Part 31

In Oregon records are few. Dr. Merriam informs me that he has seen them on Steen Mountain, in the southeastern part of the State, where they were common a few years ago. Mr. Vernon Bailey, of the Biological Survey, has seen them also in the Wallowa Mountains. The Biological Survey also has records of their occurrence in the Blue Mountains, where they used to be found both on Strawberry Butte and on what are called the Greenhorn Mountains. The last positive record from that region is in 1895. In 1897 Mr. Vernon Bailey reported sheep from Silver and Abert Lakes in the desert region east of the Cascade. They were formerly numerous in the rocky regions about Silver Lake, and a few still inhabited the ridges northeast of Abert Lake.

In Nevada Mr. Bailey found sheep in the Toyabe range.

Mr. Bailey found sheep in the Seven Devils Mountains, and he and Dr. Merriam found them in the Salmon River, Pahsimeroi and Sawtooth Mountains, all in Idaho. Mr. Bailey also found them in Texas in the Guadaloupe Mountains and in most of the ranges thence south to the boundary line in western Texas.

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From what has already been said it will be seen that in inaccessible places all over the western country, from the Arctic Ocean south to Mexico, and at one or two points in the great plains, there still remain stocks of mountain sheep. Once the most unsuspicious and gentle of all our large game animals, they have become very shy, wary, and well able to take care of themselves. In the Yellowstone Park, on the other hand, they have reverted to their old time tameness, and no longer regard man with fear. There, as is told on other pages of this volume, they are more tame than the equally protected antelope, mule deer or elk.

Should the Grand Canyon of the Colorado be set aside as a national park, as it may be hoped it will be, the sheep found there will no doubt increase, and become, as they now are in the Yellowstone Park, a most interesting natural feature of the landscape. And in like manner, when game refuges shall be established in the various forest reservations all over the western country, this superb species will increase and do well. Alert, quick-witted, strong, fleet and active, it is one of the most beautiful and most imposing of North American animals. Equally at home on the frozen snowbanks of the mountain top, or in the parched deserts of the south, dwelling alike among the rocks, in the timber, or on the prairie, the mountain sheep shows himself adaptable to all conditions, and should surely have the best protection that we can give him.

I shall never forget a scene witnessed many years ago, long before railroads penetrated the Northwest. I was floating down the Missouri River in a mackinaw boat, the sun just topping the high bad land bluffs to the east, when a splendid ram stepped out, upon a point far above the water, and stood there outlined against the sky. Motionless, with head thrown back, and in an attitude of attention, he calmly inspected the vessel floating along below him; so beautiful an object amid his wild surroundings, and with his background of brilliant sky, that no hand was stretched out for the rifle, but the boat floated quietly on past him, and out of sight.

George Bird Grinnell.

Preservation of the Wild Animals of North America

The National and Congressional movement for the preservation of the Sequoia in California represents a growth of intelligent sentiment. It is the same kind of sentiment which must he aroused, and aroused in time, to bring about Government legislation if we are to preserve our native animals. That which principally appeals to us in the Sequoia is its antiquity as a race, and the fact that California is its last refuge.

As a special and perhaps somewhat novel argument for preservation, I wish to remind you of the great antiquity of our game animals, and the enormous period of time which it has taken nature to produce them. We must have legislation, and we must have it in time. I recall the story of the judge and jury who arrived in town and inquired about the security of the prisoner, who was known to be a desperate character; they were assured by the crowd that the prisoner was perfectly secure because he was safely hanging to a neighboring tree. If our preservative measures are not prompt, there will be no animals to legislate for.

SENTIMENT AND SCIENCE.

The sentiment which promises to save the Sequoia is due to the spread of knowledge regarding this wonderful tree, largely through the efforts of the Division of Forestry. In the official chronology of the United States Geological Survey--which is no more nor less reliable than that of other geological surveys, because all are alike mere approximations to the truth--the Sequoia was a well developed race 10,000,000 of years ago. It became one of a large family, including fourteen genera. The master genus--the Sequoia--alone includes thirty extinct species. It was distributed in past times through Canada, Alaska, Greenland, British Columbia, across Siberia, and down into southern Europe. The Ice Age, and perhaps competition with other trees more successful in seeding down, are responsible for the fact that there are now only two living species--the "red wood," or Sequoia sempervirens, and the giant, or Sequoia gigantea. The last refuge of the gigantea is in ten isolated groves, in some of which the tree is reproducing itself, while in others it has ceased to reproduce.

In the year 1900 forty mills and logging companies were engaged in destroying these trees.

All of us regard the destruction of the Parthenon by the Turks as a great calamity; yet it would be possible, thanks to the laborious studies which have chiefly emanated from Germany, for modern architects to completely restore the Parthenon in its former grandeur; but it is far beyond the power of all the naturalists of the world to restore one of these Sequoias, which were large trees, over 100 feet in height, spreading their leaves to the sun, before the Parthenon was even conceived by the architects and sculptors of Greece.

LIFE OF THE SEQUOIA AND HISTORY OF THOUGHT.

In 1900 five hundred of the very large trees still remained, the highest reaching from 320 to 325 feet. Their height, however, appeals to us less than their extraordinary age, estimated by Hutchins at 3,600, or by John Muir, who probably loves them more than any man living, at from 4,000 to 5,000 years. According to the actual count of Muir of 4,000 rings, by a method which he has described to me, one of these trees was 1,000 years old when Homer wrote the Iliad; 1,500 years of age when Aristotle was foreshadowing his evolution theory and writing his history of animals; 2,000 years of age when Christ walked upon the earth; nearly 4,000 years of age when the "Origin of Species" was written. Thus the life of one of these trees spanned the whole period before the birth of Aristotle (384 B.C.) and after the death of Darwin (A.D. 1882), the two greatest natural philosophers who have lived.

These trees are the noblest living things upon earth. I can imagine that the American people are approaching a stage of general intelligence and enlightened love of nature in which they will look back upon the destruction of the Sequoia as a blot on the national escutcheon.

VENERATION OF AGE.

The veneration of age sentiment which should, and I believe actually does, appeal to the American people when clearly presented to them even more strongly than the commercial sentiment, is roused in equal strength by an intelligent appreciation of the race longevity of the larger animals which our ancestors found here in profusion, and of which but a comparatively small number still survive. To the unthinking man a bison, a wapiti, a deer, a pronghorn antelope, is a matter of hide and meat; to the real nature lover, the true sportsman, the scientific student, each of these types is a subject of intense admiration. From the mechanical standpoint they represent an architecture more elaborate than that of Westminster Abbey, and a history beside which human history is as of yesterday.

SLOW EVOLUTION OF MODERN MAMMALS.

These animals were not made in a day, nor in a thousand years, nor in a million years. As said the first Greek philosopher, Empedocles, who 560 B.C. adumbrated the "survival of the fittest" theory of Darwin, they are the result of ceaseless trials of nature. While the Sequoia was first emerging from the Carboniferous, or Coal Period, the reptile-like ancestors of these mammals, covered with scales and of egg-laying habits, were crawling about and giving not the most remote prophecy of their potential transformation through 10,000,000 of years into the superb fauna of the northern hemisphere.

The descendants of these reptiles were transformed into mammals. If we had had the opportunity of studying the early mammals of the Rocky Mountain region with a full appreciation of the possibilities of evolution, we should have perceived that they were essentially of the same stock and ancestral to our modern types. There were little camels scarcely more than twelve inches high, little taller than cotton-tail rabbits and smaller than the jackass rabbits; horses 15 inches high, scarcely larger than, and very similar in build to, the little English coursing hound known as the whippet; it is not improbable that we shall find the miniature deer; there certainly existed ancestral wolves and foxes of similarly small proportions. You have all read your Darwin carefully enough to know that neither camels, horses, nor deer would have evolved as they did except for the stimulus given to their limb and speed development by the contemporaneous evolution of their enemies in the dog family.

THE MIDDLE STAGE OF EVOLUTION.

A million and a half years later these same animals had attained a very considerable size; the western country had become transformed by the elevation of the plateaux into dry, grass-bearing uplands, where both horses and deer of peculiarly American types were grazing. We have recently secured some fresh light on the evolution of the American deer. Besides the Palaeryx, which may be related to the true American deer Odocoileus, we have found the complete skeleton of a small animal named Merycodus, nineteen inches high, possessed of a complete set of delicate antlers with the characteristic burr at the base indicating the annual shedding of the horn, and a general structure of skeleton which suggests our so-called pronghorn antelope, Antilocapra, rather than our true American deer, Odocoileus. This was in all probability a distinctively American type. Its remains have been found in eastern Colorado in the geological age known as Middle Miocene, which is estimated (sub rosa, like all our other geological estimates), at about a million and a half years of age. Our first thought as we study this small, strikingly graceful animal, is wonder that such a high degree of specialization and perfection was reached at so early a period; our second thought is the reverence for age sentiment.

THE AFRICAN PERIOD IN AMERICA.

The conditions of environment were different from what they were before or what they are now. These animals flourished during the period in which western America must have closely resembled the eastern and central portions of Africa at the present time.

This inference is drawn from the fact that the predominant fauna of America in the Middle and Upper Miocene Age and in the Pliocene was closely analogous to the still extant fauna of Africa. It is true we had no real antelopes in this country, in fact none of the bovines, and no giraffes; but there was a camel which my colleague Matthew has surnamed the "giraffe camel," extraordinarily similar to the giraffe. There were no hippopotami, no hyraces. All these peculiarly African animals, of African origin, I believe, found their way into Europe at least as far as the Sivalik Hills of India, but never across the Bering Sea Isthmus. The only truly African animal which reached America, and which flourished here in an extraordinary manner, was the elephant, or rather the mastodon, if we speak of the elephant in its Miocene stage of evolution. However, the resemblance between America and Africa is abundantly demonstrated by the presence of great herds of horses, of rhinoceroses, both long and short limbed, of camels in great variety, including the giraffe-like type which was capable of browsing on the higher branches of trees, of small elephants, and of deer, which in adaptation to somewhat arid conditions imitated the antelopes in general structure.