iced and
reported on by Government expeditions which passed through the country,
and the hunters and trappers who about that time plied their trade along
that river found them abundant. Mr. Roosevelt has written much of
hunting them on that stream.

The low bluffs of the Yellowstone River--in the days when that was a
hostile Indian country, and only the hunter who was particularly
reckless and daring ventured into it--were a favorite feeding ground for
sheep. They were reported very numerous by the first expeditions that
went up the river, and a few have been killed there within five or six
years, although the valley is given over to farming and the upper
prairie is covered with cattle. This used to be one of the greatest
sheep ranges in all the West; the wide flats of the river bottom, the
higher table lands above, and the worn bad lands between, furnishing
ideal sheep ground. The last killed there, so far as I know, were a ram
and two ewes, which were taken about forty miles below Rosebud Station,
on the river, in 1897 or 1898.

Of Wyoming, Mr. Wm. Wells writes: "I have only been up here in
northwestern Wyoming for a year, but from what I have seen, sheep are
holding their own fairly well, and may be increasing in places. In 1897,
Mr. H.D. Shelden, of Detroit, Mich., and myself were hunting sheep just
west of the headwaters of Hobacks River. There was a sort of knife-edge
ridge running about fifteen miles north and south, the summit of which
was about 2,000 feet above a bench or table-land. The ridge was well
watered, and in some places the timber ran nearly up to the top of the
ridge. On this ridge there were about 100 sheep, divided into three
bands. Each band seemed to make its home in a cup-like hollow on the
east side of the ridge, about 500 feet below the crest, but the members
of the different bands seemed to visit back and forth, as the numbers
were not always the same.

"We could take our horses up into either one of the three hollows, and
some of the sheep were so tame that we have several times been within
fifty yards in plain sight, and had the sheep pay very little attention
to us. In one instance two ewes and lambs went on ahead of us at a walk
for several hundred yards, often stopping to look back; and in another a
sheep, after looking at us, two horses and two dogs, across a canyon 200
yards wide, pawed a bed in the slide rock and lay down. In another case
I drove about thirty head of ewes and lambs