Mountain (Bighorn) Sheep

By editor

Thompson Falls, Sanders County, Montana, 1810

The bighorn sheep is a creature of the high, cold places, a master of the steep rocks and the thin air. When David Thompson, the first European to visit the middle Clark Fork, arrived in 1810, he found them a welcome sight in the bitter winter, writing that he "saw about a dozen of Sheep, sorely wounded one of them with Shot but the Rocks were too steep and the cold & the Snow too bad." They were the lifeblood of the Salish, Pend d'Oreille, and Kootenai tribes, who left their images carved into the stone of the canyons.

These magnificent animals, Ovis canadensis, crossed the Bering Land Bridge half a million years ago, spreading from Alberta to Baja California. The glaciers of the Ice Age separated them into distinct species, the Rocky Mountain bighorn growing the largest horns of all, massive curved crowns that can weigh thirty pounds on an older ram. They lived in harmony with the mountains until the late nineteenth century, when the coming of man and his domestic livestock brought uncontrolled hunting and devastating diseases.

By the 1940s, the great herds were nearly gone, considered endangered across the West. The Thompson Falls herd vanished entirely by 1948, wiped out by disease and the steady encroachment of civilization. But in 1959, nineteen sheep were brought from the Sun River Game Range and Wildhorse Island, and from that small seed, a new herd grew. Today, hundreds of them range across ninety square miles of rugged forest, evidence of the enduring wildness of the mountains, even as they descend to the valley bottoms in winter, where the iron roads and highways claim their toll.

See also

• Mountain (Bighorn) Sheep at Thompson Falls, Sanders County (Erected by Unknown, erected Unknown)
• Pend d'Oreille Hunting Grounds
• Bad Rock Trail