has been the mainstay and the resource against starvation of the
pathfinder, the settler, the prospector, and at times even the
railroad-builder. In view of what the bison millions did for the
Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Kansas and Texas, it is only right and square
that those states should now do something for the perpetual preservation
of the bison species and all other big game that needs help.

For years and years, the antelope millions of the Montana and Wyoming
grass-lands fed the scout and Indian-fighter, freighter, cowboy and
surveyor, ranchman _and sheep-herder_; but thus far I have yet to hear
of one Western state that has ever spent one penny directly for the
preservation of the antelope! And to-day we are in a hand-to-hand fight
in Congress, and in Montana, with the Wool-Growers Association, which
maintains in Washington a keen lobbyist to keep aloft the tariff on
wool, and prevent Congress from taking 15 square miles of grass lands on
Snow Creek, Montana, for a National Antelope Preserve. All that the
wool-growers want is the entire earth, all to themselves. Mr. McClure,
the Secretary of the Association says:

"The proper place in which to preserve the big game of the West is in
city parks, where it can be protected."

To the colonist of the East and pioneer of the West, the white-tailed
deer was an ever present help in time of trouble. Without this
omnipresent animal, and the supply of good meat that each white flag
represented, the commissariat difficulties of the settlers who won the
country as far westward as Indiana would have been many times greater
than they were. The backwoods Pilgrim's progress was like this:

Trail, deer; cabin, deer; clearing; bear, corn, deer; hogs, deer;