The Rev. John McDougall, of Morley, Alberta, wrote me in 1899, in answer to inquiries as to the mountain sheep inhabiting the country ranged over by the Stony Indians, “that it is the opinion of these Indians that the sheep which frequent the mountains from Montana northward as far as our Indians hunt, are all of one kind, but that in localities they differ in size, and somewhat in color.

“They say that from the 49th parallel to the headwaters of the Saskatchewan River, sheep are larger than those in the Selkirks and coast ranges; and also that as they go north of the Saskatchewan the sheep become smaller.  As to color, they say that the more southerly and western sheep are the lighter; and that as you pass north the sheep are darker in color.  These Stonies report mountain sheep as still to be found in all of the mountain country they roam in.  Their hunting ground is about 400 miles long by 150 broad, and is principally confined to the Rocky Mountain range.”

In an effort to establish something of the range of the mountain sheep, during the very last years of the nineteenth century, I communicated with a large number of gentlemen who were either resident in, or travelers through, portions of the West now or formerly occupied by the mountain sheep, and the results of these inquiries I give below: 

Prof.  L.V.  Pirsson, of Yale University, who has spent a number of years in studying the geology of various portions of the northern Rocky Mountains, wrote me with considerable fullness in 1896 concerning the game situation in some of the front ranges of the Rockies, where sheep were formerly very abundant.  In the Crazy Mountains he says he saw no sheep, and that while it was possible they might be there, they must certainly be rare.  In 1880 there were many sheep there.  In the Castle Mountains none were seen, nor reported, nor any traces seen.  The same is true of the Little Belt, Highwood, and Judith Mountains.  He understood that sheep were still present in the bad lands; immediately about the mountains and east of them the country was too well settled for any game to live.  Earlier, however, in the summer of 1890, passing through the Snowy Mountains, which lie north of the National Park, sheep were seen on two occasions; a band of ten ewes and lambs on Sheep Mountain, and a band of seven rams on the head of the stream known as the Buffalo Fork of the Lamar River.  In 1893 an old ram was killed on Black Butte, at the extreme eastern end of the Judith Mountains, near Cone Butte, and it is quite possible that this animal had strayed out of the bad lands on the lower Musselshell, or on the Missouri.  Even at that time there were said to be no sheep on the Little Rockies, Bearpaws, or Sweetgrass Hills.

All the ranges spoken of were formerly great sheep ranges, and on all of them, many years ago, I saw sheep in considerable numbers.

There are a very few sheep in the Wolf Mountains of Montana.