The wapiti is the largest and stateliest deer in the world. A full-grown bull is as big as a steer. The antlers are the most magnificent trophies yielded by any game animal of America, save the giant Alaskan moose. When full-grown they are normally of twelve tines; frequently the tines are more numerous, but the increase in their number has no necessary accompaniment in increase in the size of the antlers. The length, massiveness, roughness, spread, and symmetry of the antlers must all be taken into account in rating the value of a head. Antlers over fifty inches in length are large; if over sixty, they are gigantic. Good heads are getting steadily rarer under the persecution which has thinned out the herds. Next to the bison the wapiti is of all the big game animals of North America the one whose range has most decreased. Originally it was found from the Pacific coast east across the Alleghanies, through New York to the Adirondacks, through Pennsylvania into western New Jersey, and far down into the mid-country of Virginia and the Carolinas. It extended northward into Canada, from the Great Lakes to Vancouver; and southward into Mexico, along the Rockies. Its range thus corresponded roughly with that of the bison, except that it went farther west and not so far north. In the early colonial days so little heed was paid by writers to the teeming myriads of game that it is difficult to trace the wapiti’s distribution in the Atlantic coast region. It was certainly killed out of the Adirondacks long before the period when the backwoodsmen were settling the valleys of the Alleghany Mountains; there they found the elk abundant, and the stately creatures roamed in great bands over Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana when the first settlers made their way into what are now these States, at the outbreak of the Revolution. These first settlers were all hunters, and they followed the wapiti (or, as they always called it, the elk) with peculiar eagerness. In consequence its numbers were soon greatly thinned, and about the beginning of the present century it disappeared from that portion of its former range lying south of the Great Lakes and between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. In the northern Alleghanies it held its own much longer, the last individual of which I have been able to get record having been killed in Pennsylvania in 1869. In the forests of northern Wisconsin, northern Michigan, and Minnesota wapiti existed still longer, and a very few individuals may still be found. A few are left in Manitoba. When Lewis and Clark and Pike became the pioneers among the explorers, army officers, hunters, and trappers who won for our people the great West, they found countless herds of wapiti throughout the high plains country from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. Throughout this region it was exterminated almost as rapidly as the bison, and by the early eighties there only remained a few scattered