Part 11

This was written two weeks before I was able to examine one that was in very truth snow-white; and lately, while looking through the books to find what they have to say that may fill out my imperfect knowledge, I have come more than once on the statement that the goat is not pure white, but has a tinge of yellow, or some shade, here and there, that dulls his total sheen. This I conceive to be error. Age, it is possible, may bring a few dark hairs to the white goat. But I should wish to be very sure about this before I asserted it. The sum of my experience is, that first I killed some plainly old male goats (they were off by themselves, no longer with the herd), and of these the coats were dingy; that presently I found a plainly younger male goat (he was lighter in weight and his horns and hoofs showed less wear), and his coat was spotless; and that finally I found the coat of a kid born that same year to be equally spotless. What is the inference--almost the conclusion? Is it not that in the older goats the color was discoloration, from causes external; that by nature the goat is perfectly white; and that the books have gone on reproducing an original mistake which grew from some writer’s having seen only goats that were weather-stained? Oh, the reproduction of error! The way one man’s inaccurate statement is blandly copied down by the next man, and verification shirked at every turn! Why will they do it, these little scientific folk? For the great ones never do. The great ones verify, or else, when they come to a hole in their knowledge, they frankly tell you that they don’t know. They paste no piece of paper over the hole, pretending it’s all solid underneath. But the small fry--the popular magazine size,--these unceasingly are pasting paper. And why? Because they’re not afraid of being found out. They know how few of their readers can discover the holes and poke their fingers through the paper. Don’t you believe me, reader? Does your kind heart repudiate with heat this aspersion? Perhaps--for instance--you’re not aware how some little writers go on deriving the name of a well-known St. Lawrence fish from two French words, _masque allongée_. I would tell you about it, only I did not discover their ludicrous blunder myself; but here’s a hole where I happened to poke my own finger through the paper. During ten years I used every official map of Wyoming that I could procure. First it was a territory, and next a state, but all the while the map-makers continued to draw Pacific Creek as flowing into Buffalo Fork. Now Pacific Creek is a thoroughfare between the two sides of the Continental Divide, and it does not flow into Buffalo Fork, but into Snake River. It was a really bad geographical mistake. Some original map-maker had traced his map on hearsay or guesswork, hadn’t gone down the creek to see for himself, and all his successors faithfully reproduced his ignorance. The people who knew better were merely Indians, prospectors, cowboys, or stray hunters like myself. We didn’t count; _that_ wasn’t being found out!

Pacific Creek being wrong to a certainty, how then about Atlantic Creek, and Thoroughfare, and a good many more? Did these, also, flow one way officially, and actually another? How could I be sure until I had crossed mountains and found them for myself? And how should you, reader, enjoy being condemned to such maps in a country where Indians, and bears, and blizzards prevailed? You will scarce wonder that I grew to place upon those maps the same chastened reliance that I place to-day upon books which tell me that the goat is not strictly white, or that he lives in the Rocky Mountains. You might search a good many hundred miles of Rocky Mountains that have never seen a goat, but which the sheep has frequented since before the memory of man. Here again comes the contrast between the two: having come the same road from Kamchatka, their ranges upon this continent but partially coincide, and even where both animals are established and flourishing in the same zone, their localities within that zone are so capriciously separated as to baffle even the explanation that one drives the other out.

It would seem that they can stand equal cold; both are to be found in Alaska, as might be expected from the manner of their emigration. And beginning with Alaska (one authority, R. Lydekker, “The Royal Natural History,” London, 1898, the best authority I have found for coherence and completeness, names latitude 64° as the northern limit), we find goat and sheep alike plentifully distributed as we come south. But only for a certain distance. If the Northwest be plain like a picture in your mind’s eye, you can recall how in the far North the Cascades and Rockies are intermingled, and how, as we come down through British Columbia to our own soil, they gradually separate, slope apart, so that by the time they reach the latitude of Portland, Oregon, a wide, flat domain lies between them. Both have slanted inland; but while the Cascades are only some hundred and sixty miles from the Pacific coast, the Rockies are away over in Idaho and Montana, and continue to diverge until they sink among the hot sands of the mesquite and the yucca. Now, in Arizona, in the Colorado Cañon for instance, we still find the sheep, and can find him yet farther down in northwest Mexico. But no goat is so far south. The goat stops more than a thousand miles to the north. It seems clear, then, that goat and sheep will inhabit equal cold, but not equal heat.

Where, exactly, does the goat stop? That is something which no book (that I have seen) will tell you. The London book, which I have quoted already, names latitude 40° as the southern limit of his habitat. This is considerably farther south than I have ever heard of him. My knowledge of him goes no farther south than the Saw Tooth Range, which is in Idaho. These sharp ridges nourish the head waters of the Salmon River, and are in the southern-central part of the state. And I am inclined to say, in spite of Mr. Lydekker, but supported by Mr. Arthur Brown, that the Saw Tooth and Salmon River country in Idaho is about the southeastern corner of the goat’s province. Saving stray and accidental individuals, you are not likely to find him beyond that point, south or east. I have never talked with any hunter who had seen him in Wyoming, although (and here again I will re-enforce my own experience with Mr. Brown’s) there seems to be a sort of goat tradition in Wyoming, here and there. This myth is, to be sure, highly sublimated. You don’t hear that goat used to be upon this or that definite mountain, or that So-and-So saw a man who saw a goat, or whose wife or uncle saw one; it never comes as near you as that; yet still faintly in the air of the Continental Divide there hovers this vague rumor of the animal.

If he was ever in Wyoming as a domiciled resident, who shall say why he departed? Why is he not to-day upon the Washakie Needle, or in the abrupt country where heads Green River, or among the formidable Tetons, since to-day he is but a little farther west of the Tetons, in the Saw Tooth Range? And why, if man (or sheep) drove him from these Wyoming peaks, has he not been driven from the peaks of Idaho? Difference in neither heat, nor cold, nor humidity, nor accessibility, can be the explanation, for there is no difference; and as for difference in food, I find no suggestion of it in the pages of the authorities.

“What they eat in winter is a mystery. But it must be the little knobs of moss that grow at the edges of the steep rocks on top, where the snow cannot lie. They never come down into the valleys, as the mountain sheep do when the snow grows deep up above.”

This is no authority, but merely my camp notebook again; and the statement that the goat is never, like the sheep, driven to low pastures by the snow is but the popular account of him that I was able to gather from the inhabitants--the prospectors, the trappers--of the mountains where I hunted him. Yet it is interesting; and if generally true, it may furnish some clue to the capricious local separations between sheep and goat in the zone of their common habitat. But if the goat cannot, when the weather would drive him down, subsist upon the less lofty growths that then satisfy the sheep, you will remark how truly unlike the real goat is this narrow discrimination as to diet.

It is surprising, indeed, that at this late day, when investigation and verification are so easy, no naturalist seems anywhere to have written a plain, complete paragraph answering the plain, natural question: In what states and territories does the white goat live? It would seem the naturalist’s business to tell us this. We have the right to expect to open some single standard book, and find such facts at once. Well, I have had to open eight, gathering here a fact and there a fact in a manner not unlike the painful process of rag-picking. The result is far from covering the ground; let me acknowledge this, and beg friendly correction and amplification,--and let me say, nevertheless, that the following is the most detailed information to be found so far set down in any one place.

In Alaska and British Columbia we find the goat, and in northwest Montana, and in Idaho, but only in spots; he is also in the northern Cascades in Washington, but, oddly enough it appears, not in the Olympic Range. Nor is he in the southern Cascades, in Oregon. Elsewhere he is not, unless possibly in California. There is an ancient legend of him among the higher mountains of that state; the Spanish Padre de Salvatierra and his fellow-missionary, Padre Piccolo, are supposed to have seen him. We must uselessly wonder if they did; and I should have been more indebted to a foot-note in the “Biological Survey of Mount Shasta,” which touches upon the goat’s habitat in Oregon and Washington, were it not wholly silent as to the animal’s presence or absence, past or present, in the state of California.

The farther we follow the story of the white goat, the more do we find his steps attended with the mists of confusion; and for the gloomy critic this would be a timely moment to write some sentences about the longevity of error. But it all came out right in the end; and we will get to the facts at once, and how I first began to meet the stream of uncertainty of which the fountain-source lies in the old romantic pages of Lewis and Clark.

A while ago I spoke of a goat tradition in Wyoming. Now it was not until the fall of 1889 that I believed there was such a thing as this goat anywhere. I thought--I could not then say why--that the unlettered mountaineers and plainsmen, whose talk I heard, were speaking of the sheep; and, also, they contradicted each other in a way so curious and persistent that the animal became in a manner fabulous to me, like the unicorn, or the wool-bearing horse. Now I would meet the assurance that “over there somewhere,” among the mountains near the Pacific, a snow-white goat lived, with long hair; again, I would meet a positive denial of this. Some sceptical old trapper or prospector would proclaim that he “guessed he had been most everywhere,” and nobody could “fool him about no goat” with long hair. Indeed, when I at last laid my own goat trophies, heads and hides, before the eyes of my old friend John Yancey of the Yellowstone Park, they gave him a genuine sensation. He had wasted small faith in any tales of goat. He stared at them, he touched them, he lifted them, he could not get over it; they caused me to rise in his esteem, and he refused to believe that circumventing a mountain sheep is a far more skilful exploit. He, too, like myself, had supposed that in some way this notion about goats could be traced to mountain sheep, and that they were one and the same animal. I found this error spread eastward to great cities.

In the front hall of a certain club there used to hang--and still hangs, for all I know--the head of a white goat. I stood near it one day in 1894 or 1895, while two gentlemen were looking at it. One had hunted in our West, and was asked by the other what animal this was. He replied with certainty, “A mountain sheep.” It was no business of mine, and I did not correct him. But how inveterate and singular was the confusion! for these two wild animals do not resemble each other a particle more than do their domestic namesakes. In the hall of the club that day I did not know that, ninety years before, the self-same blunder had been made and written down for the first time, and that we were still inheriting its consequences.

On September twenty-six, 1805, Meriwether Lewis, quite inconveniently sick, was, with his equally inconveniently sick comrades, camped for the purpose of building canoes. They lay at the confluence of the north fork with the main stream of that river which Idaho now most often calls the Clearwater, and which the Indians then called the Kooskooskee. They had come overland a great way--two thousand miles--walking and riding. They had lately been high among the cold snows, and they were now abruptly plunged in the flat climate of the plains. Heat and the copious new food made every mother’s son of them ill. But a few days before this, and they had been sparingly serving out rations of horse flesh to keep together soul and body; now the Indians have given them all the salmon they can swallow, and taught them to eat the camass, a precarious vegetable. In the language of Doctor Coues (the admirable annotator of the 1894 edition, one can hardly imagine a better and honester piece of work): “Having been neither frozen nor starved quite to death--having survived camass roots, tartar emetic, and Rush’s pills (the famous Dr. Rush of Philadelphia,) the explorers have reached navigable Columbian waters.…” I could quote from this splendid book forever. It is our American Robinson Crusoe. Somebody, no doubt, will grind it into a historical novel; but no novel, no matter how big a sale it has, can spoil the journal of Lewis and Clark. Well, at this sick camp, while they’re making ready to float to Astoria, enter the white goat. It is his first recorded appearance.

Says Gass: “There appears to be a kind of sheep in this country, besides the ibex or mountain sheep, and which have wool on. I saw some of the skins, which the natives had, with wool four inches long, and as fine, white, and soft as any I had ever seen.”

Here, you perceive, is the error, appearing simultaneously with the goat.

These sheep “live,” says the text in another place, “in greater numbers on that chain of mountains which forms the commencement of the woody country on the coast and passes the Columbia between the falls and rapids.” Accurate in everything save the name.

Next comes the observation (William Dunbar and Dr. Hunter) written on the Columbia River near the Dalles: “We here saw the skin of a mountain sheep, which they say lives among the rocks in the mountains; the skin was covered with white hair; the wool was long, thick, and coarse, with long, coarse hair on the top of the neck and on the back, resembling somewhat the bristles of a goat.”

This time, you see, they are on the very edge of getting the thing straight. But no; they recede again, after the following which seems to promise complete clearing up:--

“A Canadian, who had been much with the Indians to the westward, speaks of a wool-bearing animal larger than a sheep, the wool much mixed with hair, which he had seen in large flocks.”

April ten, 1806, the party is on its return journey. It has successfully wintered on the coast, and has now come up the Columbia again, fifty miles above Vancouver.

“While we were at breakfast one of the Indians offered us two sheepskins for sale; … the second was smaller … with the horns remaining.… The horns of the animal were black, smooth, and erect; they rise from the middle of the forehead, a little above the eyes, in a cylindrical form, to the height of four inches, where they are pointed.”

Here there is no mistake about the mistake; he describes a goat and calls it a sheep. Why he should do this when he had seen the bighorn constantly during his journey up the Missouri may possibly be thus explained: He says that he did not think the bighorn much like a sheep, and so, perhaps, the goat did not strike him as much like a goat; we know it happens to be an antelope. But however we account for this original mixing of names, it is easy to perceive how good a start the mixing got; and after reading the text of the old confusion, is it not odd and interesting to trace it down through the years, down through Yancey, to the front hall of the club? to find it cropping up among all sorts and conditions of men, now in a city and now on top of the Wind River Mountains, where it used to perplex me?

And this is only the popular side of it; the scholars have been just as mixed as Yancey. The scientific side of the story is picturesquely seen through the dynasty of Latin names successively lavished upon the goat.

The country at large first heard of the goat in 1806, when Thomas Jefferson accompanied his message to Congress about Lewis and Clark’s exploration with various documents, and among these the observations of William Dunbar and Dr. Hunter. Nine years later the eminent George Ord gave to the animal his first academic baptism, and he appeared as _Ovis montana_. Pretty soon M. de Blainville seems to have called him _Antilope americana_, and _Rupicapra americana_. By 1817 he was known as _Mazama Sericea_--which is wandering pretty wide of the family. Four years more, and he is plain Rocky Mountain sheep. Next follow _Capra montana_, _Antilope lanigera_, _Capra Americana_, and _Haplocerus montanus_. This last was beginning to look permanent, when it was discovered that somebody had for some time been styling the goat by a well-devised appellation, to wit, _Oreamnus montanus_. He goes by that now; and it may be doubted if any thief has more frequently employed an alias than this probably blameless animal. Such is the story of the confusion begun--we can only guess why--by Lewis and Clark, and not cleared up until our own day.

The goat is an animal far less wary than the sheep. His watch is concentrated upon approaches from below. All the hunter has to do is to get above him, to make at once for the summit of the ridge which he proposes to hunt, and the unsuspecting creature will never give you a thought. Upon my word, it is inexcusable to kill him, except for a specimen in a collection; he is so handsome, so harmless, and so stupid! And in his remoter haunts, where the nature of man is still a closed book to him, he “thinketh no evil”; he will stand looking at the hunter with a sedate interest in his large, deep brown eyes. The tenderfoot sportsman, it seems, will generally make his beginnings as a maniac. Suddenly confronted with a herd of wild animals, he frantically pumps his repeating rifle, hypnotized by the glut of destruction. Luckily, he is apt, in his excitement, to miss. His desire is for no one special trophy, but for a hot killing of all in sight. If we are not to blame him for this flare of blind brute instinct, for heaven’s sake don’t let us praise the performance! The best that can possibly be said for it is to call it the seamy side of masculinity; and the seamy side of masculinity fits cowardice like a glove. I am speaking from the sinner’s bench; and long back in the years (not so long materially, but miles and miles every other way) I see one or two spots of shame. To-day, my wish is to photograph the game, and let him go his way in peace.

With my rifle I carried a kodak among the goats. The kodak and the rifle made a discomfortable pair now and then. For instance:--

“_Saturday twelfth_ (November) four and one-half hours’ climb up opposite ridge, so as to get above goat seen yesterday. Snow six and eight inches deep on top.” This was a day that I carried both instruments, and the rocks continually required the use of both hands. Well, I got the goat that I wanted with my rifle. I took the kodak home with one hundred pictures of my very long, hard, interesting journey. It was the year that the company’s films were bad, and I drew one hundred blanks; there was not the semblance of an image upon a single one. The same mischance had attended the Greely expedition, and I had not travelled as far as they did; so you see my mouth must utter no complaints. No; my mileage fell short of the Greely expedition; but no goat will ever tempt me through such adventures again. Alas, that a man should come to shrink from discomforts which once--but let me tell you about some of them.

Because nothing but good fellowship and kindness were shown me there, I suppress the name of the town at the railroad’s end where I waited from Saturday till Monday for the north-bound stage. It was Saturday, October ninth, my journal reminds me.

“They gave me a room.… I was glad to see as little of it as possible. I washed in the public trough and basin which stood in the office between the saloon and the dining room; and I spent my time either in the saloon watching a game of poker that never ceased, or in wandering about in the world outside. A Chinaman named Madden … played poker and of course lost to his American friends, … swearing in the most ludicrous jargon.… Yet he was good-natured … the men seemed to like him … at night he returned to the never ending game and lost some more.… I went to my room to go to bed, turned down the bed clothes, and saw there, not what I feared, but cockroaches to the number of several thousand, I should think. They scampered frantically, jostling each other like any other crowd. Then I lifted one pillow and watched more cockroaches hurry under the neighboring pillow for shelter. Then I saw that the walls, ceiling, and floor were all quivering and sparkling with cockroaches. So I told the landlord downstairs. I said that if he had no other room, I would throw my camp blankets on the office table and sleep there if he had no objection. He was sympathetic, and explained that the cockroaches must have come up from the kitchen which was below my room. This was Saturday night, and every Saturday night the cook put powder in the kitchen; so that must have sent them up. This explanation was given me in a voice full of condolence. And I replied that very likely this was how they came and that sleeping in bed with so many at a time would be impossible. He entirely agreed with me. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘cockroaches is hell.’ …

“So I unrolled my blankets and the landlord helped me make my bed on his office table, lifting the inkstands and newspapers for me.… I went to sleep, hearing the game of poker in the adjoining room, the gobbling of Madden when he lost, and the hoarse merriment of the other men at his gibberish.

“_Sunday.…_ This morning the game was still going on, but Madden had retired about four o’clock a loser. The bar-tender, sweeping the office, waked me, and I arose and made a toilet, as usual, in the public trough.”

The retrospect fills me with merriment--and regret that it’s all over for ever and ever; and the goat does not live for whose sake I would do it again.