The Club is organized primarily to promote manly sport with the rifle among the large game of the wilderness, to encourage travel and exploration in little-known regions of our country, and to work for game and forest preservation by the State. Attention has been paid to all three points by the Club, but especially to sport and protection. Nevertheless exploration has not been neglected. In a trip after wilderness game the hunter is perforce obliged to traverse and explore little-known regions, at least when he is in search of the rarer animals, or is desirous of reaching the best hunting-grounds; and in addition to such exploration, which is merely incidental to the ordinary hunting trip, members of the Club have done not a little original exploration for its own sake, including surveying, and geographical and geological map-making. The results of these explorations, when sufficiently noteworthy, have appeared in periodicals devoted to such subjects, or in Government reports. The present volume is devoted to big-game hunting and to questions of game preservation. In behalf of game protection the Club works through the State for the procuring and setting apart of reservations where forests and game alike shall be protected at all seasons by the law. These great forest reservations thus become the nurseries and breeding-grounds of game and of the large wild animals which are elsewhere inevitably exterminated by the march of settlement. Already several such reservations have been established in different States, both by National and by State action--for instance, the Adirondack Reserve in New York, the Colorado Canyon Reserve in Arizona, the big timber reserves in Colorado and Washington, the island set apart in Alaska as an undisturbed breeding-ground for salmon and sea-fowl, the Yosemite Valley and the Sequoia Parks in California. The most important reservation, however, is the Yellowstone Park, which is owned by the National Government, and is the last refuge of the buffalo in this country, besides being the chief home of the elk and of many other wild beasts. This is the most striking and typical of all these reserves, and has been thought well worth special description in the present volume, with reference to its effects upon the preservation of game.