After the turn of the century, Baja California was considered a hunter's paradise. Trophies were easily obtained, laws tolerant and enforcement lax. Journals tell of hunters, with a Mexican guide shooting a number of the Bighorns, before returning with the desired head. My late landlord, Jesus Guerrero of La Sauna, had been so employed and told of the slaughter by some of these hunters.
Even the Auto Club So Cal maps were overprinted with red lettering showing the locations of good hunting and fishing locations, indicating that at that time, this was the primary interest of Baja traveler's. A 1956 map boldly prints SHEEP GOATS on the Sierra Juarez and San Pedro del Martir. But by 1963, these words are deleted and a notice tells that this type of hunting is now illegal.
The Bighorn is truly a handsome animal, with the largest specimens weighing almost two hundred pounds. But it is its great curling horns that distinguishes it from the lesser deer and antelope. Leopold waxed lyrical, "That magnificent rain, standing like a statue on a pedestal of red bronze lava, washed by the falling rain and lit up by the setting sun; on one side a head with horns quite as massive as those of those of the central figure, on the other the heads of two younger rams."*
Originally these animals were common in many of the desert areas of northern Mexico, but were best known in Baja, where a sparse population survives. It is interesting that the first European reports of the Bighorn are to be found in early Jesuit reports from Baja California.