File:Climbs and exploration in the Canadian Rockies (1903) (14793950943).jpg

Identifier: climbsexploratio00stut (find matches)
Title: Climbs & exploration in the Canadian Rockies
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors: Stutfield, Hugh Edward Millington, 1858-1929. (from old catalog) Collie, Norman, 1859-1942, joint author
Subjects: Rocky mountains Mountaineering
Publisher: London, New York and Bombay, Longmans, Green and co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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addplenty of zest to a camping trip among themountains. The only big game which thetraveller has a reasonable chance of securingare Rocky Mountain sheep, or bighorn, wildgoats, and bears. We saw a good many tracksof deer, and occasionally those of moose, elk(or wapiti), and cariboo, but these latter areso seldom met with that they are hardly worthtaking into consideration. Bighorn, in the early part of the last cen-tury, must have been plentiful all over thesemountains. We may infer this from the worksof David Thompson and other travellers, andalso from the old game trails still visible alongthe hillsides. Now, however, in common withother big game throughout the world, theyare rapidly decreasing in numbers; and, unlesseffectual measures are taken to preserve them,the fate of the buffalo must eventually betheirs. Even forty or fifty years ago the herdshad been sadly thinned, and part of CaptainPalhsers anxiety for the safety of Dr. Hectorand his party was due to the fear that they 324
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SPORT AND GAME might be starved owing to the difficulty offinding game for food. The scarcity of wildanimals in those days was attributed to a suc-cession of exceptionally severe winters, duringwhich large numbers of sheep and goats hadperished, to great fires through the woods andmountains on the eastern side of the mainrange, and also to a mysterious disease, appa-rently a kind of mange or scab, which attackedthe bighorn. Still, from the accounts of Dr.Hector and other explorers in the middle ofthe century, it is evident that game was muchmore abundant then than now. The travellerby the Kootenay Plains in these days is nothkely to be startled, like Hector, by theapparition of a hundred rams rushing by himso close as to enable him to throw stones atthem; although Professor Coleman, on hisjourney^ up the Cataract River to the head-waters of the Brazeau in 1902, saw severalbighorn in the course of the expedition. Theyappear to frequent this part of the countrymore than any other on the

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