March, 1918 
FOREST AND STREAM 
141 
tions about these things, and no scientist 
has ever fathomed them. 
In 1912-13 there were seventeen hundred 
antelope in the northern part of the Park. 
The next year there were only five hundred 
or six hundred 
left. I am now 
giving figures 
taken on the 
ground and not 
on the maps and 
not in Washing¬ 
ton. 
What may we 
expect in regard 
to elk migra¬ 
tion? We may 
expect the same 
phenomena that 
occurred with 
the northern 
buffalo herd in 
1883. It disap¬ 
peared all at 
once, as though 
the earth had 
swallowed it. 
The next year 
the fur boats 
carried almost 
no robes down 
the Missouri 
River. The buf¬ 
falo were gone. The land was made 
ready for the bone-pickers following 
wolfers and the skin hunters. A species 
had been crowded beyond the bearing point. 
With elk and buffalo it is much as it is 
with the Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma. 
Crowd them too far, change their natural 
ways of life too much, and they cease to 
breed. Harry and harass them too much— 
any species—and it does not reproduce. 
The bear in the Yazoo Delta of Mississippi, 
once so abundant that it was no unusual 
thing to kill a dozen in a week on a hunt, 
disappeared almost at once when they did 
go—there are very few left there now. 
This is what will happen by and by—it 
may happen very, very quickly, and then 
be too late to correct. The rifles of the 
tusk hunters and meat hunters will con¬ 
tinue their work on the north. The State 
of Wyoming will open still more of the old 
sanctuary on the south. Scientists will 
feebly try to transplant a few elk, and will 
fail in it. Harried and harassed, driven 
out of its old natural habits, the elk will 
cease to breed. 
Then all at once some great conclusion 
—one of the inscrutable conclusions of na¬ 
ture—will take place in the animating spirit 
of the elk herd, whatever that may be. As 
did the black-tail, they will go out in a 
great migration, streams of them joining 
all in one body. And then they will be 
killed. 
We will have no more elk after that. 
Our Parks will all be bare of them. An 
elk will become a curiosity even as a buf¬ 
falo is today. We will have completed 
then—rapidly, perhaps very rapidly indeed 
—one more chapter in the record of 
American life in contact with nature. 
I call all the male citizens of the United 
States to join with me in the belief and 
in the protest that this is a distinct emerg¬ 
ency which ought to be handled not later, 
but now. 
All around the Yellowstone Park we set 
up a series of forest reserves which some 
said were intended to act as barriers for 
the Park, as guardian strips tending to 
save the forests and the game of the 
Yellowstone Park just that much more. 
Then we turned some of these barriers into 
Chinese walls of pollution beyond which 
no game would go—the sheep range. The 
U. S. Forester in his letter and on his map 
points out that there are certain refuges 
where elk are not shot at all. Surround 
those refuges with sheep trails, and no elk 
will ever go to them at all. How long the 
local supply will then last is easily to be 
seen from the record of the Gallatin game 
refuge above referred to. You can guess 
the answer. It is not far off. 
Now the elk herd is one great asset of 
the Yellowstone Park. Handled with any 
sort of intelligence, just let alone, it would 
last forever. When that herd is gone our 
elk all are gone. There is no place else on 
earth for these elk to go. There is no way 
on earth to keep them other than the way 
that has been devised by nature for their 
keeping. Now, which do you want, sheep 
or elk ? 
If you could solve the sheep problem 
permanently by allowing sheep in the for¬ 
est reserves, even if that meant wiping out 
all the elk, perhaps a few business men 
would say that ought to be done. But it 
must be remembered all the time that the 
use of the forest reserves by sheep does 
not settle the problem of the sheep man at 
all. He can only keep his sheep in there 
a very brief part of the year, on an average 
not over a couple of months. Those two 
months mean the ruin of the range for 
twenty years. They mean the permanent 
driving into other migration lines of the 
elk which formerly used that part of the 
range as their winter highway. So, the elk 
are wiped out; but there still remains be¬ 
fore the sheep man the ultimate problem 
of a range of his own. If the sheep man 
asks the benefit of civilization and does not 
pay for the civilization itself, if he de¬ 
stroys more than he brings into civiliza¬ 
tion, he is not paying his way; and he who 
does not pay his way is no citizen. 
The wiping out of a species from the 
surface of the earth is a sad thing to con¬ 
template, a thing to make a man heart¬ 
sick in the pondering. As to the imminent 
passing of the species of elk on this con¬ 
tinent, the time to ponder that is today, 
and not tomorrow. 
In the winter of 1894 everybody thought 
there were at 
least five hun¬ 
dred wild buf¬ 
falo left in the 
Yellowstone 
Park. Captain 
George S. An¬ 
derson, the 
Park Superin¬ 
tendent, at that 
time told me he 
thought there 
were over six 
hundred, when 
with a friend, 
Elwood Hofer, 
and a couple of 
private soldiers, 
I started on a 
snow - shoe trip 
through the 
Park with the 
purpose of find¬ 
ing and photo¬ 
graph i n g the 
wild buffalo. We 
discovered t h e 
truth—the Park 
buffalo herd was almost gone. Instead of 
there being six hundred left alive, we could 
not make over a hundred and twenty-five, 
and were confident that we counted some of 
them more than once. Mr. Haynes, the 
photographer who went in at the same 
time, thought there were only about sev¬ 
enty-four head. Without any boasting I 
may say that my own story of that trip,, 
printed in the old Forest and Stream, and 
the photographs of Mr. F. J. Haynes pre¬ 
sented with it, saved what few buffalo' 
there were left then in the Yellowstone 
Park. Today there are more than three; 
hundred wild buffalo alive in the Park. 
That is because of one newspaper story. 
1 wrote that story, and I am glad that 
I did. I am writing this one about the elk 
now as earnestly as I know hoiv because 
I know there is just as much need for 
making the facts known regarding the elk 
as there ever was in regard to the buf¬ 
falo. 
In 1894 the forest reserves were not es¬ 
tablished as they are now. There were no 
sheep in around the Park. But now, with 
rifles all around its edge, ready to go to 
work, we begin to cut off the natural exit 
of the game into many or all of its old 
scattered wintering places. We extermi¬ 
nate without regard to law, and less re¬ 
gard to reason. These are facts, my broth¬ 
ers. The more unwelcome they are, the 
more proof that something ought to be 
done now. Tell your Congressman—even 
though he live in Wyoming, Montana or 
Idaho—that is the way you feel, and that 
he must do it if he stays in the place 
where he is taking down his salary. Take 
the sheep out of the forests. Put them 
under wire. It must be done some day. 
Of course this means an industrial and 
a political fight. As to the strength of the 
sheep interests in state legislatures, no 
argument is needed. They swing the bal¬ 
ance of power in more than one state. Un¬ 
til the Forestry Service has courage enough 
(continued on page 176) 
