The Trailwatcher

The Krag Krinklehorn mystery

Back someplace in the column years there was a confession about an 11-year-old boy fearfully removing a page from a county library book. The culprit was me. The stolen page was an illustration of the world's largest bighorn ram, called Krag by the artist-author, Ernest Thompson Seton. Since 1939, guilt has made me repay the library a hundred times over, and I've acquired my own original edition copy of "Krag the Kootenay Ram."

If great love of local history is a disease, then research is the cure. That is why this column is going to talk about Krag the Kootenay Ram, Scotty McDougall, Krinklehorn Peak, and Mt. Thompson Seton

The story of Krag was first published, as a two part serial in Scribner's Magazine in 1901, then became the lead story in Seton's famous book "Lives of the Hunted."

Seton writes the thrilling, tragic life of Krag the magnificent bighorn ram, and centers it all around "Gunder Peak," which in the real world is Tuchuck Mountain in the North Fork's Whitefish Range. During the climax chapters, when the hunter McDougall sets out to kill Krag, the tortuous winter stalk wanders hundreds of miles through the Livingston and Lewis ranges of what is now Glacier Park and even up into the Galton and MacDonald ranges of Alberta and British Columbia, Canada.

Appropriately, the haunting saga ends where it began on Gunder Peak. The book became a best seller. I was not the only one who couldn't put it down, and read it over and over. So did the generation before me. Around 1913, the U.S. Geological Survey did the topographical map of the Kootenai and Flathead Forest, and the Flathead Supervisor, Robert McLaughlin, named four peaks in the North Fork, Krag Peak, Krinklehorn Peak, Mount Scotty, and Mount Thompson Seton. They are still there.

Seton's story and the characters in it were portrayed as fiction, based on what may or may not have been actual Montana history, so that could mean four of our local mountains are named after fictional animals and a person who never lived. That is the way I thought about all this for many years. Then, about 15 years ago I read a magazine article wherein a man in Colorado had dug up enough evidence to convince him the mounted head of Krag was hanging on the walls of a rich man's castle someplace in the British Isles, and he was seeking financial backers to send him over there searching.

Was there a real Krag the Kootenay Ram? Was there a Scotty McDougall who hunted him? Was Scotty buried in his cabin by an avalanche on Grave Creek?

Last year a noted historical researcher, Dave Walter, did a story for Montana Magazine, in which he found that Seton found inspiration in a story by Tacoma gunsmith/taxidermist. William Sheard printed in the July 1897 issue of Recreational Magazine titled, "How the Big Ram Was Killed." That article verifies the existence of Scotty McDougall and the ram, and an avalanche killed that Scotty in 1897.

The article by Sheard said the ram's horns measured 18.5 inches around the base and the outside curve was 52.5 inches. Unbelievable!

Walter's research produced two possible versions of what happened to the mounted trophy. One is that it was destroyed in a fire at Sheard's Tacoma establishment. The other is that George F. Stannard, a taxidermist and entrepreneur from Kalispell, bought the head from McDougall and sent it to his nephew in Ireland, who carried it to the Channel Island of Guernsey. Then, to make things really confusing, Walter says, "One might speculate that there were two separate heads involved here, as both stories appear plausible."

We don't know about that but there WAS a hunter named Scotty McDougall who did kill a giant bighorn ram and died four years later buried in snow. Here is how Seton wrapped it up; "gently the rains from the westward washed the great white pile of the snowslide. Slowly the broken shanty came to light, and there in the middle, quite unharmed was the head of the Gunder Ram. His amber eyes were gleaming bright as of old, under the cover of those wonderful horns. And below him were some broken bones, with rags and grizzled human hair.

"Old Scotty is forgotten, but the Ram's head hangs enshrined on a palace wall today, a treasure among kingly treasures. And men, when they gaze on those marvelous horns, still talk of the glorious Gunder Ram who grew them far away on the heights of the Kootenay."

Where does Krinklehorn Peak fit into this century old mystery?

You'll have to read the book.

G. George Ostrom is news director of KOFI Radio and a Flathead Publishing Group columnist.