I desire to point out that between Bangor and San Diego and from Key West to Bellingham, our country contains millions of acres of wild, practically uninhabited forests, rough foot-hills, bad-lands and mountains that could produce two million deer each year, without deducting $50,000 a year from the wealth of the country.  I grant that in the total number of deer that would be necessary to produce two million deer per annum, the farms situated on the edges of forests, and actually within the forests, would suffer somewhat from the depredations of those deer.  As I will presently show by documentary records, every one of those individual damages that exceeds two dollars in value could be compensated in cash, and afterward leave on the credit side of the deer account an enormous annual balance.

Stop for a moment, you enterprising and restless men and women who travel all over the United States, and think of the illimitable miles of unbroken forest that you have looked upon from your Pullman windows in the East, in the South, in the West and in southern Canada.  Recall the wooded mountains of the Appalachian system, the White Mountain region, the pine forests of the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf States, the forests of Tennessee, Arkansas and southern Missouri; of northern Minnesota, and every state of the Rocky Mountain region.  Then, think of the silent and untouched forests of the Pacific Coast and tell me whether you think five million deer scattered through all those forests would make any visible impression upon them.  That would be only about twenty-five times as many as are there now!  I think the forests would not be over populated; and they would produce two million killable deer each year!

Last year, 11,000 deer were forced down out of their hiding places in the Rocky Mountains, and were killed in Montana.  Even the natives had not dreamed there were so many available; and they were slaughtered not wisely but too ill.  It is not right that six members of one family should “hog” twelve deer in one season.  At present no deer supply can stand such slaughter.

Assuming that the people of the United States could be educated into the idea of so conserving deer that they could draw two million head per year from the general stock, what would it be worth?

It is not very difficult to estimate the value of a deer, when the whole animal can be utilized.  In various portions of the United States, deer vary in size, but I shall take all this into account, and try to strike a fair average.  In some sections, where deer are large and heavy, a full-grown buck is easily worth twenty-five dollars.  Let him who doubts it, try to replace those generous pounds of flesh with purchased beef and mutton and veal, and see how far twenty-five dollars will go toward it.  Every man who is a householder knows full well how little meat one dollar will buy at this time.

I think that throughout the United States as a whole every full-grown deer, male or female contains on an average ten dollars worth of good meat.  I know of one large preserve which annually sells its surplus of deer at that price, wholesale, to dealers; and in New York City (doubtless in many other cities, also) venison often has sold in the market at one dollar per pound!