Part 7

“The moment that the buffalo is dead, three or four hunters, their faces and hands often covered with gunpowder, and with pipes lighted, place the animal on its belly, and, by drawing out each fore and hind leg, fix the body so that it cannot fall again; an incision is made near the root of the tail, immediately above the root in fact, and the skin cut to the neck, and taken off in the roughest manner imaginable, downward and on both sides at the same time. The knives are going in all directions, and many wounds occur in the hands and fingers, but are rarely attended to at this time. The pipe of one man has perhaps given out, and with his bloody hands he takes the one of his nearest companion, who has his own hands equally bloody. Now one breaks in the skull of the bull, and with bloody fingers draws out the hot brains and swallows them with peculiar zest; another has now reached the liver, and is gobbling down enormous pieces of it; while perhaps a third, who has come to the paunch, is feeding luxuriously on some--to me--disgusting-looking offal. But the main business proceeds. The flesh is taken off from the sides of the boss, or hump bones, from where these bones begin to the very neck, and the hump itself is thus destroyed. The hunters gave the name of ‘hump’ to the mere bones when slightly covered by flesh; and it is cooked, and is very good when fat, young, and well broiled. The pieces of flesh taken from the sides of these bones are called _filets_, and are the best portion of the animal when properly cooked. The forequarters, or shoulders, are taken off, as well as the hind ones, and the sides, covered by a thin portion of flesh, called the dépouillé, are taken out. Then the ribs are broken off at the vertebræ, as well as the boss bones. The marrow-bones, which are those of the fore and hind legs only, are cut out last. The feet usually remain attached to these; the paunch is stripped of its covering of layers of fat, the head and backbone are left to the wolves. The pipes are all emptied, the hands, faces, and clothes all bloody, and now a glass of grog is often enjoyed, as the stripping off the skin and flesh of three or four animals is truly very hard work.… When the wind is high, and the buffaloes run toward it, the hunters’ guns often snap, and it is during their exertions to replenish their pans that the powder flies and sticks to the moisture every moment accumulating on their faces; but nothing stops these daring and usually powerful men, who, the moment the chase is ended, leap from their horses, let them graze, and begin their butcher-like work.”

The Indian and the half-breed killed the buffalo for their support,--for food, clothing, shelter, and many of their implements. The civilized buffalo skinner exterminated it for its hides. There was another class which did something toward wiping out the buffalo, yet the numbers killed by them were inconsiderable in comparison with those killed for commercial purposes. This class comprised those who ran buffalo for sport. Buffalo-running was not a difficult art, nor especially exciting, except so far as it is exciting to chase and overtake some creature that is trying to escape. Provided a man had a good horse and was fairly accustomed to riding, there was little difficulty and little danger in the buffalo chase. At the same time, the combination of the swift ride, the rough country, the dust and dirt thrown up by the flying herd, and the close proximity of the great beasts have reduced many a buffalo runner on his first chase to a pitch of nervousness which made him do precisely the wrong thing. There have been cases, not a few, where riders, trying to kill buffalo with a pistol, have shot their own horses instead of the buffalo; and at least one case came to my knowledge where the excited hunter, riding up on the right instead of the left side of the bull, and shooting across his own body, managed to shoot himself in the left arm.

There was something rather exhilarating in the headlong ride after buffalo, a game not unlike “follow my leader,” which boys play, where the leader chooses the roughest and most difficult ground over which he can pass, and the follower is obliged to take the same route. But buffalo-hunting is now a sport of the distant past, and it is needless to speak of it at any length.

In the days of its abundance the buffalo was a most impressive species, and their enormous numbers have been a theme on which many writers have delighted to linger. Adjectives have failed them to describe the multitudes of buffalo seen, and it was not unusual for men to travel long distances among great herds, which made slow way for them as they passed along. Many calculations have been made of the numbers of buffalo seen at one time; but, after all, these can be little more than guesswork. Terms like thousands and millions, so commonly used, have little or no meaning, for we have no standard of comparison by which to measure them. All the earlier writers, however graphic their descriptions of their numbers, fail to impress the reader, because no one could comprehend such numbers except by seeing them. Dr. Allen, Mr. Hornaday, Colonel Dodge, and many of the old explorers, give much matter bearing on this subject. A few lines from the Journal of Alexander Henry give some idea of their numbers on the Red River. He says, under date of September 18, 1800: “I took my usual morning view from the top of my oak, and saw more buffalo than ever. They formed one body, commencing about half a mile from camp, whence the plain was covered on the west side of the river as far as the eye could reach. They were moving slowly southward, and the meadow seemed as if in motion. This afternoon I rode a few miles up Park River. The few spots of wood along it have been ravaged by buffalo; none but the large trees are standing, the barks of which are rubbed perfectly smooth, and heaps of wool and hair lie at the foot of the trees. The small wood and brush are entirely destroyed, and even the grass is not permitted to grow in the points of the wood. The bare ground is more trampled by these cattle than the gate of the farm yard.”

Even in recent times one might journey for days at a time through herds, which to the eye seemed absolutely to cover a blackened prairie, and I myself have travelled for weeks through the Northwest without, at any time during the day, being out of sight of buffalo. How many millions there were in the great herds through which we used to pass, it is useless now to compute. They have all gone. But over a vast extent of the western country they have left memorials still visible and long to endure in the deep trails which furrow the prairie in all directions.

Other mementos still to be seen, and stirring the heart of the old-timer, though to the man of to-day they are without a meaning, are the huge erratic boulders which lie here and there over the prairie where they were dropped by the great ice mass in its passage down from the highland. Against such boulders the buffalo used to rub their bodies, and such masses of granite or of flinty quartzite, polished and with their sharp angles worn away by the rubbing against them of the tough hides, may often be seen. About such a rock, deep worn in the ground, is the trench, where the bulls and the cows and the younger animals once marched as they pushed their sides against the hard rock, their hoofs cutting the soil into fine dust to be blown away by the wind. The angles of these old rubbing-stones are still discolored by the grease left on them from the buffalo’s skins, and looking at them, one might fancy that they had been used only yesterday.

Here, then, are monuments of imperishable granite, fashioned by a race of dumb creatures, and telling to him who can read their sculpturing a long story of life and power and multitude forever gone. From earliest time man has set up all over the earth his enduring memorials to hold the wonder of later ages; but of the races of the beasts, which one has done this, save only the bison?

AMERICAN BISON

(BOS BISON[6])

The great elevation of the forequarters, the mass of long hair clothing the head, shoulders, and fore part of the body, together with the peculiar form of the head and horns, the latter of which are cylindrical, serve at once to distinguish the bison from the other members of the ox tribe. Some of the points distinguishing the American bison from its European cousin are that the mass of hair on the fore quarters is longer, the form of the skull is different, the horns are shorter, thicker, blunter, and more sharply curved. In the skull of the American animal the sockets of the eyes have a more tubular form.

Height at shoulder about 6 feet; weight from 15 to 20 hundredweight; an adult bull weighed by W. T. Hornaday scaled 1727 pounds.

_Distribution._--The greater portion of western North America, ascending to the Great Slave Lake, and descending to New Mexico and Texas; now nearly exterminated. American writers recognize two races (or species), the prairie bison (_B. bison typicus_) and the larger wood bison (_B. bison athabascæ_) of the forest highlands of the northwest.

MEASUREMENTS OF HORNS

=======+=======+======+=======+=================+================= LENGTH | | | | | ON |CIRCUM-|TIP TO|WIDEST | | OUTSIDE|FERENCE| TIP |INSIDE | LOCALITY | OWNER CURVE | | |SPREAD | | -------+-------+------+-------+-----------------+----------------- --21½ | 15¼ | .. | 35 |Northern Montana |W. F. Sheard | | |outside| | | | | | | 20⅞ | 15 | .. | 30½ |Wyoming |Hon. F. | | | | | Thellusson | | | | | --20¼ | 16⅛ | 33½ | .. | ? |W. H. Root | | | | | --19 | 12½ | .. | .. |Western Montana |P. Liebinger | | | | | 18⅞ | 14¾ | .. | 16⅞ |Western Montana |The late J. S. | | | | | Jameson | | | | | --18¼ | 14 | 26¼ | 29 |Sioux Country |Sir Greville | | | | | Smyth, Bart. | | | | | --18 | 14 | .. | .. |Montana |F. Sauter | | | | | 17¾ | 12⅜ | 15⅛ | .. | ? |H.R.H. the Duke | | | | | of Saxe-Coburg | | | | | and Gotha | | | | | --17½ | 12½ | .. | .. |Southwestern |Theodore | | | | Montana | Roosevelt | | | | | 17½ | 12 | .. | 25½ |Wyoming |H.R.H. le Duc | | | | | d’Orléans | | | | | 17½ | 13½ | 21 | .. | ? |Viscount | | | | | Powerscourt | | | | | 17⅛ | 11⅜ | 10⅜ | 17⅛ | ? |British Museum | | | | | --17 | 14 | 17½ | .. |Yellowstone, |Count E. Hoyos | | | | Montana | | | | | | 16⅝ | 14¼ | 24 | .. |Bighorn Mts., |Moreton Frewen[7] | | | | Wyoming | | | | | | 16½ | 12½ | 19⅜ | .. |Colorado |Sir Edmund G. | | | | | Loder, Bart. | | | | | 16¼ | 13½ | 14¼ | .. | ? |Duke of Portland | | | | | 16⅛ | 15⅞ | 25¾ | .. |Colorado |Sir Edmund G. | | | | | Loder, Bart. | | | | | 15½ | 14⅜ | .. | 19¾ |Wyoming |St. George | | | | | Littledale | | | | | --15.8 | 12.14 | 15 | .. |Indian Territory,|Prince Henry of | | | | near Texas | Liechtenstein | | | | | 14 | .. | 12¼ | .. |North Park, |Col. Ralph Vivian | | | | Colorado | | | | | | 13½ | 13½ | 17½ | .. | ? |G. Wrey | | | | | 13⅜ | 12 | .. | .. | ? |Hon. Walter | | | | | Rothschild =======+=======+======+=======+=================+=================

THE MOUNTAIN SHEEP: HIS WAYS

BY OWEN WISTER

Upon a Sunday morning, the 10th of July 1892, I awaked among my scanty yet entangling Pullman blankets, and persuaded the broken-springed window-shade of my lower berth to slide upward sufficiently for a view of Livingston, Montana. Outside I beheld with something more than pleasure a fat and flourishing mountain ram. He was tethered to a telegraph pole, and he scanned with an indifference bred by much familiarity our sleeping-car, which had come from St. Paul, being dropped last night from the coast-bound train, because it was this morning to trundle its load of tourists up the Yellowstone Park branch to Cinnabar. The ram had been looking at Eastern tourists and their cars long enough for the slow gaze of his eye to express not a kindred but the same contempt which smouldered in the stare of the Indians at Custer station, of the cow punchers at Billings, of every Rocky Mountain creature, indeed, beneath whose observation the Eastern tourist passes. Dear reader, go stand opposite the lion at the zoo if you don’t know what I mean. So patent was the stigma cast that it fantastically came into my head to step down and explain to the animal that I was not a tourist, that I had hunted and slain members of his species before now, and should probably do so again. And while thus I sat speculating among the Pullman blankets, the ram leaped irrelevantly off the earth, waved his fore legs, came down, ran a tilt at the telegraph pole as though at a quintain, and the next instant was grazing serene on the flat with an air of having had no connection whatever with the late disturbance.

What had started him off like that? Extreme youth? No; for when I came to hear about him, he was five years old--a maturity corresponding in us men to about thirty. It was simply his own charming temperament. No locomotive had approached; moreover for locomotives he, as I was later to observe, did not care a hang; no citizen old or young of either sex had given him offence; nor was there stir of any kind in Livingston, Montana, this fine early Sunday morning. When I presently stood on the platform, only the wind was blowing down from the sunny snow-fields, and that not bleakly, while from high invisible directions came thinly a pleasant tankling of cow-bells.

Not two minutes had I been on the platform when the ram did it again. Yes, it was merely his charming temperament; and often since, very often, when encompassed with ponderous acquaintance, have I envied him his blithe and relaxing privilege. I was now thankful to learn that the branch train had still some considerable time to wait for the train from Tacoma, before it could take me from the ram’s company; no such good chance to watch a live healthy mountain sheep on his own native heath was likely again to be mine, and after breakfast I sought his owner at once.

“It’s a fine dy,” said the owner.

“And a very fine ram,” I assured him.

“He’s quite tyme,” the owner went on. “You can have him for five hundred.”

“You’re a long way from London,” was my comment; and he asked if I, too, were English. But I was not, nor had I any wish to bear away the ram, skipping and leaping into civilization.

Three hundred pounds would, I suppose, have been a little heavier than he was, but not much; he stood near as high as my waist, and he had at some period of his long, long ancestry marched across to us from Asia upon his lengthy un-sheeplike legs--skipped over the icy straits before Adam (let alone Behring) was in the world, and while the straits themselves waited for the splitting sea to break the bridge of land between Kamchatka and Alaska. This is the best guess which science can make concerning our sheep’s mysterious origin. Upon our soil, none of nature’s graveyards hold his bones preserved until late in the geological day; earlier than the glacial period neither he nor his equally anomalous comrade, the white goat, would seem to have been with us; and we may comfortably suppose that sheep and goat took up their journey together and came over the great old Aleutian bridge which Behring found later in fragments. Having landed up there in the well-nigh Polar north, they skipped their way east and south among our Pacific and Rocky Mountains, until, by the time we ourselves came over to live in the North American continent, they had--the sheep especially--spread themselves widely, and were occupying a handsome domain when we met them.

“Among other things we procured two horns of the animal … known to the Mandans by the name of ahsahta … winding like those of a ram.”

This, so far as I know, is the first word of the mountain sheep recorded by an American. Thus wrote Lewis on December the twenty-second, 1804, being then in winter camp with the Mandan Indians, not many miles up the river from where to-day the Northern Pacific’s bridge joins Bismarck to Mandan. We find him again, on the twenty-fifth of the May following, when he has proceeded up the Missouri a little beyond the Musselshell, writing, “In the course of the day we also saw several herds of the big-horned animals among the steep cliffs on the north, and killed several of them;” as to which one of his fellow explorers correctly comments in his own record, “But they very little resemble sheep, except in the head, horns, and feet.” It is not worth while to quote a later reference made when the party was near the Dearborn River, north, sixty miles or so, of where now stands the town of Helena.

Thus it is to be seen that Meriwether Lewis, private secretary to President Jefferson and commander of that great expedition, met the mountain sheep in Dakota, and from there to the Rocky Mountains grew familiar with him; though not so familiar as to prevent his later making a confusion between sheep and goats, which, being handed down, delayed for many years a clear knowledge of these animals. To this I shall return when goats are in question.

Until very lately, until the eighties, that is to say, sheep were still to be found in plenty where Meriwether Lewis found them among the Bad Lands of Dakota; and they dwelt in most ranges of the Western mountains from Alaska to Sonora. They had not taken to the peaks exclusively then; the great table-land was high enough for them. I very well recall a drive in July, 1885, when, from the wagon in which I sat, I saw a little band of them watching us pass, in a country of sage-brush and buttes so insignificant as not to figure as hills upon the map. That was between Medicine Bow and the Platte River. To meet the bighorn there to-day would be a very extraordinary circumstance; and as for Dakota, there too has civilization arrived; and you will find divorces commoner than sheep--and less valuable.

It is Gass whom I have cited above as to the scant likeness between this wild so-called sheep and the usual sheep of our experience; and it was Gass whose word I remembered this Sunday morning at Livingston, while I stood taking my fill of observation. The ram, as his owner had assured me, was in all truth quite “tyme”; and you could examine him as near as you wished. I took hold of his rope and pulled him to me, and rubbed his nose. Like a sheep? I have already spoken of his long legs. I now looked him over carefully for a sign of anything in the nature of fleece. There was no sign. Short hair, in texture not unlike the antelope’s and in color not far from that gray we see in fishing-line, covered him close and thick. Upon his neck and shoulders it merged with a very light reddish brown, and on his rump it became a patch much lighter, though not white. In fact, the hue of his coat varied subtly all over him; and I am tempted to remark in this connection that in describing the color of wild animals most of us have been apt to make our assertions far too rigid. Animals there are, of course, completely white, or black, and so forth; but many, the more you scrutinize them, the more reveal gradations, as this ram did; gray fishing-tackle is only a rough impression of his tint upon the 10th of July; on December the 1st of that same year I saw him again, and his hair had darkened to something like a Maltese cat’s. Furthermore, I have seen other sheep in summer that struck me, some as lighter, and some as darker, than the gray of fishing-tackle. And what, shall we infer, do these variations import? Adjustments to climate and environment, state of the individual’s age and health, or several distinct species of sheep? I think I should be shy of the last inference unless I were prepared to accept a difference in the color of the eyes and hair of two brothers as being a basis sufficient to class them as separate subspecies of man. It is a dear thought to many of us that some mountain, some lake, some river, some street, or even (rather than nothing at all) some alley, shall be labelled with our name, and thus bear it down the ages; and from this very human craving our zoölogists are not wholly exempt; but I have been taught to doubt that of the mountain sheep, the _Ovis canadensis_[8] (or _Ovis cervina_, as some books still have it), more than one or two subdivisions will prove, in the end, valid enlargements of our knowledge. These are _Ovis dalli_,[9] a white variety in central Alaska, north of latitude 60°, and (perhaps) _Ovis stonei_,[10] a dark variety with horns more slender and outward curving, in Alaska and North British Columbia. The four other would-be subspecies have been set down as _Ovis canadensis auduboni_, _Ovis nelsoni_,[11] _Ovis mexicana_,[12] and _Ovis fannini_.[13] These four may be considered not so much varieties of sheep as works of fiction.