Hugh Monroe, a typical mountain man of the old time, who reached Fort Edmonton in the year 1813, and died in 1893, after eighty years spent upon the prairie in close association with the Indians, has often told me of the Blackfoot method of securing sheep when their skins were needed for women’s dresses.  On such an occasion a large number of the men would ride out from the camp to the neighborhood of one of these buttes, and on their approach the sheep, which had been feeding on the prairie, slowly retreated to the heights above.  The Indians then spread out, encircling the butte by a wide ring of horsemen, and sending three or four young men to climb its heights, awaited results.  When the men sent up on the butte had reached its summit, they pursued the sheep over its limited area, and drove them down to the prairie below, where the mounted men chased and killed them.  In this way large numbers of sheep were procured.

Of the hunting of the sheep by the Indians who inhabited the rough mountains in and near what is now the Yellowstone National Park, Mr. Hofer has said to me: 

“It is supposed that when the Sheep Eater Indians inhabited the mountains about the Park they kept the sheep down pretty close, but after they went away the sheep increased in that particular range of country, the whole Absaroka range; that is to say, the country from Clark Fork of the Yellowstone down to the Wind River drainage.

“The greatest number of sheep in recent years was pretty well toward the head of Gray Bull, Meeteetsee Creek and Stinking Water.  In those old times the Indians used to build rude fences on the sides of the mountains, running down a hill, and these fences would draw together toward the bottom, and where they came nearly together the Indians would have a place to hide in.  Fifteen years ago there was one such trap that was still quite plainly visible.  One fence follows down pretty near the edge of a little ridge, draining steeply down from Crandle Creek divide to Miller Creek.  There was no pen at the bottom, and no cliff to run them off, so that the Indians could not have killed them in that way, but near where the fences came together there was a pile of dead limbs and small rocks that looked to me as if it had been used by a person lying in wait to shoot animals which were driven down this ridge; and it was near enough to the place that they must pass to shoot them with arrows.  These Indians had arrows, and hunted with them; and up on top of the ridges you will find old stumps that have been hacked down with stone hatchets.  Some of the tree trunks have been removed, but others have been left there.  I think that some Indians would go around the sheep and start them off, and gradually drive them to the pass where the hunter lay.  I remember following along this ridge, and then on another ridge that went on toward the Clark Fork ridge to quite a high little peak, and on top of this peak was quite a large bed for a man to lie in.  He could watch there until the sheep should pass through, and then he could come out and drive them on.”