THE MENTOR 1916.08.15, No. 113,
Game Animals of America

Game Preservation

The most striking and melancholy feature in connectionwith American big game is the rapidity withwhich it has vanished. When, just before the outbreakof the Revolutionary War, the rifle-bearing hunters of thebackwoods first penetrated the great forests west of theAlleghanies, deer, elk, black bear, and even buffalo,swarmed in what are now the States of Kentucky andTennessee, and the country north of the Ohio was a greatand almost virgin hunting-ground. From that day tothis the shrinkage has gone on, only partially checkedhere and there.

There is yet ample opportunity for the big gamehunter in the United States, Canada and Alaska.…It is necessary to remember that these opportunitiesare, nevertheless, vanishing; and if we are a sensiblepeople we will make it our business to see that the processof extinction is arrested. At the present moment thegreat herds of caribou are being butchered, as in the pastthe great herds of bison and wapiti have been butchered.Every believer in manliness, and therefore in manlysport, and every lover of nature, every man who appreciatesthe majesty and beauty of the wilderness and ofwild life, should strike hands with the far-sighted men whowish to preserve our material resources, in the effort tokeep our forests and our game beasts, game birds, andgame fish—indeed, all the living creatures of prairie,and woodland, and seashore—from wanton destruction.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

From “Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter,” by Theodore Roosevelt.

Copyright, Charles Scribner’s Sons.