years have been preserved from destruction by a California
cattle company; the other, found only in the Southwest, in territory now
included within the Black Mesa forest reservation, may be, perhaps,
without a single living representative. Over a vast extent of the
territory which the antelope once inhabited, it has ceased to exist; and
so speedy and so wholesale has been its disappearance that most of the
Western States, slow as they always are to interfere with the privileges
of their citizens to kill and destroy at will, have passed laws either
wholly protecting it or, at least, limiting the number to be killed in a
season to one, two or three. In 1888 no one could have conceived that
the diminution of the native large game of America would be what it has
proved to be within the past fifteen years.

[Illustration: THE NEW BUFFALO HERD IN YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK]

That the game stock may re-establish itself in certain localities, the
Club has advocated the establishment in the various forest reserves of
game refuges, where absolutely no hunting shall be permitted.

Through the influence of William Hallett Phillips, a deceased member of
the Club, a few lines inserted in an act passed by Congress March 3,
1891, permitted the establishment of forest reserves, and Hon. John
W. Noble, then Secretary of the Interior, at once recommended the
application of the law to a number of forest tracts, which were
forthwith set aside by Presidential proclamation. Since then, more and
more forest reserves have been created, and, thanks to the wisdom and
courage of the Chief Magistrates of the Nation within the past twelve
years, we now have more than sixty millions of acres of such
reservations. These consist largely of rough, timbered mountain lands,
unfit for cultivation or settlement. They are of enormous value to the
arid West, as affording an unfailing water supply to much of that
region, and in a less degree they are valuable as timber reserves, from
which hereafter may be harvested crops which will greatly benefit the
country adjacent to them.

In the first volume of the Boone and Crockett Club Books, it was said:
"In these reservations is to be found to-day every species of large game
known to the United States, and the proper protection of the
reservations means the perpetuating in full supply of all these
indigenous mammals. If this care is provided, no species of American
large game need ever become absolutely extinct;