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
Everyone now is ready to admit that the extermination of the herd of
buffalo in the seventies was permitted by a crude, short-sighted policy
on our part as a nation, and should we of the early twentieth century
allow the remaining deer, elk, mountain sheep, and antelope, the last of
the great bears, and the innumerable small creatures of the wild, to be
crowded off the face of the earth, we should be depriving our children
and our children's children of a satisfaction and of a source of
interest which they would keenly regret. It would be well if we bore in
mind that we stand in a sort of fiduciary relation to the people who are
to come after us, so far as the wild portion of our land is concerned,
those few remote tracts still untarnished by man's craze to convert
everything in the world, or beneath the surface of the earth, into
dollars for his own immediate profit. He has the same short-sighted
policy in his hunting. He is content to gratify the impulse of the hour
without thought of those who are to spend their lives here when we have
led our brief careers and have gone to a well merited oblivion, to reap
our reward--
Heads without names, no more remembered.
Let us look this matter squarely in the face. We are the inheritors of
these domains. It is one of the most precious assets of posterity. Here,
year by year, in steadily increasing proportion, as wisdom more
prevails, will men take comfort; and as the comprehension of nature's
charms penetrates their minds will they find content. One chief
satisfaction that every American feels from the mere fact of his
nationality is the full assurance in his heart that any measure founded
on sound reason and prompted by generous impulse will receive, if not
immediate acceptance, at all events eventual recognition. In the end
justice will prevail. Thus, in this matter before us, it will naturally
take a few years for Congress to realize that a genuine demand exists
for the creation of these refuges in every State, East as well as West,
but the interest in wild creatures, and the desire for their protection,
if not a clamorous demand, is one almost universally felt. All men,
except a meager few of the dwarfed and strictly city-bred, partake of
this, and it is so much a sign of the times that no Sunday edition is
complete without its column devoted to wild creatures, their traits,
their habits, or their eccentricities. One could hardly name, outside of
money-making and politics, an interest which all men more generally
share.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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