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Show 60 BASIS OF AMERICAN HISTORY [ 1500 Pennsylvania as late as 1869. \ N ow virtually extinct east of the Mississippi, the range of the elk is practically limited to the eastern slope of the Rockies, especially in western Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, with a few representing local varieties in the Olympic Mountains of Washington and in Arizona and New Mexico. The present focus of the elk range is the Yellowstone Park, which forms a breeding- ground and summer nursery for a herd of twenty thousand head. The moose ( Alces atnericanus), the largest and most powerful of the deer family, has suffered much less than has the elk from the inroads of civilization. Its present range is from the Atlantic to the Pacific, through the wooded north temperate sub- region, especially in New Brunswick, Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia, and Alaska, 1 and extending into the United States in Maine, northern Minnesota, and in the Rockies as far south as northern Wyoming. In thp Adirondacks it was exterminated about i860. While the number of moose has undoubtedly been sadly lessened by hunters, opinion differs as to the danger of its extinction. Though yielding the southern limit of their range, there is reason to believe that they are encroaching, perhaps to an equal extent, upon new forest lands to the northward. In certain parts of British Columbia and Alaska the dying out of the Indian tribes has 1 The Alaska moose is generally regarded as a distinct species, Alces gigas. |