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Updated: June 15, 2025
They proved to be a war party of Blackfeet, who, while in search of the Crow tribe, had fallen upon the trail of Captain Bonneville on the Popo Agie, and dogged him to the Bighorn; but had been completely baffled by his vigilance. They had then waylaid the present detachment, and were actually housed in perfect silence within their fort, when the mule of the trapper made such a dead point.
The antelopes were sometimes quite shy; so were the bighorn; though on occasions both kinds seemed to lose their wariness, and in one instance the journal specifies the fact that, at the mouth of the Yellowstone, the deer were somewhat shy, while the antelope, like the elk and buffalo, paid no heed to the men whatever. Ordinarily all the kinds of game were very tame.
About every other elk attacked falls a victim. Deer are more fortunate, the ratio being one dead to five leaped at. The antelope, living on the lowlands or upland meadows, escapes nine times out of ten; and the mountain sheep, or bighorn, seldom falls to the onslaught of his enemy.
From the huge wrinkled horns, and other marks, I knew it to be the argali, or wild sheep, known among hunters by the name of the `bighorn, and sometimes spoken of in books as the `Rocky Mountain sheep, although in its general appearance it looked more like an immense yellow goat, or deer with a pair of rams' horns stuck upon his head.
The defile bore traces of having been a thoroughfare for countless herds of buffaloes, though not one was to be seen. The hunters succeeded in killing an elk and several black-tailed deer. They were now in the bosom of the second Bighorn ridge, with another lofty and snow-crowned mountain full in view to the west.
But the bighorn, the wild sheep, able to bear the bitterest storms with no signs of stress, cannot cope with the loose shifty snow. Never such a storm goes over the mountains that the Indians do not catch them floundering belly deep among the lower rifts.
It has very large ears, and the tip of the tail is black, from which it derives its name. The bighorn is so named from its horns; which are of a great size, and twisted like those of a ram. It is called by some the argali, by others the ibex, though differing from both of these animals. The Mandans call it the ahsahta, a name much better than the clumsy appellation which it generally bears.
On the north side the cliffs were wild and romantic, and these were soon succeeded by rugged hills, and these, in turn, by open plains on which were descried herds of buffalo, elk, and wolves. On the twenty-seventh of July, having reached the Bighorn, one of the largest tributaries of the Yellowstone, the party have this entry in their journal:
The altitude zone of the cony I found to be between eleven and thirteen thousand feet. He and the Bighorn, ptarmigan, weasels and foxes are mountain-top dwellers throughout the year. Marmots hibernate during the long alpine winters.
In fact, the only moderate-sized herd of wild bison in existence to-day, the protected herd in the Yellowstone Park, is composed of animals intermediate in habits and coat between the mountain and plains varieties as were all the herds of the Bighorn, Big Hole, Upper Madison, and Upper Yellowstone valleys.
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