in time to die. 
In a great deal of this general slaughter 
the bulls are killed only for their teeth, 
because they are tough and thin, and not 
very good eating. A great many cows are 
killed for meat. Also a great many calves 
are killed for meat. If you like, you may 
be shown certain pictures of detached 
heads of elk calves found north of the 
Park by government investigators—calves 
killed for meat. 
Being of but feeble intellect perhaps 
myself, I do not see just what good it does 
either to kill five thousand cow elk to save 
their lives, or to count five thousand or 
fifty thousand elk, and do nothing further 
to save their lives. While the Biological 
Survey prepares to count, and the Forestry 
Service prepares to argue, the tusk hunter 
and the meat hunter and the game butcher 
are already on their way. 
And now comes the last and most in¬ 
credible horror of them all. U. S. Sena¬ 
tors Myers and Walsh of Montana have 
presented to them a Montana petition ask¬ 
ing Mr. Hoover in the guise of “Food 
Conservation” to decree the killing of all 
the Yellowstone elk, only a few to be left 
under fence! This seems unbelievable, but 
it is true. 
I have been simply building up to the 
point of saying that a distinct and terrible 
emergency exists today regarding the elk 
herd of the Yellowstone Park. Within a 
few years at most the elk will be as ex¬ 
tinct as the buffalo. 
Nothing at all has gone wrong with na¬ 
ture if only we had left nature alone. But 
we have not left nature alone. We have not 
left the elk able to take care of themselves. 
I sat in a little conference with the 
heads respectively of the Forestry Service 
and the Biological Survey at Washington 
not long ago. The three of us bent over 
a map showing all the forest reserves 
around the Yellowstone Park. A finger 
rested on the great Teton refuge, .where 
there are so many elk south of the Park. 
“We ought,” said one of the department 
heads, ”to go into the work of catching 
elk down here south of the Park and 
planting them in east of the Park in the 
Shoshone Reserve where there are no elk 
today.” 
Did you ever hear anything more hope¬ 
less, more futile, more absurd? Both gen¬ 
tlemen looked at me reprovingly when I 
suggested that it would be a long way 
round by rail from the Teton Reserve to 
the Shoshone Reserve, and also suggested 
that the transplanting of elk would not be 
necessary if the elk were allowed a' chance 
to arrange their own plans of life. 
Since that time another little instance of 
monkeying with nature has come up and 
gotten into news notice. There were six 
thousand Mexican quail caught in the 
southwest and carried up to Pennsylvania 
for transplanting. That was in the fall of 
1916. Three thousand of the quail were 
dead before January first, 1917. That was 
slaughter. It was not conservation. It 
was not leaving nature alone. 
The U. S. Forestry made this statement 
of the sheep situation around Yellowstone 
Park: 
“The number of sheep authorized to 
graze on the National Forests around the 
Yellowstone Park during the grazing sea¬ 
son of 1916 was as follows: 
Absaroka . 
. 102,000 
Beartooth . 
. 48.800 
Gallatin . 
. 6,3,000 
Madison . 
Shoshone . 
Cj 
0 
0 
Targhee . 
. i ^9,000 
Teton . 
. 20,000 
Total . 
. 569,100 
With this came a map in several very 
fetching colors, each color representing 
some phase of the cattle industry in the 
forest reserves, and in the state game pre¬ 
serves. There were two years ago at least 
a half a million sheep scattered around 
the Park, some of them far enough not to 
damage, some of them close enough to be 
extremely damaging. There are probably 
over a million in 
fact. No sheep 
man holds to his 
lease. The For¬ 
est Service does 
not know. Usual¬ 
ly, it is said, 
twice as many 
sheep are run in 
as are paid for. 
I suppose a mil¬ 
lion is closer to 
the truth than 
half a million. 
In U. S. Forest¬ 
ry statistics one 
can have no con¬ 
fidence at all. 
They do not 
know the facts. 
What depart¬ 
mental Wash¬ 
ington does not 
know about its 
own business 
would make a 
handsome report 
all by itself. 
A part of the country west of the Park, 
between the Targhee and Gallatin National 
Forests, and east of the Madison National 
Forest, on the map was done in a pretty 
baby blue color, of itself very fetching. 
A foot note said regarding this baby blue 
patch, “Cattle range—no sheep.” 
“You surely don’t mean that,” I re¬ 
marked to the department head. 
“Oh, yes, I do,” was the reply. '“Sheep 
run here on the Targhee National Forest” 
—and the departmental index finger was 
laid upon a tract done in a nice apple 
green. 
Now, the truth is that a summit or di¬ 
vide lies between apple green and baby 
blue. It would be a most crude and impo¬ 
lite thing for any sheep man to allow his 
sheep to run from the apple green part 
of the map over into the baby blue part 
of it. The head of the Forestry Depart¬ 
ment considered that as an impossible 
thing. Had it occurred, it must only have 
been when the sheep men had presented 
their cards and explained the matter. As 
a matter of fact, none the less the sheep 
themselves last summer and fall a year ago 
were so very rude as to get off their reserve 
of apple green and to spread pretty widely 
over the baby blue tract on the head waters 
of the south fork of the Madison and in 
many creeks thereabouts—going up to 
within eight miles or less of the very line 
of the Yellowstone Park. This, be it re¬ 
membered, is precisely on the migration of 
the elk westbound in the fall to the winter 
range of this country which the sheep now 
were using illegally as summer range. 
I explained to Mr. Graves, U. S. For¬ 
ester, that sheep had been seen in that 
country not by one man, but by' several. 
“Oh, a few might have gotten in there,” 
was his reply. “I believe w r e did have a 
report on that from somewhere in Phila¬ 
delphia. Of course the sheep were ordered 
out at once—I think perhaps they* were out 
before I got the complaint.” 
Fine! But the result of the rude action 
Driven from their natural feeding grounds, these elk died of starvation 
