Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat — Story, Setting & Ideas

Three Voices, Three Approaches

The volume is divided among three authors, each with a distinct method. Whitney’s musk-ox section is a first-person hunting narrative, rich with logistical detail—provisioning, equipment, the behavior of guides. George Bird Grinnell’s bison chapter shifts to a natural history essay, complete with measurements, horn tables, and a lament for the vanished herds. Owen Wister’s two contributions on mountain sheep and white goat blend personal anecdote with wry observation, as when he describes a tethered ram in Livingston, Montana, whose “slow gaze” expresses contempt for tourists.

These differences in genre and tone mean the book does not offer a single reading experience. A reader moving straight through will encounter abrupt transitions from Whitney’s survival tension to Grinnell’s taxonomic lists to Wister’s ironic humor. The structure rewards selective reading: each section can stand alone as a period piece of American field sports.

The Bison as Monument

Grinnell’s chapter on the bison is the most elegiac. He describes rubbing-stones worn smooth by generations of buffalo, their angles “still discolored by the grease left on them.” These stones, he writes, are “monuments of imperishable granite, fashioned by a race of dumb creatures,” telling a story of “life and power and multitude forever gone.” The passage is notable for its shift from scientific description to something approaching memorial.

Grinnell includes a table of horn measurements from notable hunters and collectors—Theodore Roosevelt, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Sir Greville Smyth—which serves as a roll call of the late-nineteenth-century sporting elite. The juxtaposition of precise data with lyrical mourning is characteristic of the period’s conservation writing, where the impulse to document often accompanied a sense of loss.

Wister’s Ironic Eye

Owen Wister opens his mountain sheep chapter with a scene that undercuts romantic expectations. He wakes in a Pullman berth, raises the window-shade, and sees a “fat and flourishing mountain ram” tethered to a telegraph pole, gazing at tourists with “the same contempt which smouldered in the stare of the Indians.” The domesticated ram becomes a comic emblem of the wild reduced to spectacle.

Wister’s prose is more literary than Whitney’s or Grinnell’s, with a novelist’s attention to character and setting. His sections on the white goat continue this vein, describing the animal as “an agile climber” and emphasizing the difficulty of pursuit. The tone is often wry, sometimes self-deprecating, and it provides a counterpoint to the earnestness of the earlier chapters. Readers may find Wister’s contributions the most stylistically engaging.

Reading the Excerpts as a Sequence

The excerpts available do not include the full text of each section, but they reveal the book’s hybrid nature. Whitney’s opening is a survival story; Grinnell’s middle is a natural history monograph; Wister’s later chapters are sporting essays with a literary bent. The volume was published in 1904 as part of “The American Sportsman’s Library,” a series edited by Caspar Whitney, and it reflects the era’s interest in combining field experience with scientific cataloguing.

A first-time reader might begin with Wister’s more accessible prose, then move to Whitney for narrative tension, and finally to Grinnell for factual depth. The book does not require linear reading. The index and illustrations—including photographs of skulls, horns, and hunting scenes—suggest it was designed as a reference as well as a narrative work.

The three authors share a common subject—large game of North America—but their treatments diverge so markedly that the volume reads as three books in one. Whitney’s musk-ox hunt is a test of endurance; Grinnell’s bison is a monument to what has been lost; Wister’s sheep and goat are occasions for wry reflection. Readers should approach each section on its own terms, alert to the different expectations each author sets. The excerpts offer a sampler of late-imperial sporting literature, where observation, adventure, and elegy coexist.

There’s something grounding in how those old writers lingered on the same prairies and mountains I’ll never see, their worry for the herds feeling almost familiar. It makes me think of quieter evenings spent with Mark Twain's Speeches — Story, Setting & Ideas, where the voice is different but the ache of passing time feels the same.