The Cleopatra's Big Game Expedition
Twenty members of an Illinois hunting club trekked into the Northwest to bag grizzly, goat, and caribou, leaving a trail of exhausted guides and provincial legal trouble behind them.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A jolly crowd of happy hunters came in over the Great Northern yesterday in the private Pullman car, Cleopatra. They were twenty members of the Bloomington Hunting Club, of Bloomington, Ill. They came over the Canadian Pacific to Vernon, near the head of Okanagan lake. Here they divided into three parties, one going west of the lake in search of deer, another striking off for Goat mountain to the north of Cherry creek looking for goat, and the third going south of Cherry creek in search of caribou, and all looking for grizzly and sheep. They spent two glorious weeks in the mountains, getting sixty-five deer, fourteen goats and six caribou, but owing to the timidity of their Indian guides, they never ran across a bear. There were plenty of fresh bear tracks, but the guides steered the hunters away from the game, because a couple of the Indians had been killed by grizzlies a short time ago. The party made a rather hasty exit from the country as the provincial officers were after them because only three of the party had paid the $50 license required of hunters by British Columbia. They brought their spoil to this city to be mounted and sent on to them afterward.
“They spent two glorious weeks in the mountains... but owing to the timidity of their Indian guides, they never ran across a bear.”
This account of wealthy 'sport hunters' chartering private rail cars to exploit the wilderness captures the era's frantic, extractive relationship with the Pacific Northwest. Today, such private excursions have been replaced by high-end eco-tourism and remote adventure travel, but the dynamic of out-of-towners commodifying local ecosystems remains a familiar friction.
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