336 
FOREST AND STREAM 
June, 1918 
WHAT ABOUT THE YELLOWSTONE ELK? 
SETTLEMENTS HAVE BARRED THE OLD MIGRATION ROUTE THAT THE ELK 
HAVE ALWAYS FOLLOWED FROM THEIR SUMMER TO THEIR WINTER RANGE 
By GEO. BIRD GRINNELL 
J UST now, when all the world is stand¬ 
ing bare-headed before the splendid 
spirit of France, I wish to make a quo¬ 
tation from a Frenchman—a good priest— 
who was the companion, and for a time the 
recorder, of that hardy and gallant gentle¬ 
man, Robert Cavalier de La Salle. Of a 
certain journey and territory that the ex¬ 
plorers passed through Father Allouez says : 
“There are also some dry and fertile lands, 
filled with an incredible number of bears, 
elk, deer, and turkeys, which the wolves 
are constantly attacking and which are so 
little wild that we were several times in 
danger of not being able to keep them from 
running over us, except by firing shots at 
them.” 
This is a rough translation of the old 
French written nearly 240 years ago, about 
the territory between Lake Erie and Lake 
Michigan. It may have covered Southern 
Michigan, Northern Ohio and Northern. 
Indiana. Today, if you and I were to try 
to walk from Toledo to Chicago, we should 
not need guns in order to keep the bears, 
elk or wild turkeys from running over us. 
We no longer chase buffalo on the out¬ 
skirts of Chicago. From the fertile plains 
of Nebraska the antelope, buffalo, and elk, 
once so abundant there have disappeared. 
Like conditions prevail over much of Mon¬ 
tana and Wyoming. Not only is the big 
game gone, but the little lakes where the 
swans, geese and canvas-back ducks used 
to breed have been drained and plowed up, 
and now grow crops. What was the wild 
west is now no more wild than Connecticut, 
Illinois or Iowa. 
Do these statements seem elementary? 
Is this the brand of pap to offer to Forest 
and Stream readers? I am not sure. 
Something like it seems needed! 
Civilization and wild nature do not go 
together. You cannot have a herd of wild 
buffalo in your sheep pasture, nor groups 
of elk browsing in your wheat fields. The 
economic difficulty is obvious, and besides 
that, in these days the appearance of a 
big wild animal or a big wild bird near a 
settlement at once calls out a dozen men 
and boys with shotguns, rifles and a few 
dogs. 
In the Yellowstone National Park, an 
excellent summer range, there are many 
elk. On every side of this summer range 
is a fenced and settled territory, through 
which the elk cannot pass, as they did 
formerly, to a winter range where they can 
feed and live until spring returns. Through 
the winter, therefore, the elk must remain 
in the high country of their summer range, 
where food sufficient to support them can¬ 
not be had. So they starve. 
For some years past the winter condition 
of the elk in the Yellowstone National Park 
—the only reservation in the country where 
now there are any large numbers of elk— 
has called forth long articles from men, 
some of whom have done good work for 
game preservation, and who write effec¬ 
tively, but who do not recognize the fun¬ 
damental changes that have taken place in 
the west during the last generation. The 
most recent of these articles is from the 
pen of Mr. Emerson Hough in Forest and 
Stream of March, 1918. 
With Mr. Hough’s remarks about graz¬ 
ing the domestic sheep in the forest re¬ 
serves and, last summer, perhaps close about 
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These mountain trails are visible for miles 
the Yellowstone Park, I am wholly in 
agreement. As a sheep herder on occa¬ 
sions, a former owner of sheep, one who 
has treated these smelly beasts for the vari¬ 
ous ailments to which they are subject, and 
who finally lost the greater part of his 
substance through deaths from his herd in 
winter, I shun the tame sheep, and believe 
that his only place is on the table, after 
being properly butchered and properly 
skinned. For his wild cousin, destitute of 
wool, with the great crooked horns, I have 
a great admiration. After him, in years 
past, I have climbed and run and crept and 
crawled over many miles of prairie and 
mountain. I believe too that the Forest 
Service should not permit the grazing of 
sheep in the forest reserves adjacent to the 
national parks. 
T HE annual starvation of the elk herds 
of the National Park is heart sick¬ 
ening, as Mr. Hough says, but though 
a number of people who may be supposed 
to know as much as anyone about the sub¬ 
ject have been pondering this matter for 
many years, no adequate remedy has as 
yet been suggested. The question is one 
of food for the elk herds. It is not espe¬ 
cially one of protection from poachers, 
though this is important; but we shall 
never get anywhere if we confine ourselves 
to saying “something must be done.” 
Mr. Hough, who has been in the Yellow¬ 
stone Park in winter and whose good work 
there is very well known to many of the 
old timers, furnished to the public the news 
which in the spring of 1894 brought about 
the passage of the law that gave the Yel¬ 
lowstone Park a government. He knows, 
if he stops to think, that the Park is not a 
winter range for elk, and that in the winter 
no elk remain there, unless by some mis¬ 
chance they should be snowed in, and if 
they are snowed in—though occasionally a 
few have wintered in the Hayden Valley— 
they usually starve. 
In the old days, a long time before the 
Yellowstone Park became a tumultuous re¬ 
sort and before it was surrounded by a 
ring of fenced ranches, the seasonal move¬ 
ments of the elk were well understood. 
Those to the north of the Yellowstone Lake 
and living on tributaries of the Yellowstone 
River, at the approach of winter, drifted— 
slowly, or rapidly, according to the amount 
of cold or the depth of the snow—down 
that stream and out on to the Montana 
plains to the north. Most of them lived in 
the valley of the Yellowstone—generally 
known to Indians as Elk River—and among 
the surrounding hills until the approach of 
spring, when they took their way back to 
the high mountains that they had left the 
previous fall. The 400 elk mentioned by 
Mr. Hough as having been killed for their 
teeth north of the Park line were working 
out to follow their ancestral migration line 
down the Yellowstone River. That the elk 
have tried to do this in several winters 
lately indicates that in the north part of the 
Park elk are growing more abundant and 
are crowded. For these elk, killed beyond 
the Park line, the Montana state game offi¬ 
cials were and are responsible. 
The elk on the extreme east and north 
side of the Park went east, dovm the 
streams which run toward the prairie; 
down Clark’s Fork—of the Yellowstone— 
down both branches of the Stinking Water, 
and down Greybull and Wind River. Some 
of those going east went as far east as the 
Big Horn Mountains and wintered in their 
foothills. 
The antelope never wintered in the Park, 
but went down the Yellowstone River 
toward the lower country. T. E. Hofer 
has spoken of seeing their trails where Liv¬ 
ingston now stands, where at first he 
thought that bands of sevefal thousand 
sheep had passed along. 
Eight or ten years ago, when Col. John 
Pitcher was superintendent of the Yellow¬ 
stone Park, he plowed and sowed alfalfa 
on a flat near Gardiner, to serve as winter 
feed for the antelope, sheep and deer. He 
applied a number of times for authority 
and money to extend this field, and to sow 
other fiats in the bottom of the Yellowstone 
River with alfalfa, which might be har¬ 
vested and stacked and kept from year to 
year to be used for the smaller animals and 
even for the elk of the northern herd in 
case of a hard winter, but this authority 
was never given him. If this had been done 
it would have saved many elk from star¬ 
vation. 
Of the elk in the high mountains to the 
west of the Continental Divide, a part fol¬ 
lowed down the Madison River and its 
valley to, or nearly to, the three forks of 
the Missouri, spreading out over the lower 
country and wintering there. The elk to 
