In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner declared the American frontier closed. Americans had supposedly fulfilled their manifest destiny. Easterners had conquered the American West.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, a nation rejoiced – the soft chorus of the farmer's swaying grain, the percussion of the miner's pickax, the lowing timbre of the rancher's herds, and the falsetto of the conductor's whistle reached to the heavens.
Below this divine, national cacophony, yet nine thousand feet above its acolytes, herds of North American bighorn sheep bleated an anthem of resistance, a song that reverberated through canyons and along precipices well into the twentieth century. This is a story about a national government chasing sheep for the purpose of zoological display. This is also a story about the construction of knowledge, the ironies of conservation, and the building of the American West. More important, this is a story about storytelling. The following tale will call attention to the opportunities that zoological parks, animal history, and narrative history offer the historian. As animals migrate from the margins of history to its main stage, they reveal paths hidden beneath the routes blazed previously by historians. Telling stories through and with animals will untangle historiography, showing how ideas, processes, and actors can be pulled apart in new ways – making audible historical subjects long relegated to our silenced wildernesses. Here, mountain sheep bleat. This article will show how topics as diverse as zoological knowledge, federal–state–local–individual power, conservation, extinction, the “building” and populating of the American West, and notions of “resistance” remain interwoven upon our understanding of the past. Mountain sheep point us to the threads, unforeseen, that stitch history together.
Like the history of other first Americans, the history of North American mountain sheep must begin on the frozen ice of Beringia, the name given to the land bridge that connected the Americas to Eurasia thirteen thousand years ago. Even though these mountain sheep diverged from their Eurasian ancestors 600,000 years ago, as Homo erectus was still perfecting the bipedalism and undergoing the protein-stimulated brain growth that would soon make them human, they would not become “American” until they crossed the Bering Sea and stepped hoof in northern Canada.Footnote 1 This diaspora immediately migrated southward, and quickly colonized the North American continent from northern Canada to northern Mexico. Today, zoologists generally recognize three species as offspring of the Ice Age diaspora – Ovis canadensis (bighorns), Ovis dalli (white, horned sheep of Alaska and northwestern Canada), and Ovis nivicola (also known as Siberian snow sheep).Footnote 2 Of these three, it is Ovis canadensis that sheeped most of North America. This species, like Homo sapiens sapiens, varies greatly from place to place, yet most scholars recognize three subspecies of Ovis canadensis. These are the Rocky Mountain bighorn, the Sierra Nevada bighorn, and the desert bighorn.Footnote 3 Like the history of other first Americans, the nineteenth-century chapter of Ovis canadensis is one of both persecution and survival.Footnote 4
As history has demonstrated elsewhere, genocidal forces rarely succeed in completely stamping out their Other. Culture proves resilient. Individuals hang on. A good portion of the historiography of the American West narrates a process of extermination, exploitation, and extraction, and sheep, of course, fit into this narrative.Footnote 5 Like others, though, they fought back.
This article tells the story of how native sheep resisted imperialism, and how, in so doing, they tied together ideas, forces, and actors central to the history of the American West.Footnote 6
Millennia before Europeans sailed westward, humans and sheep met in the mountains of western North America. These interactions were surely dynamic, different in the Bitterroot Mountains than in the Black Hills or San Juan Mountains, different in the Wasatch Range than on Mount Elbert or along the Baja peninsula. It is, therefore, difficult to generalize about the role of sheep in human cultures, and humans in sheep cultures, prior to European colonization. It can be generally assumed that one of the most developed sheep–human “contact zones” existed in the American Southwest, where Puebloan peoples had long flourished and where sheep habitats existed at more accessible and lesser altitudes.Footnote 7 Nonetheless, mountain sheep were surely most meaningful to humans in places where both lived, as evidenced by the ancient petroglyphs and pictographs of bighorn sheep embedded in boulders in California and Utah.Footnote 8
Even though sheep and humans long shared the North American continent, European colonization brought quick declines in sheep populations. Indeed, mountain sheep from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, like so many other New World animals, were moved along a rhetorical spectrum from mysterious “exotica” to “marvelous possession” to commodity.Footnote 9 In 1697, a Spanish missionary in California discovered a “remarkable species of sheep.”Footnote 10 In 1800, Duncan McGillivray, an explorer with the fur-trading North West Company, encountered an animal near Calgary that “appear[ed] to be a compound of the deer and the sheep, having the body and the hair of the first, with the head and horns of the last.”Footnote 11 McGillivray's “discovery” was quickly communicated to the Western world and coronated belier de montagne by leading naturalist Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire in 1803.Footnote 12 Two years later, in 1805, Lewis and Clark met mountain sheep along the badlands of the Upper Missouri River, representatives of the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase.Footnote 13 It did not take long for these new national possessions to become international commodities.
Robert Jameson, professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh and future instructor of Charles Darwin, proclaimed that upon
examining the fleece, I was particularly struck with its uncommon fineness; and it occurred to me, that an animal inhabiting the temperate regions of the Rocky Mountains, with so valuable a fleece, might be easily procured, and readily introduced into this country, and form a valuable addition to our wool-bearing animals.Footnote 14
The proposed relocation never happened, but North American mountain sheep fascinated the world – especially their wool, horns, and mutton. Even though a century of scientists quibbled over their classification, no one who had laid eyes on North American mountain sheep questioned their uniqueness. They stood atop Nature's throne. And, sadly, ascendancy, as in so many other circumstances throughout history, leads to annihilation.
An 1858 article in a journal fittingly entitled Spirit of the Times described the attractive qualities of mountain sheep for its readers. First, “The coating of this sheep is more cervine than ovine, in color resembling the winter coat of our common deer … in length and consistency that of the elk, but coarser.” Second, “their flesh has the flavor of the finest mountain mutton.” Finally,
The horns of the male measure about three feet from base to tip; measured around the spiral, the circumference is also three feet, and they have at their base a diameter of five or six inches; commonly weighing eleven or more pounds, and, as situated on the head, their points are eighteen inches apart.Footnote 15
Not only did mountain sheep make fine coats, delicious dinners, and spectacular antler trophies, but they also proved challenging to hunt, and therefore became both the hunter's ultimate test and prize. This commodification of the mountain sheep spawned a voluminous popular literature for nineteenth-century Americans to consume. Titles alone tell the story. 1877: “Big Horns, or Rocky Mountain Sheep, Surprised,” Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly. 1881: “Sheep-Hunting in the Mountains,” Littell's Living Age. 1884: “Stalking the Mountain Sheep,” Forest and Stream. 1891: “Capturing Rocky Mountain Sheep,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine. Even poet and nature writer Mary Austin wrote verses for mountain sheep:
By 1895, William Temple Hornaday, a leading naturalist in the United States, lamented the demise of the continent's mountain sheep:
Formerly the Mountain Sheep inhabited practically all the wild mountain-ranges of the West, from central Arizona to the Arctic Circle. In the northern half of this vast range it still exists abundantly; but in the United States this much-prized animal has been so persistently hunted and shot that now it is found in few localities only, and those are very hard to reach.Footnote 17
Others joined the dirge. German painter Carl Rungius, for example, inspired greatly by Hornaday, memorialized mountain sheep through his painting The Mountaineers: On Wilcox Pass, where bighorns stood proudly atop the Alberta Rockies, looking outward at the viewer as if demanding a reason for the intrusion onto their mountainscape.Footnote 18 Rungius's work might be best understood as an epitaph, an artistic preservation of a species that he was certain would soon be gone forever.
BRINGING SHEEP TO WASHINGTON: THE “HUNT” BEGINS
Late in the year of 1898, zoo superintendent Frank Baker decided that the National Zoological Park needed to keep the promise made almost a decade earlier in the halls of the Capitol, namely to preserve the animals of the North American continent.Footnote 19 This mission would not be complete, he knew, until he could acquire Rocky Mountain sheep for the zoo.Footnote 20 By the end of the nineteenth century, acquiring a zoological specimen seemed to be a straightforward task – locate a collector, place an order, and wait a few weeks. Frank Baker knew this process quite well. He had placed hundreds of orders, resulting in the successful procurement of elephants, beavers, bison, and elk. Indeed all of the zoo's inhabitants (that were not donated or loaned to the zoo) were usually acquired by simply placing an order. Yet, even though a national network of “specimen dealers” had emerged after the Civil War to meet Americans’ growing demand for natural history, some specimens proved more difficult to procure than others.Footnote 21
On 1 March 1899, Baker made his order through the botanist, naturalist, and University of Montana professor Morton J. Elrod. The telegram to Elrod read, “I wish to obtain immediately a young Rocky Mountain ram alive. Can you furnish one, or inform me where to get one, and price? Answer collect.”Footnote 22 Clearly the superintendent assumed that locating a sheep would be an easy assignment. To cover his bases, though, Baker sent an identical telegram to hunter R. W. Rock of Lake, Idaho, three days later.Footnote 23 Even after following up with Elrod with a longer, typed letter, Baker heard only silence in return.Footnote 24 He then contacted hunter and collector Vic Smith, of Anaconda, Montana, and hotel owner Leonard M. Cotton, of New Castle, Colorado, in hopes that they would know where to find some sheep.Footnote 25 Both agreed to help the National Zoo, and the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Samuel P. Langley, even sent Cotton the legal papers for a formal agreement.Footnote 26 Yet the year ended, three months of a new century passed, and Baker was still without word of sheep. The hunt for living Rocky Mountain sheep was on.
Secretary Langley and Superintendent Baker pursued different courses of action. Langley rushed down the paved paths of government. In February 1900, Langley contacted Colorado Senator Edward Wolcott for help. The Senator promised to talk to his business partner, who he believed would “succeed in convincing” the authorities that granted permits “that every citizen of Colorado is interested in the success” of the National Zoological Park. In April, the Senator appealed directly to the Colorado governor and asked for “some kind of official sanction” granted to the zoo for the capture of two or three pairs of sheep.Footnote 27 Langley also telegrammed New York governor Theodore Roosevelt for recommendations of hunters who could catch these animals.Footnote 28 The future President responded that same day with two names.Footnote 29
Baker, on the other hand, continued down the tangled footpaths of hunters, trappers, and collectors. He waited for good news from Elrod, Rock, Smith, and Cotton, yet once Langley began appealing to government officials, Baker decided it was time to hurtle himself down the skein of trails that tied the North American West together. Throughout the month of April, Baker reached out to Owen Swift of Edlaw, Perry Foust of Stevensville, Frank C. Parks of Ketchum, Frank Robinson of Libby, J. Blizzard of Eureka, H. Weeman of Midland, John Goff of Meeker, W. H. Root of Laramie, Frank Hays of Aspen, Howard Eaton of Medora, George L. Smith and Nims B. Ferguson of Glenwood Springs, and Tazewell Woody of Mammoth Hot Springs.Footnote 30 He scoured Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and North Dakota in the hope of catching Rocky Mountain sheep. All the while, Langley was growing impatient.Footnote 31 When the Smithsonian secretary grouched at Baker for still not having acquired a single sheep, Baker responded,
During the last two years no chance has been allowed to slip for obtaining these animals. The failure does not arise from lack of effort but from the fact that the sheep are exceedingly wary and almost impossible to capture. But very few have ever been in captivity and those were caught by accident rather than by design.Footnote 32
Rocky Mountain sheep had been pushed by a westbound nation to the edge of extinction, victims of bullets, disease, and dislocation. Yet catching one alive proved to be a nearly impossible task. Baker would have to find the perfect man for the job.
One day in April, that man arrived at the National Zoological Park for the sole purpose of speaking to Baker about catching Rocky Mountain sheep. By 1900, Charles Jesse “Buffalo” Jones had acquired quite the reputation as a frontiersman, hunter, and cowboy. As a child, Jones had likely met Abraham Lincoln when his father hired the future President's legal advice. Jones knew personally American legends like Wyatt Earp, Pat Garret, and Buffalo Bill Cody. He founded Garden City, Kansas, and served as its first mayor. And most significantly for Frank Baker's purpose, Jones, alongside the National Zoo, fought to prevent the extinction of the American bison.Footnote 33 A fitting symbol of a tangled, turn-of-the-century West, Jones proved quite the socialite for a frontiersman, quite the statesman for a cowboy. And as he and Baker meandered along the walkways of the National Zoological Park, sharing stories about wildlife, Jones convinced the superintendent that mountain sheep could not be obtained by the casual enlistment of individual hunters. Mountain sheep were simply too elusive. Their capture would require a grand expedition.Footnote 34 Less than a week later the Smithsonian had organized such an expedition, and as Jones's signature was still drying on the contract, he headed west.Footnote 35
“BUFFALO” JONES AND THE COLORADO EXPEDITION OF 1900
One month later, Jones scrawled a letter from Red Stone, Colorado:
Dear Friend: I came down from the mountains yesterday quite ill, but am all right today … There are no young lambs yet, except one or two pair and they are in the most difficult parts of abrupt cliffs. I am down after long ropes so as to let one of my party down to search for them. I feel sure they are there as the doe keeps near and is very watchful [and] besides she has a regular path leading to the cliffs. We have located five bands ranging from seven to thirty … I am not disturbing them just yet … I feel confident of securing some sheep, yet it is one of the most difficult and hazardous undertakings I ever experienced … Don't be disappointed even should I fail alltogether, yet if there is such a thing as getting them will do it.Footnote 36
There was such a thing. Before the letter even reached the desk of Frank Baker, Langley received news via telegram that Jones had indeed captured his first lamb.Footnote 37 And shortly after receipt of the letter, Baker received word of a second lamb.Footnote 38 Maybe mountain sheep were not tricky after all. Jones took the lambs to Topeka for safekeeping and went back to the mountains in search of more.Footnote 39 At this rate, “Buffalo” Jones would have three pairs of sheep in no time.Footnote 40 Yet the assignment was arduous. “You have no idea the difficulty in capturing the lambs,” Jones wrote to Baker, “They go into the most difficult cliffs and my fingers are covered with blisters … endeavoring to find their lair.”Footnote 41
Another letter, scribbled frustratingly, 19 June 1900, from Topeka:
I stayed in the mountains as long as there was a hope of capturing a lamb. Even a week longer. As they are as nimble as a fox when a week old. The old ewes take them to the highest and roughest peakes as soon as they can travel. And even drop them far above where the old bucks + young sheep range. People see sheep on the side hills + think it easy to get a lamb but they know nothing about the habit of the animals.Footnote 42
Jones had captured two lambs in two months’ time, yet acquiring more proved exasperating. As head of the Colorado expedition, Jones “had men in all parts of Colo[rado], endeavoring to capture lambs … but not one of them ever saw the tail of the lamb.” Mountain sheep were impossible to catch! And they were impossible to hold onto, for Jones even complained that the two lambs under his possession kept escaping because they “scale everything they come to.”Footnote 43 One of the lambs could even “run up the side of the barn.”Footnote 44
In Topeka, the two lambs were “having a hot time of it,” for a prairie summer proved much hotter than a mountain summer.Footnote 45 Animal dealers knew little about mountain sheep except that they were almost impossible to keep alive at low altitudes, frequently succumbing to apoplexy.Footnote 46 Jones reported in July that one of the sheep looked as if it was approaching death.Footnote 47 It recovered, but Jones continued to stay “with them all the time” to personally ensure that they would live to see their days in the National Zoological Park.Footnote 48 He monitored their diet closely, feeding them milk three times every day, but “dare[d] not risk strangers to feed them as sour milk would be dangerous.”Footnote 49 This intensive nurturing quickly grew expensive and time-consuming, and Jones had business to attend to in Nebraska.Footnote 50 So once the weather began to cool in September, he wasted no time in shipping the lambs to Washington. They were both in excellent health, and he felt sure “they [would] go through all right.”Footnote 51
A little more than a week later, Frank Baker received news that the lambs had died in transit.Footnote 52 After hearing word about these deaths from his employer, Jones responded, embarrassed, “Your message reached me here. I am almost paralyzed at it.” He apologized profusely, feeling guilty that he rushed the needy animals off to Washington. “I cannot express my regrets at the news.”Footnote 53 “I regret my time was so taken that I could not have stayed with them.”Footnote 54 The cause of death remained a mystery. The Texan who shipped the lambs reported that they succumbed to a cough.Footnote 55 Frank Baker suspected food poisoning.Footnote 56 Jones, after examining the bodies, suspected that one lamb died naturally and the other became so lonesome that it beat itself to death upon the side of the pen.Footnote 57 Baker remained skeptical. More than one year later, another collector made a reference to the pair of sheep caught by Jones that had succumbed to “injudicious handling.”Footnote 58 Apparently, word about the fate of captured sheep travelled quickly. No matter how these sheep died, however, the National Zoo's first two lambs resisted captivity.Footnote 59
INTENSIFICATION IN THE COLORADO ROCKIES, 1901
Even after the Smithsonian Institution forged a contract with “Buffalo” Jones, Frank Baker continued to fashion an extensive mountain sheep community across the Colorado Rockies. Clearly, catching Rocky Mountain sheep was no simple assignment, and the zoo director built a safety network of potential sheep collectors. Even though, in 1900, the Smithsonian refused to sign more than one contract in order to minimize its financial risk, the National Zoological Park still agreed to purchase sheep from individuals should they happen to catch any on their own. Most of these contacts stretched across Colorado – Edlaw, Aspen, Manitou, Granite, Paonia, Denver, Leadville, and Eagle. Others hailed from Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.Footnote 60 None caught sheep, however. By the late autumn of 1900, Frank Baker still believed that mountain sheep would be captured most easily in Colorado, and on the doorstep of the 1901 winter, he prepared to rely on more than one famed cowboy to bring the animals to Washington. This year, Frank Baker sent two contracted men to the mountains – hunters A. S. Sharp, and Samuel V. Moninger.Footnote 61
Before they could catch any sheep, though, they needed permits from the state of Colorado. On 25 May 1900, President William McKinley signed the nation's first wildlife statute into law. In addition to protecting avian populations and regulating the importation of exotic animals, the Lacey Act, Baker knew, forbade the “shipping of sheep … through other states” if those sheep were obtained in violation of state game laws.Footnote 62 The previous year, Colorado governor Charles S. Thomas approved unquestioningly a permit for “Buffalo” Jones to catch three pairs of Rocky Mountain sheep. The new governor, James B. Orman, however, responded tersely to the petition for permits in a year of heightened wildlife regulation: “Do not care to issue further permits at present.” Enraged at the curt dismissal by a freshman governor, and frustrated that the authority of state governments could attenuate the national sovereignty supposedly wielded by the National Zoo, the secretary of the Smithsonian pleaded with Colorado Senator Henry M. Teller for assistance.Footnote 63 Sharp and Moninger needed permits promptly because it was decided, after Jones's spring and summer failings, that the best time to capture sheep would be during the deep snows of January, February, and March. Adult sheep were simply too nimble and “too wary to be trapped by the hunter.” The only hope would be to corner young sheep between mountain drifts.Footnote 64 Langley proved impatient. He even told Moninger not to worry about a permit and to just collect for himself!Footnote 65 Finally, after political pressure from Teller, Orman capitulated, granting permits to both Sharp and Moninger to “kill for your Institution six Mountain Sheep each.”Footnote 66 “Kill” was crossed out, and “capture” penciled in.
Sharp and Moninger hit the mountaintops. Moninger located a large herd of forty-five sheep right away. The problem was that they were “pretty well snowed in … one of the roughest canyons in the state” and cornered by two or three mountain lions. Moninger planned to kill the lions to ensure his own safety and then use muzzled dogs to run down the sheep.Footnote 67 He failed. Though Moninger gunned down the predators successfully, he did not realize that mastiffs cannot catch sheep on rocky cliffs. Sheep had evolved for millennia to outmaneuver agile cats. Canines did not have a chance.Footnote 68 Later that winter, Moninger tracked down a different herd. Since he could crawl undetected within one hundred feet of them, he planned to catch them in a makeshift enclosure built on the mountainside. He failed again.Footnote 69 Sharp had no more luck than Moninger. He discovered a “flock of fine sheep” outside Leadville, Colorado, and had “four men … after them steady.” However, an impossible storm drove them from the mountains. Sharp remained optimistic: “if there is such a thing as getting them we will have them. [T]hey are one of the hardest animals to capture.”Footnote 70 Yet, despite doing “all in [his] power,” he came up empty-handed.Footnote 71 Indeed, Sharp called his task to catch Rocky Mountain sheep “the most difficult job I ever undertook.”Footnote 72 The Smithsonian's two hunters failed.
Luckily, Frank Baker prepared for the worst. Even though “Buffalo” Jones was no longer on contract, Baker promised that the Smithsonian would purchase any sheep Jones caught as a freelance collector. Jones was supposedly on their trail, yet apparently the celebrity cowboy spent more time over a desk writing Buffalo Jones’ Forty Years of Adventure than he spent tracking sheep.Footnote 73 Baker, frustrated, ordered the book and turned toward another freelancer for results.Footnote 74 Trapper and trail guide J. C. Cosley emerged from Baker's mountain sheep network exuding confidence. “I am a man who is thoroughly aquainted [sic] with the mountains,” Cosley wrote to Baker in December.Footnote 75 In March, Cosley informed Baker that he had indeed captured two sheep in January but released them when Baker never replied to either his letter or his telegram.Footnote 76 Cosley supplied Baker with a vivid, five-page account of their capture.Footnote 77 The zoo superintendent, however, remained unbelieving. The story seemed like a tall tale to him. And its teller repeatedly proved unreliable. On the other hand, Baker's growing frustration with catching sheep may have made him skeptical of any success story. It was true that, like sheep, mail frequently became lost in the mountains.
Spring came again to Colorado. The deep snows began to recede. And still, no sheep. Baker decided that it was time to expand the search.
EXPLORING THE WEST, 1901–1902
Just as Frank Baker began to widen his field of vision, a sheep emerged from an unlikely source. Baker learned that E. I. Shafer of Eckert, Colorado, possessed a mountain sheep that he was willing to sell to the National Zoo. The sheep had been in captivity in western Colorado for nine months, and it was a “very nice, healthy specimen.”Footnote 78 Even though the state game warden was “determined not to let [Baker] have the sheep,” with the influence of Senator Teller and the lobbying of “Buffalo” Jones, who pleaded with the warden “to allow a thorough test to domesticate a few,” a permit was finally and begrudgingly granted.Footnote 79 On 24 June 1901, the National Zoological Park received its first bighorn.Footnote 80
Like most zoo mammals, however, the mountain sheep needed companions. Since Colorado sheep seemed impossible to catch, and since the Smithsonian seemed to have exhausted its favors from the state government, Frank Baker began to look elsewhere. In the summer of 1901, he forged a new, unofficial policy for catching bighorns. Baker articulated this policy to Miers Fisher of Denver, who was inquiring about a Smithsonian contract after reading about the adventures of Sharp and Moninger in local papers:
The National Zoological Park still desires to obtain four or five specimens of this animal, but it does not seem advisable to make formal contracts with persons to supply them as it has been found that even where the parties seemed to be most favorably situated there was no certainty whatever that they could secure the animals … the Park will stand ready … to purchase specimens.Footnote 81
While Baker stood ready, he pushed his mountain sheep network across the entirety of western North America, in an effort to both save a species from extinction and tie a continent to a national zoo worthy of a twentieth-century nation.
Baker cast his network far and wide. First, he looked to the state of Montana. He had formed relationships with three hunters from Kipp, Browning, and Main who agreed to pursue sheep. Montana, Baker discovered, only issued permits for mountain sheep serving educational purposes within the state.Footnote 82 They could not be sent elsewhere. Baker and Langley consequently appealed to the governor to grant the Smithsonian “official sanction” around Blackfoot.Footnote 83 The request, however, was denied.Footnote 84 Like Colorado, Montana had begun to take its wildlife regulations seriously. Baker corresponded with collectors and hunters from Idaho Falls, Hailey, Patterson, and Small, Idaho, and Langley with a collector from Aberdeen, South Dakota.Footnote 85 Baker looked to Flagstaff and Yuma, Arizona.Footnote 86 He looked to Eddy, New Mexico.Footnote 87 He looked to Salt Lake City, Utah.Footnote 88 He looked to Elizabeth Lake, California, for Sierra Nevada bighorns.Footnote 89 He looked to Parkman, Wyoming.Footnote 90 He even looked to Colorado again, for he had been told that mountain sheep roamed upon the privately owned Glen Beulah Park, near De Beque in the western part of the state. However, these sheep still proved too “wild” to capture. Due to Glen Beulah's canyons and cliffs, the manager claimed that “it would be quite as difficult to capture one in the park as outside.”Footnote 91
Baker searched high and low (well, mostly high) throughout the continental United States, but he also looked north to Canada. Indeed, William Temple Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Park and Baker's predecessor as founder of the National Zoo, believed that the white, horned sheep of northern Canada and Alaska would survive better in captivity because they lived at lower altitudes.Footnote 92 Although these sheep would eventually be classified as different species (either Ovis dalli or Ovis nivicola, not Ovis canadensis), they could still serve as representatives of the disappearing mountain sheep of North America. After communicating with Hornaday, Baker contacted a sheep-seeker in British Columbia.Footnote 93 He courted a “purser of a steamer” that ran between Seattle and Scagway, Alaska, who promised to catch a particular type of horned, white sheep (called Ovis fannis by Hornaday) found only along a specific Alaskan inlet.Footnote 94 Baker even pursued the possibility of capturing desert bighorns in the State of Chihuahua in northwestern Mexico.Footnote 95 These sheep were apparently in graver danger than their relatives across the border, for hunters from Paris, London, and Mexico City frequently vacationed to the region to take advantage of low altitudes and lax game laws.Footnote 96
No matter where in North America Frank Baker recruited hunters, trappers, collectors, and frontiersmen, mountain sheep resisted. They had long served as target practice for trigger-happy humans. Yet they refused to be captured alive. They evaded the imperial appropriation that tethered elephants, fenced antelope, and caged monkeys. The elusive cultures they built on cliffs, at the edge of human settlement, proved virtually impenetrable. Joseph Chandler admitted to Baker that “the goal is dangerous” because sheep were “only to be had on the peaks … and seldom leave the precipices where they can't be caught.”Footnote 97 James Fullerton believed it common knowledge that sheep were “the most difficult of all game to hunt.”Footnote 98 W. H. Root joked, almost two years after the incident, that “Buffalo Jones had the consent of the Governor of Colorado but not of the sheep.”Footnote 99 Winnie Harwood Phillips believed that the sheep must “know their safety lies in escaping to the tops of the waterless mountains.”Footnote 100 Will Frakes declared Sierra Nevada bighorns “the most cautious and suspicious animal that I ever attempted to capture.”Footnote 101 Samuel V. Moninger, after trying to catch damned sheep for over a year, scribbled angrily and almost incoherently to Baker, “they can go any place if any else can get them let them go ahead.” Then, he raged that the muzzled dogs he used to chase sheep down were poisoned.Footnote 102 A. S. Sharp also pursued sheep long after his contract expired. In fact, his commitment to catching sheep exploded into an obsession. Recognizing this, during the winter of 1902, Baker suggested, “As you have now engaged in this undertaking for a year I think it will not be worth while for you to pursue the matter much longer.”Footnote 103 Sharp ignored the advice.
MOUNTAIN SHEEP RESISTANCE AND WESTERN KNOWLEDGE
The campaign to catch mountain sheep proved arduous. The entire mountain sheep affair may have been the most sustained effort in history, by the United States government, to procure a single species for the purpose of zoological display. By the spring of 1902, Frank Baker had grown “extremely anxious.”Footnote 104 The citizens of Colorado had, at the same time, begun to demand that their state monitor its cherished animals more closely. C. W. Harris, commissioner of game and fish, told Baker that “people in the state, are getting very angry at this Department, on account of capture permits … I just received a letter, stating where a man had a permit to capture one sheep and in trying to do so, he killed eleven, and failed to capture any.”Footnote 105 Wyoming also increased its surveillance. Only the governor could now grant the federal government permission to extract sheep from Wyoming, and DeForest Richards surely was not eager to rid his state of an animal that his constituents held dear.Footnote 106 It appeared that the Smithsonian would have to soon abandon its search for sheep altogether. Indeed, in a letter to Montana Senator William A. Clark, Secretary Langley explicitly blamed the states for making it difficult for the Smithsonian to achieve its mission.Footnote 107 Public resistance to catching sheep was mounting.
Then, on 11 April 1902, a second sheep arrived miraculously on the doorstep of the National Zoo.Footnote 108 Like the first, this sheep was owned previously by a resident of western Colorado, living specifically in the town of Ouray.Footnote 109 Hearing word of Baker's desire for sheep, Mr. Dusenbery decided to sell his pet. Harris reluctantly granted a permit. And Baker realized that, from now on, it would no longer be “advisable to ask further privileges” from Colorado.Footnote 110 This was it. At the end of 1902, four years after the chase commenced, two Rocky Mountain sheep shared an exhibit in the nation's capital. Despite the adventures sparked by the Smithsonian Institution, these particular sheep, fenced upon a rocky hill next to the aoudad enclosure, were unremarkably obtained through everyday Americans who had quietly domesticated the animals that the federal government pursued around its supposedly “conquered” frontier. Wild sheep tamed by “wild” Americans ironically provided the National Zoo with “pets” that told the story of a nation “taming” a frontier. Because this lie lay hidden behind their curation, these two mountain sheep allowed the zoo, and the United States, to lay claim to the modernity of mastery pursued by nation-states the world over.
Indeed, during the first decade of the twentieth century, national power proved more chimerical than textbook narratives of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era may suggest. Despite the failed populist movement of the 1890s, despite American victory in the Spanish–American War, despite Teddy Roosevelt's big-stick diplomacy, and despite the display of mastery exhibited by neatly arranged zoo enclosures, the state remained far from omnipotent. Within the space of the zoo, power appeared neat and tidy. A zoo-goer could observe North American mountain sheep in one enclosure, walk a few steps, and then watch the wild sheep from North Africa and southeastern Spain in another enclosure. A zoo-goer could assume that the United States had conquered the Ovis ungulates of the world. The display of the zoo, however, as demonstrated above, masked the true story of hunters, locals, governors, permits, policies, public opinions, and failures. Undoubtedly, over the course of the nineteenth century, the state grew in both size and power. Over this same time span, an amateur tradition of natural-history collecting gave way to professionalized trades in animals, plants, and other environmental artifacts that met the public's insatiable demand for natural history after the Civil War.Footnote 111 Nonetheless, these well-known transitions fail to tell the whole story. In mountain sheep harvesting, many actors, diffused throughout the federal system and spread across American society, exercised a power (or a lack thereof) that influenced both the national government and the business of animal collecting.
Since, by 1902, it was common knowledge that mountain sheep were “impossible to acclimate,” no one expected the pair to live long – a fact plainly (and interestingly) stated in the guidebook that visitors carried from enclosure to enclosure.Footnote 112 Indeed, the first sheep died in January 1903, killed by intestinal parasites that thrive at low altitudes and hot climates.Footnote 113 The second sheep apparently lived for several years; no record of its death can be found. The National Zoological Park, however, did not cease pursuing bighorns after the first pair's procurement. The quest for mountain sheep was, in fact, only just beginning. Wild Westerners chased bighorns for the Smithsonian until the eve of the First World War. A few sheep arrived at the zoo. A few sheep died. Most absconded, retreating to the unreachable heights of the American West. As late as 1917, Richard Rathbun, acting secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, told Texas Senator Morris Sheppard (who was trying to locate mountain sheep for San Antonio's zoo) that the “wild sheep is among the most difficult of animals to acclimatize.”Footnote 114 That same year, Frank Baker purchased a mountain sheep from a young Mojave student of the Colorado River Indian School. Baker sent the boy ten dollars, six percent of the going rate for bighorns.Footnote 115
Like much of the history of the American West, the intertwined stories of early zoological parks and mountain sheep twist around the theme of exploitation, familiar to both the historiography of the American West and contemporary criticisms of zoological parks. Gilded Age and Progressive Era zoo building indeed exploited both humans and animals alike. Exploitation, of course, surrounded every zoo enclosure. From capture to transport, from containment to curation, from display to consumption, every life in the zoo – sheep included – embodied (literally) human dominion over the nonhuman, the natural, the exotic. Exploitation made the tableau of mastery, etched into the very purpose of the zoo movement, possible in the first place. Yet seeing zoological parks, and their animals, through the lens of exploitation only gets at the surface of their complicated histories. Historians’ reliance on standard power-laden categories of analysis – nation, empire, modernity, industrialization, race, and the exotic – has placed zoological parks into interpretive straitjackets, overemphasizing singular meanings bestowed upon the institution and its animals, not the multitudinous meanings born within it. Tracing the biographies of a few individual mountain sheep alone shows us that countless stories are awaiting the historian. Tracking historical animals will not only give voice to the silenced, but also gesture toward new analytical crossroads.
Several historical lessons cling, with mountain sheep, to the cliffs and canyons of North America. First, as the Smithsonian Institution chased sheep, it wove together a body of knowledge about these mysterious animals. This knowledge emanated not from the new laboratories of scientists. This knowledge arrived not from the writings of naturalists in the field. This knowledge came from the heavens, pieced together by the North Americans who ventured to vertical frontiers. In many ways, these individuals appeared as the archetypal characters of Western myth – cowboys, hunters, adventurers, mountain men. However, in their role as sheep-chasers, it was through their failures that both zoological knowledge was built from the ground up and the North American West was built from peaks down. Even though a few systematic zoologists had tried classifying the many types of mountain sheep that bound North America together, in 1922 a Milwaukee hunter declared “the books … very confused and misleading.”Footnote 116 Ned Hollister, the later superintendent of the National Zoological Park, admitted that the sheep “have never been thoroughly studied as yet, and the relationship[s] between the forms are imperfectly known.”Footnote 117 The Americans who lived among bighorns could care less about “forms,” but they knew the sheep best. And it was these individuals who provided the raw material for science. Like the sheep, knowledge could not be captured. It had to be assembled by a network of unlikely actors, brought together by government, economics, human culture, and sheep resistance.Footnote 118
Second, extinction and conservation cannot only be viewed dialectically. Early animal conservation efforts, as environmental historians have shown, first arose to confront the specter of extinction.Footnote 119 Ironically, though, many of these campaigns, in the short term, often endangered the very species they sought to save. Even though the National Zoological Park (and other zoos) hoped to protect mountain sheep, the process of catching them inevitably caused high casualties. In the long term, though, over the course of the twentieth century, zoo-sponsored conservation campaigns reduced their recklessness. Conservation became more conservation-minded. Extinction, of course, remains a specter.Footnote 120
The third lesson is similar. Though the contemporary historiography of the American West has complicated Turnerian narratives driven by overwrought East–West power relations, the shadows of these narratives still shade historical work. The West, of course, is no longer (and was never) “won.” Yet it is still “made,” “peopled,” “shaped,” and “exploited.” The West is depicted as a product of historical processes emanating from the East, a periphery of a metropole located along lesser longitudes. Even as we nuance East–West essentialisms, we still turn to symbols that carry these essentialisms into historical writing. The railroad is such a symbol. Railroads surely facilitated processes of commodification, extraction, and displacement, as well as extermination. However, the unidirectionality embodied in railroad symbolism is distorting. Mountain sheep make better symbols for the turn-of-the-century American West. Their story began with an East–West narrative structure: an eastern zoo wanted mountain sheep from western mountains. What could be more unidirectional? Indeed, power emanated from the East, from the National Zoological Park, from the Smithsonian Institution, from the federal government, from the desire of eastern cities to display the wild. Yet the chase for sheep hurtled down many paths to many places and created a constellation of power-wielding individuals – Wyoming hunters, New Mexico animal collectors, Alaskan sailors, Colorado governors, Montana professors, celebrity adventurers, game wardens, conservationists, Mojave children, future Presidents, and sheep themselves. In the pursuit of sheep, nothing was simple.
And, regarding the mountain sheep affair, all of these actors and forces lay hidden behind the stories of mastery told on the surface of zoological parks. Between 1870 and 1910, zoological parks appeared suddenly at the heart of every major American city. In this time span, these institutions sold tens of millions of tickets.Footnote 121 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians realized the historical significance of zoological parks.Footnote 122 Yet, still, the primary interpretations of zoos focus on the master narratives projected onto zoo animals, based around the constructs of empire, class, nationhood, globalization, and “ecological modernity.”Footnote 123 These narratives were (and are) important. The problem, though, is that they are constructed by society and inscribed upon the bodies of zoo animals after they are put on display. While these narratives speak volumes about past societies and cultures, they tend to homogenize real, historical nonhuman animals. These narratives tend to focus on discursive, metonymic animals, not living animals. They tend to ignore the lives of animals before they arrived in zoos. They tend to ignore the complex processes that brought animals to zoos in the first place. And they tend to ignore most of the humans who surrounded, lived with, and experienced animals. More than fifty zoological parks, thousands of zoo employees, millions of zoo animals, and tens of millions of zoo-goers exploded onto the historical scene during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Each of these actors has unique and complicated stories to tell for historians in the midst of the “animal turn.”Footnote 124
Sheep survived. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the population of Ovis canadensis has declined from more than 1·5 million to approximately 70,000 today. Nonetheless, due to conservation efforts and sheep resilience, mountain sheep numbers have been on the rise since the National Zoological Park first began its chase at the dawn of the twentieth century.Footnote 125 Mountain sheep still face challenges that threaten existence. A recent resurgence in mountain lion populations, “subsidized” by local cattle, has allowed predators to propagate more rapidly than prey, posing a serious threat to sheep, especially in the American southwest and California.Footnote 126 Americans are still pressing against the range and habitat of mountain sheep in myriad ways. Surface mining, urbanization, hiking trails, livestock grazing and the construction of “travel corridors” all lay claim to mountain sheep territory.Footnote 127 For zoological parks, mountain sheep continued to resist for most of the twentieth century – remaining difficult to locate, capture, transport, and keep in captivity. Occasionally, a mountain sheep would arrive at a zoo, either unpredictably or after prolonged adventures like the one narrated above. Frequently, though, its life was short.
In the 1970s, zoological parks began to breed sheep in captivity, sidestepping many of the logistical difficulties of procurement that confronted the Smithsonian Institution seven decades earlier. In 1980, according to the International Zoo Yearbook, twenty-three zoological parks, scattered about the world, held 106 mountain sheep. Of these, eighty-one had been born in captivity. Yet captive breeding has introduced new threats to captive herds of Ovis canadensis: reductions in viability, decreases in fertility, increases in mortality, and less genetic variability.Footnote 128 Zoos do not release captive-bred sheep into the wild, as they do with other species. Sheep born in zoos stay in zoos, as do their offspring. Surely these captive herds deserve a history of their own. They deserve a history that analyzes them as biopolitical products of the Anthropocene. They also deserve stories told, tales that locate their voices from the crags of our past and present. At least 159 mountain sheep live in zoological parks today.Footnote 129 While none live in the National Zoo, mountain sheep can be found in cities like Calgary, LA, Edmonton, San Diego, Phoenix, and Denver. Tens of thousands of resilient others still stretch from northern Canada to northern Mexico.Footnote 130 They still bind a continent together, living above the perception of most twenty-first-century Americans.
