Distinctly Montana Magazine

W W W. D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA NA . C O M 35 I thought I could maybe get across without Howell seeing or hearing me, for the wind was blowing very hard. So I started over from cover, going as fast as I could travel. I found a ditch about 10 ft. wide, and you know how hard it is to make a jump with snowshoes on level ground. I had to try it anyhow, and some way I got over. I ran up to within 15ft of Howell, between him and his gun, before I called to him to throw up his hands, and that was the first he knew of any one but him being anywhere in that country. According to a witness, the journalist Emerson Hough, Howell was "a most picturesquely ragged, dirty and unkempt looking citizen," and apparently unworried by his capture. "He knew he could not be punished and was only anxious lest he should be detained until after the spring sheep shearing in Arizona." He "had no shoes, and he had only a thin and worthless pair of socks. He wrapped his feet when snowshoeing into a pair of meal sacks he had nailed on to the middle of his snowshoes. e whole bundle he tied with thongs." Hough added that Burgess possessed "indomitable grit." When he brought Howell in, "Burgess was limping very badly....When he got in by the fire he said nothing, but took off his heavy socks, showing a foot on which the great toe was inflamed and swollen to four times its natural size. e whole limb above was swollen and sore, with red streaks of inflammation extending up to the thigh." Burgess had "lost the two toes next to the great toe," and explained that the Crow Indians did that for him." Despite that injury, "which would have disabled most men, Burgess passed the evening calmly playing whist, and the following morning again took the trail, making the twenty miles to the Post before evening, and de- livering his prisoner safely. e post surgeon....at once amputated the great toe, thus finishing what the Indians had less skillfully begun some years before. While Howell did not fade from the Yellowstone scene for many years, the results of the report on his capture were spectacular. Rep. John Lacey of Iowa introduced a bill that became known as the first "Lacey Act," "to protect the birds and animals in Yellow- stone National Park, and to punish crimes in said park." It was hoped that poaching could completely stopped, but it still occurs infrequently even today, and modern park rangers continue to patrol the park in the best tradition of Felix Burgess and his heroic contemporaries. MONTANA YOGO SAPPHIRES • FANCY MONTANA SAPPHIRES 402 EAST MAIN BOZEMAN, MT GEMGALLERY.COM (406) 587-9339 BOZEMAN'S PREMIER CUSTOM JEWELRY STORE SHOP ANYTIME www.gemgallery.com IDEAL CUT DIAMONDS Howe wanted ki his dog for not barking, but •e army scouts would not let him.

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