Mr. Muir has seen such shelters in Nevada, and he tells us also that the Indians used to build corrals or pounds with diverging wings, somewhat like those used for the capture of antelope and buffalo on the plains, and that they drove the sheep into these corrals, about which, no doubt, men, women, and children were secreted, ready to destroy the game.

Certain tribes made a practice of building converging fences and driving the sheep toward the angle of these fences, where hunters lay in wait to kill them, as elsewhere mentioned by Mr. Hofer.  In fact, sheep in those old times shared with all the other animals of the prairie that tameness to which I have often adverted in writing on this subject, and which now seems so remarkable.

The Bannocks and Sheep Eaters depended for their food very largely on sheep.  In fact, the Sheep Eaters are reported to have killed little else, whence their name.  Both these tribes hunted more or less in disguise, and wore on the head and shoulders the skin and horns of a mountain sheep’s head, the skin often being drawn about the body, and the position assumed a stooping one, so as to simulate the animal with a considerable closeness.  The legs, which were uncovered, were commonly rubbed with white or gray clay, and certain precautions were used to kill the human odor.

A Cheyenne Indian told me of an interesting happening witnessed by his grandfather very many years ago.  A war party had set out to take horses from the Shoshone.  One morning just at sunrise the fifteen or sixteen men were traveling along on foot in single file through a deep canon of the mountains, when one of them spied on a ledge far above them the head and shoulders of a great mountain sheep which seemed to be looking over the valley.  He pointed it out to his fellows, and as they walked along they watched it.  Presently it drew back, and a little later appeared again further along the ledges, and stood there on the verge.  As the Indians watched, they suddenly saw shoot out from another ledge above the sheep a mountain lion, which alighted on the sheep’s neck, and both animals fell whirling over the cliff and struck the slide rock below.  The fall was a long one, and the Cheyennes, feeling sure that the sheep had been killed, either by the fall or by the lion, rushed forward to secure the meat.  When they reached the spot the lion was hobbling off with a broken leg, and one of them shot it with his arrow, and when they made ready to skin the sheep, they saw to their astonishment that it was not a sheep, but a man wearing the skin and horns of a sheep.  He had been hunting, and his bow and arrows were wrapped in the skin close to his breast.  The fall had killed him.  From the fashion of his hair and his moccasins they knew that he was a Bannock.

A reference to the hunting methods of the Sheep Eaters reminds one very naturally of that pursued by the Blackfeet, when sheep were needed, for their skins or for their flesh.  These animals were abundant about the many buttes which rise out of the prairie on the flanks of the Rocky Mountains, in what is now Montana, and when disturbed retreated to the heights for safety.