140 
F O R E S T AND S T R E A M 
March, 1918 
on the part of these illiterate sheep is 
that no elk will cross that country for at 
least another year, perhaps never again. It 
means that when the spring thaws come 
the upper waters of the best grayling 
stream on earth 
wall be so pol¬ 
luted that the 
fish will leave it. 
Worst of all, it 
means that the 
government a t 
Washington does 
not know what 
is going on. 
There are 
twice as many 
sheep on these 
forest reserves 
as has been be¬ 
lieved. There are 
less than half as 
many elk left 
as has been be¬ 
lieved. The elk 
are being crowd¬ 
ed off their own 
natural winter 
feeding grounds, 
and more and 
more are being 
forced into un¬ 
natural habits, so 
that they need 
artificial support. 
The entire balance of nature has been dis¬ 
turbed by the advent of commercial man. 
All the elk which are driven back by 
sheep into the park in the late fall are 
obliged to try to live through on range 
which is not winter range. A large per 
cent, of the herd perishes for these reasons 
every year in any case. Forced back into 
the Park in unnatural numbers, this natural 
toll is increased. The end is not very far off. 
As to the chance an elk has outside of 
the Park, we may take the very pretty 
proof presented in the opening last fall of 
the Gallatin State Game Refuge. That 
refuge had in it twc thousand elk. One 
thousand of them were killed the first 
season. Had it been possible to kill the 
other half that would have been done. It 
may be done next year. 
The average citizen not posted in these 
matters does not know the bloodthirstiness 
of some men. There was an artist, whose 
name I could easily give, a man who has 
done big game pictures for railroads and 
for private individuals. Not so very long 
ago he went on a trip in the Jackson’s Hole 
country. He had his rifle equipped with a 
silencer so that its report was very faint. 
Out of one band of elk he shot down thir¬ 
ty-five head, and stood laughing at the 
confusion of the elk, who did not know 
whence the firing was coming. 
As to the tusk hunters, they would not 
stop at thirty-five—they would kill thirty- 
five thousand indeed if they had the 
chance. The calf-killers and cow-killers 
also take their toll all around the Park 
every fall. The little ranchers all live on 
elk all winter. And meantime nature 
takes her toll. To cap all these we con¬ 
fuse and disturb and break up all the 
habits of the elk themselves. The rem¬ 
nants of the old west-bound winter migra¬ 
tion from the Park, normally about fifteen 
hundred head, turn wearily back into the 
high snow country. Starving there, they 
work north of their old exit point, the 
Madison River near the junction of the 
Firehole and the Gibbon, and hence we 
get the phenomena of “extraordinary num¬ 
bers of elk” in the upper part of the Park. 
These numbers do not mean plenty. They 
mean extinction. Hence we get these pic¬ 
tures of four hundred elk killed for their 
teeth, pictures of the heads of calves shot 
down for meat. 
This is an emergency and a terrible one 
in the history of the elk herd. It is a state 
of affairs which every citizen of America 
ought to resent. It ought to be resented 
by every department head in Washington. 
There ought to be no more argument about 
it, no more map painting, and no more 
count taking. Something ought to be done 
about it, and done now. 
The sheep ought to be taken out of every 
foot of the forest reserves near the Park 
which normally constitute winter range for 
the elk herd. If this be not done, and if 
all these destructive agencies’ be allowed 
to advance in geometrical proportion, as 
indeed is the case now, we may say good¬ 
bye to our elk herd very soon, whether or 
not we like that. 
One last instance of sheep modesty. A 
petition has gone from Washington State 
to the Interior Department asking the 
opening up of the National Parks them¬ 
selves to sheep! This in the name of “food 
conservation.” 
Much of this deplorable situation arises 
from the erroneous numbers credited to 
the elk herd in the Park. Fired by the pic¬ 
tures of vast herds of elk—two thousand, 
twenty-five hundred, three thousand in one 
bunch—in the hay countries south of the 
Park in the winter time, the killers clamor 
for more chance at these elk. Now comes 
Wyoming and opens to shooting a part of 
the old Teton Refuge just south of the 
Yellowstone Park, which has so long been 
a sanctuary for the elk which come out of 
the Park in that direction! What next? 
What hope have the elk left? 
The natural division of the two great 
herds, the northern and the southern herd, 
of the Park, is roughly along a line run¬ 
ning between the Thumb and the Lake 
Hotel. The Hayden Valley elk mostly 
drift north. Those south of the Thumb 
and in east of there usually go into 
the Jackson’s Hole country along the 
Snake River. 
All of this 
country ought to 
remain forever 
shut to the 
rifles. Now Wy¬ 
oming threatens 
to open it to the 
rifles. In lieu of 
that country, the 
talk is that other 
reserves will be 
closed to shoot¬ 
ing — but only 
such reserves as 
have no elk in 
them! Is this 
not in every way 
truly a picture 
of American 
game preserva¬ 
tion ? 
So now you 
have your elk 
starved, harried, 
forsaken, d i s - 
tressed, strug¬ 
gling as best 
they can to make 
a living. I have 
seen that sort of thing going on in the win¬ 
ter time myself inside the Yellowstone 
Park. I am not writing by proxy, and not on 
hearsay—I know what I am writing about 
at first hand. I know how much the sheep 
have got in on the old migration lines of 
the elk. I know that an emergency does 
exist right now in regard to the great herd 
of the Park—the last great herd of elk in 
all the world, which will have no success¬ 
ors in all the world. The ways of wild 
game are far better studied on the ground 
than on maps. As a sort of rough-neck 
naturalist myself, I know very well that 
game does not always run according to 
schedule. Mr. Stephen D. Mather, of the 
Interior Department, the man who I think 
has done more for the good of America 
than any department man who ever worked 
in Washington, was this fall, very much 
grieved over the fact that practically all 
the antelope in the northern part of the 
Park had gotten out over the fence on top 
of the heavy snow drifts. They had lo¬ 
cated themselves over toward Electric 
Park, where they were being fed. Mr. 
Mather wanted to have them driven back 
into the Park, and found that very diffi¬ 
cult. At last accounts this migration of 
the antelope had not been corrected. 
In the year 1912-13 pretty much all the 
black-tail deer in the Park, about fifteen 
hundred in all, left at the west and north¬ 
west part of the Park and wandered clear 
over into the Bitterroot range. They all 
were killed. The gleeful hunters comment¬ 
ed on the extreme ease with which they 
could kill these “tame deer.” None of 
those deer ever came back. 
What made them leave? 
In 1900-01 nearly all the porcupines of 
the Park left, and are now just going back. 
No one knows why they left, any more 
than why the squirrels used to migrate in 
countless thousands from Tennessee as far 
north as Vermont. Game has its own no- 
