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"With the same measure of success that we had in Banff, we will have two thousand head of buffalo at Wainwright within five years," said Howard Douglas, Dominion commissioner of Parks, to a Bulletin representative yesterday afternoon. Mr. Douglas and Mr. Ed. Ellis, superintendent of the Wainwright park, who was for nine years in charge of the buffalo herd at Banff, were guests at the Alberta yesterday. Mr. Douglas left on the afternoon train for the south on his way to Revelstoke, B. C. where he will join Hon. Charles Murphy who is returning from the coast.
The commissioner recalled how the herd at Banff numbered but seventeen at the outset. A few weeks from now 75 will be transferred from the Banff park to Wainwright, a herd of twenty being left in the former place. All these animals have sprung from the original herd of seventeen.
Buffalo Park at Wainwright, according to Mr. Ellis, is large enough to support a herd of 5,000 buffalo. The park has an area of 106,000 acres. It is enclosed by 73 miles of wire fence.
The remaining 190 head of buffalo are now being rounded up in Montana by Michael Pablo, the Mexican from whom the herd was purchased by the Dominion government, and the final shipment will be made early in September. Mr. Ellis expects that the herd will be increased next year by over one hundred calves.
In September next, Mr. Douglas, accompanied by R. H. Campbell, Dominion forestry commissioner, will make a trip to the big Jasper Park reservation of 5,400 square miles near the Yellowhead Pass, on the east slope of the Rockies. Mr. Douglas stated that the object of the trip was merely to gain a knowledge of the ground and to make arrangements to prevent squatters settling on it.—Bulletin.