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
'Logan boys,' well known hunters at that time. Later the Logans made a
strike in the mines and disappeared. For several years no sheep were
seen, but finally Mexicans began killing them in the Santa Catalinas,
and occasionally six or eight would be hung up in the market at the same
time. Later the Papago Indians in the southwest began killing them for
the market. These people, as did also the Mexicans, killed big and
little, and the animals, never abundant, were threatened with
extermination. Those killed by the Logans came from the Tucson
Mountains; those killed by the Mexicans from the Santa Catalinas, and
those killed by the Indians probably from the Baboquivari or Comobabi
ranges. I questioned the hunters repeatedly, but they never gave me a
satisfactory answer.
"Although I never saw the sheep, I have repeatedly seen evidence of them
in both the ranges named. Inasmuch as I have not seen one in several
years past, I feel very confident that there are not many to see. Last
year I learned of a large ram being killed in the Superstition Mountains
which was alone when killed. About three years ago the head of a big ram
was brought to this city. It is said to have weighed seventy pounds. I
did not see it, nor did I learn where it came from.
"The Superstition and the Santa Catalinas are the very essence of
ruggedness, but notwithstanding this I am constrained to believe that
the days of big game are nearly numbered in Arizona. The reasons for
this are readily apparent. The mountain ranges are more or less
mineralized. To this there is hardly an exception. There is no place so
wild and forbidding that the prospector will not enter it. If 'pay rock'
or 'pay dirt' is struck, then good-by solitude and big game. A second
cause is to be found in the cattle industry, which, as a rule, is very
profitable. One of the most successful cattle growers in the country
once told me that cattle in Arizona would breed up to 95 per cent.
These breeders during the dry season leave the mesas and climb to the
top of the very highest mountains, and, of course, the more cattle the
less game. A year ago I was in the Harshaw Mountains, and was told by a
young man named Sorrell that a bunch of wild cattle occupied a certain
peak, and that on a certain occasion he had seen a big mountain sheep
with the cattle.
"So far as I know, I never saw or heard of a case of scab among wild
sheep."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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