American Big Game in Its Haunts: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club
History
American Big Game in Its Haunts: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club
Big game hunting -- United States
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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