Mountain (Bighorn) Sheep

Mountain sheep were a valued source of food in the middle Clark Fork region for both Native peoples and newcomers. In 1810, fur trader, explorer, and geographer David Thompson, the first European visitor to the middle Clark Fork, welcomed their presence during cold winter days when other game was scarce, and a Christmas visitor to Thompson's Saleesh Trading Post near Thompson Falls feasted on mountain sheep along with rice, tea, coffee, arrowroot, and 15 gallons of prime rum. Bighorns were also an important food source for the Salish, Pend Orielle, and Kootenai Tribes, who left reminders in drawings on stone. Once common from Alberta to Baja, Mexico, bighorns reached the new world from eastern Siberia during the Ice Age by crossing the Bering Land Bridge about 500,000 years ago. Glaciers separated the sheep into 2 species distinguished mostly by horn size: bighorns in southern Canada and the United States, and the thin-horned Dall's and Stone's sheep in northern Canada and Alaska. The bighorn sheep's scientific name, Ovis, canadensis, means Canadian sheep, and bighorns are divided into three varieties: the California bighorn of the Sierra Nevada, the desert bighorn of the southwest, and the Rocky Mountain bighorn of the northwest, which has the largest horns. Once plentiful, bighorn populations declined rapidly with the settling of the West as competition with people and livestock for range, uncontrolled hunting, and introduced diseases and parasites decimated them from the late 1880s onward; many herds were wiped out by the early 1900s, and by the 1940s bighorns were considered endangered in most western states. The Thompson Falls herd followed this pattern as disease caused a massive die-off in the early 1900s, reducing the population to about 50 sheep in 1942 and about 10 in 1947, with none remaining by 1948. In 1959, 19 bighorns were transplanted from herds at the Sun River Game Range in west-central Montana and Wildhorse Island on Flathead Lake, and the population grew to about 600 sheep in the early 1980s. That number overpopulated the range and increased parasite infection, so hunting began in 1968 and continues to prevent overgrazing and protect local landowners' crops. The herd now numbers 300-359 at its low point each year before the spring lamb crop and ranges over more than 90 square miles of rugged National Forest and state lands, but many sheep are still killed each winter in collisions with vehicles and trains.

Montana · United States