Elk in Corbin Park
The following story was published in SooNipi Magazine, Fall 2007 issue.
CORBIN’S ELK
By Mary Comeau-Kronenwetter, Ed.D.
One hundred years ago, one could hear the bugle of a bull elk in Andover,
New Hampshire. Sixty-six years ago, two hundred men spread out across
Lempster, Washington, Goshen and Unity and took forty-six wild elk in a
two-day season. The elk, more accurately called wapiti or Cervus Canadensis
has never been a native of New Hampshire, but briefly roamed free in
the state during the first half of the 1900s. Newport-born financier
Austin Corbin imported elk into the state in the 1890s as he stocked his
private game reserve, the Blue Mountain Forest Park (known informally as
Corbin’s Park). Corbin acquired between 265-373 deeds, which included over
sixty farms across the townships of Cornish, Croydon, Grantham, Newport and
Plainfield. The park was enclosed with thirty-six miles of fencing and was
stocked with wild boar, moose, bison, bighorn sheep, elk, Chinese pheasant,
and other exotic species. Wildlife conservation was Corbin’s primary aim;
hunting was only permitted later to thin the population of rapidly
increasing species such as boar.
Austin Corbin’s son, Austin Corbin III, took over the park management after
the untimely death of his father in an 1896 carriage accident. During his
tenure, he donated or sold animals from the park’s bison, deer and elk herds
to various government and private game reserves and zoos across the United
States. It is a well-known story of how Corbin Park bison helped repopulate
the almost extinct bison population in the United States. The story of
Corbin Park elk in New Hampshire is less known.
Ten million elk are thought to have occupied the United States before
European settlement. Native Americans hunted elk for food, and used the
hides, bones, antlers and teeth for practical and decorative purposes.
European settlers and market hunters reduced the population almost to
extinction. By the late 1800s, it is estimated that only 50,000 elk remained
in the Western states.
This second largest species of deer (moose being the largest) ranges up to
five feet at the shoulder, with 1,000 pounds not uncommon. Males sport
magnificent antlers. Their name wapiti comes from the Shawnee term “white
rump.” Their habitat is primarily forest and forest edge. They graze on
grasses, plants, leaves and bark, and each typically consumes ten to twenty
pounds of food daily. They compete with other deer species for food; one elk
consumes three times as much food as one deer. While moose prefer a solitary
lifestyle and deer prefer small cliques, elk live and travel in herds. A
dominant bull will defend a harem of cows that can number over twenty.
In the Smithsonian Institution’s History of Corbin Preserve (1964) Richard
Manville reported that sixty elk were imported into Corbin Park from
Northern Minnesota in 1891 and soon became nearly as tame as cattle.
They flourished overall, with numbers occasionally declining during
particularly severe winters. In 1903, Austin Corbin III presented eight cows
and four bulls to the State of New Hampshire. The Andover Fish & Game Club
released the animals in the vicinity of Ragged Mountain.
New Hampshire Fish and Game naturalist Helenette Silver documented the
history of the released elk in New Hampshire during the first half of the
1900s. In A History of New Hampshire Game and Furbearers (1957) she writes
of the growth of the original group of gifted elk. By 1912, up to forty elk
were seen in one herd. Farmers had begun presenting claims for damage to
fields and orchards. However, it wasn’t until 1915 that New Hampshire passed
a law requiring payment for game damage. Property owners in Andover, Webster
and other locations, took matters into their own hands and shot the elk on
their property. Other elk, when they moved on to the area around Cardigan
Mountain, were killed by poachers around Canaan.
In 1933, Austin Corbin III made another gift of elk. This time, two bulls
and ten cows were released in Washington and Goshen into the Pillsbury
Reservation. At the time, it was a state game refuge. The elk again
flourished, with their population estimated to be between sixty and two
hundred. The animals began expanding their territory into several
surrounding towns, including Washington, Lempster, Goshen, and Unity. Again,
individuals who lost gardens and crops to the voracious elk complained to
state and local government officials.
In 1941, the state decided to reduce the herd through its first (and only)
two-day elk hunting season. Two hundred hunters, who had paid $5 for a
special license, bagged forty-six elk on December 17 and 18 of that year.
Considering that the elk were shot in herds, it is fortunate that no
accidents were reported. After the hunt, conservation officer Jesse Scott
estimated that only thirteen elk remained in the New Hampshire woods.
In1942, the first of a number of surveys was done, scouting possible
locations in Northern New Hampshire where the elk might be relocated to
avoid their trespass into private fields and orchards.
Claims filed for crop damages in the early 1950s spurred the State
legislature to pass An Act Relative to Elk (Chapter 43). And in 1955: “The
director of fish and game is hereby directed to reduce the elk herd in the
state to a population that will no longer present a potential threat to
agricultural interests. The reduction of this herd shall be started at once
and carried to completion without unnecessary delay.”
The act also contained a provision stating that proceeds from the carcasses
sold go toward “the establishment of an elk herd in the northern counties of
the state.”
On March 16, 1955, conservation officers shot fourteen cows and two bulls in
Lempster. A few days later, an irate farmer shot two bull elk. At this
point, the Fish and Game Department estimated that there were perhaps
between twenty and thirty free-ranging elk remaining in the state. It is
commonly believed that the remaining elk were killed by farmers or poached
illegally by hunters. None of the various proposals for relocating the elk
to more northern or western parts of the state were ever enacted.
Although unsubstantiated reports of wild elk sightings persist, Steve Weber,
Chief of New Hampshire Fish and Game’s Wildlife Division, recently confirmed
that there are no wild free-range elk in New Hampshire today. The only elk
to be found in the state are located on a handful of livestock or game farms
and at the Blue Mountain Forest Association, today a private-membership
hunting club.
For a brief period in New Hampshire history, the bugle of a wild wapiti bull
could be heard echoing in the mountains of central New Hampshire. Like the
howl of the gray wolf, a native now extinct in New Hampshire, the sound has
disappeared from the granite state wilderness. Today, according to the Rocky
Mountain Elk Foundation, there are about one million wild free-ranging elk
live in the western United States: Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota,
Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, and from
Ontario west in Canada.
end of story by Mary Comeau-Kronenwetter
click HERE to see an old 1954 article in Sports Illustrated (back before today's Politically Correct liberals made guns & hunting "evil", and hunting was considered a "sport" that could be described in SI) about the big New Hampshire elk hunt
Click HERE to go to my full "Corbin Park" page
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