June, 1918 
FOREST AND STREAM 
337 
the south of the Continental Divide, those, 
for example, in the Heart Lake, Lewis Lake 
and Shoshoni Lake country, made their au¬ 
tumnal journey southward along the Snake 
River, a part of them crossing over the 
divide between the Snake River and Green 
River, at various low points, following down 
the tributaries of Green River, and thence 
working down eastward into the extensive 
sage brush covered flats and bad land coun¬ 
try of the Red Desert, and east and south 
of that. Here in the various sheltered 
places—Bates’s Hole and Goshen Hole were 
two of them well to the eastward—the elk 
wintered in great numbers. Thousands of 
them were found in many warm sheltered 
making a well beaten road. Most of the 
tracks were large and we believed that they 
were made by old bulls, which, after the 
close of the rutting season, had gone off by 
themselves to rest and recuperate before 
starting on the journey that they knew they 
were to make. 
The number of these individual trails, 
plainly ‘visible on the hillside and often 
traceable through the glasses for a long 
distance, was astonishing, and all the elk 
headed southward for the lower country, 
where food was plenty, where the snow was 
less deep, and where for uncounted genera¬ 
tions the elk of this part of the Rocky 
Mountains had spent the winter. 
began to come in and pasture their flocks 
on the Red Desert. And this was the be¬ 
ginning of the end for that part of the elks' 
wintering ground. 
For some years before this a few pros¬ 
pectors had been searching for gold on the * 
tributaries of Snake River and finding none. 
A little later an occasional settler appeared 
on Snake River and its tributaries, southerly 
from Jackson’s Lake, and cut some hay 
there. So long as they were few in num¬ 
ber, they killed only such meat as they 
needed as the elk herds passed, but after 
ten or a dozen years, the settlers had so in¬ 
creased that they put up fences which abso¬ 
lutely barred the old migratory road to the 
All the trails converging toward the easiest way through the country, making a well-beaten road in search of food 
places of limited area where food was abun¬ 
dant and the situation favorable. 
One autumn while these conditions pre¬ 
vailed, I traveled in mid-September through 
the country south of the Yellowstone Park, 
and witnessed the beginnings of the indi¬ 
vidual migration southward by the elk. 
The ground was covered with snow, and 
the cold at night was bitter. All the quiet 
water was deeply frozen and in the morning 
as we set out with our packs the late fall 
flowers were stiff and shrunken, though as 
the sun rose and the air became warmer 
these blossoms again took on their ordinary 
appearance. All along the valleys through 
which we rode and down from the hills 
that rose on either side, were the trails 
where single elk had passed during the 
night, all the trails converging toward the 
easiest way through the country, and at last 
This was in old times. In the middle 8o’s 
the ranchers had begun to come in to all 
the lower plains country; the over-stocked 
ranges had been fed off, and the catttle no 
longer fattened as they used to and were 
gradually moved away, and the old free 
range was transferred in part to the high 
country of the Laramie plains and west¬ 
ward and in part to country further north. 
This brought in people to the high country 
to the west—not too many, of course,—but 
enough to interfere to some degree with 
the winter range of the elk. Moreover, 
after a little while, people from Northern 
Colorado began to make journeys each au¬ 
tumn up to this warm country, “to kill their 
winter’s meat.” A very few years of this— 
two or three if I recollect it—cleaned out 
all the elk that wintered in Bates’s Hole. 
About this time, in the 8o’s, the sheepmen 
species whose ancesters had used it since 
the elk began. 
Then began starvation for the elk. Food 
was covered deep with snow, of, if the 
ground was bare the passing herds gnawed 
off all edible vegetation, so that those which 
followed them found nothing to eat. What 
happened after that has been told hundreds 
of times and has been illustrated by hun¬ 
dreds of photographs. The elk photo¬ 
graphed in Jackson Hole are the concen¬ 
trated elk of the southern part of the Park. 
They have come so far and can go no far¬ 
ther. 
During the last few years the State of 
Wyoming and the Federal Government have 
bought a hay farm or two and have pur¬ 
chased hay from the settlers about Jackson 
to feed the elk. In some years the death 
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