Part 26

PRIMITIVE HUNTING.

At many points in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas the Indians were formerly great sheep hunters, and largely depended on this game for their flesh food. That it was easily hunted in primitive times cannot be doubted, and is easily comprehended when we remember the testimony of white observers already quoted. In certain places in the foothills of the mountains, or in more or less isolated ranges in Utah, Nevada, Montana, and other sections, the Indians used to beat the mountains, driving the sheep up to the summits, where concealed bowmen might kill them. On the summits of certain ranges which formerly were great resorts for sheep, I have found hiding places built of slabs of the trachyte which forms the mountain, which were used by the Indians for this purpose in part, as, later, they were also used by the scouting warrior as shelters and lookout stations from which a wide extent of plain might be viewed. The sheep on the prairie or on the foothills of such ranges, if alarmed, would of course climb to the summit, and there would be shot with stone-headed arrows.

Mr. Muir has seen such shelters in Nevada, and he tells us also that the Indians used to build corrals or pounds with diverging wings, somewhat like those used for the capture of antelope and buffalo on the plains, and that they drove the sheep into these corrals, about which, no doubt, men, women, and children were secreted, ready to destroy the game.

Certain tribes made a practice of building converging fences and driving the sheep toward the angle of these fences, where hunters lay in wait to kill them, as elsewhere mentioned by Mr. Hofer. In fact, sheep in those old times shared with all the other animals of the prairie that tameness to which I have often adverted in writing on this subject, and which now seems so remarkable.

The Bannocks and Sheep Eaters depended for their food very largely on sheep. In fact, the Sheep Eaters are reported to have killed little else, whence their name. Both these tribes hunted more or less in disguise, and wore on the head and shoulders the skin and horns of a mountain sheep's head, the skin often being drawn about the body, and the position assumed a stooping one, so as to simulate the animal with a considerable closeness. The legs, which were uncovered, were commonly rubbed with white or gray clay, and certain precautions were used to kill the human odor.

A Cheyenne Indian told me of an interesting happening witnessed by his grandfather very many years ago. A war party had set out to take horses from the Shoshone. One morning just at sunrise the fifteen or sixteen men were traveling along on foot in single file through a deep canon of the mountains, when one of them spied on a ledge far above them the head and shoulders of a great mountain sheep which seemed to be looking over the valley. He pointed it out to his fellows, and as they walked along they watched it. Presently it drew back, and a little later appeared again further along the ledges, and stood there on the verge. As the Indians watched, they suddenly saw shoot out from another ledge above the sheep a mountain lion, which alighted on the sheep's neck, and both animals fell whirling over the cliff and struck the slide rock below. The fall was a long one, and the Cheyennes, feeling sure that the sheep had been killed, either by the fall or by the lion, rushed forward to secure the meat. When they reached the spot the lion was hobbling off with a broken leg, and one of them shot it with his arrow, and when they made ready to skin the sheep, they saw to their astonishment that it was not a sheep, but a man wearing the skin and horns of a sheep. He had been hunting, and his bow and arrows were wrapped in the skin close to his breast. The fall had killed him. From the fashion of his hair and his moccasins they knew that he was a Bannock.

A reference to the hunting methods of the Sheep Eaters reminds one very naturally of that pursued by the Blackfeet, when sheep were needed, for their skins or for their flesh. These animals were abundant about the many buttes which rise out of the prairie on the flanks of the Rocky Mountains, in what is now Montana, and when disturbed retreated to the heights for safety.

Hugh Monroe, a typical mountain man of the old time, who reached Fort Edmonton in the year 1813, and died in 1893, after eighty years spent upon the prairie in close association with the Indians, has often told me of the Blackfoot method of securing sheep when their skins were needed for women's dresses. On such an occasion a large number of the men would ride out from the camp to the neighborhood of one of these buttes, and on their approach the sheep, which had been feeding on the prairie, slowly retreated to the heights above. The Indians then spread out, encircling the butte by a wide ring of horsemen, and sending three or four young men to climb its heights, awaited results. When the men sent up on the butte had reached its summit, they pursued the sheep over its limited area, and drove them down to the prairie below, where the mounted men chased and killed them. In this way large numbers of sheep were procured.

Of the hunting of the sheep by the Indians who inhabited the rough mountains in and near what is now the Yellowstone National Park, Mr. Hofer has said to me:

"It is supposed that when the Sheep Eater Indians inhabited the mountains about the Park they kept the sheep down pretty close, but after they went away the sheep increased in that particular range of country, the whole Absaroka range; that is to say, the country from Clark Fork of the Yellowstone down to the Wind River drainage.

"The greatest number of sheep in recent years was pretty well toward the head of Gray Bull, Meeteetsee Creek and Stinking Water. In those old times the Indians used to build rude fences on the sides of the mountains, running down a hill, and these fences would draw together toward the bottom, and where they came nearly together the Indians would have a place to hide in. Fifteen years ago there was one such trap that was still quite plainly visible. One fence follows down pretty near the edge of a little ridge, draining steeply down from Crandle Creek divide to Miller Creek. There was no pen at the bottom, and no cliff to run them off, so that the Indians could not have killed them in that way, but near where the fences came together there was a pile of dead limbs and small rocks that looked to me as if it had been used by a person lying in wait to shoot animals which were driven down this ridge; and it was near enough to the place that they must pass to shoot them with arrows. These Indians had arrows, and hunted with them; and up on top of the ridges you will find old stumps that have been hacked down with stone hatchets. Some of the tree trunks have been removed, but others have been left there. I think that some Indians would go around the sheep and start them off, and gradually drive them to the pass where the hunter lay. I remember following along this ridge, and then on another ridge that went on toward the Clark Fork ridge to quite a high little peak, and on top of this peak was quite a large bed for a man to lie in. He could watch there until the sheep should pass through, and then he could come out and drive them on."

AGENTS OF DESTRUCTION.

The settling up of much of their former range, with pursuit by skin-hunters, head-hunters, and meat-hunters, has had much to do with the reduction in numbers of the mountain sheep, but more important than these have been the ravages by diseases brought in to their range by the domestic sheep, and then spread by the wild species among their wild associates. For many years it has been known that the wild sheep of certain portions of the Rocky Mountain region are afflicted with scab, a disease which in recent years seems to have attacked the elk as well. Testimony is abundant that wild sheep are killed by scab as domestic sheep are. On a few occasions I have seen animals that appeared to have died from this cause, but Mr. Hofer, to be quoted later, has had a much broader experience.

More sweeping and even more fatal has been the introduction among the wild sheep of an anthrax, of which, however, very little is known.

Aside from man, the most important enemies of the sheep in nature are the mountain lion and eagles of two species. These last I believe to be so destructive to newly born sheep and goats that I think it a duty to kill them whenever possible.

Dr. Edward L. Munson, at that time Assistant Surgeon, U.S. Army, but whose services in more recent years have won him so much credit, and such well deserved promotion, wrote me in 1897 the following interesting paragraphs with relation to disease among sheep. He said:

"The Bear Paw Mountains were full of mountain sheep a dozen years ago. One was roped last summer, and this is the only representative which has been seen or heard of there in ten years. The introduction of tame sheep early in the '80's was followed by a most destructive anthrax, which not only destroyed immense numbers of tame sheep, but also exterminated the wild ones, which appeared to be especially susceptible to this disease. In going through these mountains one often finds the skeletons of a number huddled together, and the above is the explanation given by some of the older settlers. The mountains are small, and the wild sheep could not climb up out of the infected zone. Immediate contact is, of course, not necessary in the propagation of anthrax, and the bacilli and spores left on soil grazed over by an infected band would readily infect another animal feeding over such a country even a long time afterward.

"I have also heard that the introduction of dog distemper played havoc with wolves, coyotes, and Indian dogs, when it first came into the country. This is the case with regard to any disease introduced into a virgin human population, in which there is no immunity due to the prevalence of such a disease for hundreds of years previously."

Mr. Elwood Hofer, discussing this subject in conversation, says:

"There are not a great many sheep in the Park now, anywhere; they have died off from sickness--the scab. This is a fact known to everyone living in the neighborhood of the Park. I have killed only one that had the disease badly, but I used to see them every day, and pay no attention to them. I did not hunt for them, for I did not want them in that condition. I remember that once a man came out to Gardiner who did not know that the sheep were sick. He saw some when he was hunting, and rushed up in great excitement and killed three of them. They seemed to be weak and were pretty nearly dead with scab before he saw them. Sometimes they become so weak from this disease that they lie down and die.

"I first noticed sheep with the scab around the canyon by the Yellowstone. I never saw any troubled with this disease around Meeteetsee or Stinking Water. I have been there in winter, and hunted them as late as November, and Col. Pickett used to kill some still later. I never heard him speak of the scab."

In spring and early summer, when the young sheep are small, the eagles are constantly on the watch for them, and unquestionably capture many lambs. I have been told by my friend, Mr. J.B. Monroe, who has several times captured lambs alive, that when they heard the rope whistling as he threw it toward them, they would run directly toward him, seeming to fear some enemy from above. He believes that they took the sound of the rope flying through the air for the sound of the eagle's wings.

While, of course, the mountain lions cannot overtake the sheep in fair chase, they lie in wait for them among the rocks, killing many, because the sheep range on ground suitable for the lions to stalk them on; that is to say, among the rocks on steep mountain sides, or at the edges of canyons.

A conversation had with Mr. Hofer a year or two since is so interesting that I offer no apology for giving the gist of it here. It has to do with the enemies of the sheep, especially the mountain lion, and with some of the sheep's ways. In substance, Mr. Hofer said:

"One day about the first of January I was in my cabin looking through the window, and up through the Cinnabar Basin, over the snow-covered mountains. As I was looking, I saw a dark patch disappear in the snow and then rise out of it again. The snow was deep and fluffy. The animal that I was watching would disappear in the snow with a plunge, and then would come up with a jump. It made several wonderful flights. It was so far off I could not tell what it was, and when I looked at it through the glasses I saw that it was a big ram breaking a trail. I was watching him closely and at first did not notice that others were with him. Soon, however, I discovered that there were four or five other sheep following him.

"The big ram came down from the side of the mountain, and, to pass over to the other mountain, he had to cross the valley. There were a number of knolls or ridges in this valley, where the snow was not so deep as in the hollows. The ram broke a trail to a knoll, and stopped and looked back, and pretty soon I saw the rest of the sheep coming along. They followed his trail and passed him while he was standing there looking back, always looking up at the mountain. While he stood on this knoll where the snow was not deep--for it had blown off--and the other sheep had passed him, one of them took the lead to the next knoll, breaking the trail, but here the snow was not so deep as that the ram had come through. No sooner had the sheep got to this knoll than the old ram started. He took the trail the others had made, and joined them at the next knoll, and then plunging in, went on ahead and broke a fresh trail to the next rise of ground. The ram did most of the trail-breaking, but sometimes one of the others went ahead; there was always one in the rear, on guard, as it were, until they had crossed the valley to a steep ridge on the next mountain. As they went, they stopped every little while and stood for some time looking back.

"Knowing the habits of the animal, I felt sure that something had driven them off the mountain. They looked back as if to see whether anything was following, or perhaps to look again at what had frightened them. I thought it was a mountain lion. Soon afterward I took my snowshoes and went up that way and found the track of a mountain lion. From the size of the track it seemed as if the animal must have been enormous. On soft snow, though, tracks spread and look big, and besides that, these cats commonly spread out their toes. There was no mistake about its being a mountain lion, for I could see where the tail had struck the soft snow and made holes in it.

"Mountain lions were around there a good deal, and E. De Long, who had a cabin a little further up in the valley, told me that three times in his experience of hunting up there he had come on a place where a mountain lion had just killed a sheep. In each case he found the sheep in nearly the same place, and in each case the sheep was freshly killed, and he dressed it and took it home.