The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1909-06-20

If a man were to tell you that ne
had seen a square mile Of starving Elk
r. he said that he had hidden IN a
load Of domestic hay and watched ~
400 of them stream past in line that
seemed to have no ending.
re- no swore that he had stood on a
maintain spur and looked down into
a valley packed with elk as far as the
eve could reach.
Would you believe himF
Probably not. :,
Your answer to him likely would
be sarcastic. You might observe thaI
Won had never suffered from night
mare in that form and that not even
in the moments of your widest I'M
Awnings did you permit yourself to
strav 80 far from the truth as to pic
ture a mile of elk, or valley of them,
or any Of the other things OF which ne
was trying to convince you, says the
Chicago Tribune.
But out of the West there comes
from the famous Jackson s Hole coun-
trv a plain, unvarnished tale of truth
told by plain, unvaruished man or
the mountains, in which it is made
apparent that all of these things have
happened and are happening now in
wyoming. And to back up that story
this man brings the evidence OF the
camera.
Thirty thousand elk are wintering
I'M the Jackson Hole country in Wy
oming. They are not wary or timor-
Gus, these elk. They do not shun the
hsunts of man. On the contrary, they
come up to his doors. For they are
starving, and the state of Wyoming is
feeding them $4,000 worth OF hay in
an effort to keep them alive until the
snow is gone and the growths of spring
time will furnish them with the
natural food which a hard winter has
taken from them.
Thirty thousand starving elkl
It sounds Ike one of the tall stories
that Westerners reserve for Eastern
consumption, but it ism t. The camera
doesn t lie unless it is tempered with,
and Ben Sheffield of Moran, Wyoming,
who made the eloquent pictures,
did nothing to his instrument
that good photographer should not
DO. He just went down to jackson,
Struggled himself down in load of
hay, and drove out into the valley
around the town.
The elk came trotting around the
load Thousands of them came, until
the wagon was the center of an ocean
of brown bodies and tossing heads
Then Sheffield turned loose his films
and the pictures are the result. After
the picture taking, the hay was pitched
off to the waiting animals, which strug
gied and fought for mouthful much
like the ordinary Holstein cows of 10
cal fame.
Aside from the deplorable circum
stances of inevitable starvation for 8
large number of the elk, the mere fig
nres which develop in telling the tale
of the Jackson Is Hole elk are such al
TO startie the average American il
whose ears is constantly dinned thu
song that =" big game is going the
way of the L 1ffalo, and that the deer
the moose, the mountain sheep, an(
the elk, the largest species of American
wild game, soon will have vanished
from the face of the earth and become
like the buffalo, a subject for lamenta
sion and national shame.
Whatever may have happened to tn.
elk in other portions of the country
it is evident that in Wyoming it is fat
from the possibility of immediate ex
tinction. A glance at the figures Incl
dent to the situation as it exists a