Chadwick Stone's Ram - a photo on Flickriver

Though summer’s heat still lingers across the vast north country, the first sheep hunters have already returned with their tales of adventure in the high wind-blown ridges. Others, their excitement fuelled by dreams of full curl rams in green, gold and orange alpine meadows, are on their way north into remote corners of British Columbia, near the Yukon border.

Gateway for many to sheep country and final contact with civilization is Fort Nelson and here, just west of Mile Marker 300–now Kilometre Marker 483—on the Alaska Highway (the only road in and out of town) is the Fort Nelson Heritage Museum (www.fortnelsonmuseum.ca). Out in front of the museum’s log cabin, among the vintage automobiles and relics from the postwar highway construction, atop a ledge stone cairn, stands a life-size bronze of a Stone’s sheep ram, startling in its likeness to the real thing except for its impossible flared horns.

Commissioned by the Guides and Outfitters of British Columbia and created by Canadian sculptor Rick Taylor in 1996 for the, the bronze is no exaggeration. If you were to measure the wide-flaring horns, you’d find that the right one tapes out at 50 1/8 inches and the left one 51 5/8 inches with a tip to tip spread of 31 inches, just exactly as noted in the Boone and Crockett book of world record Stone’s sheep. Named the Chadwick Ram, it has dominated that list for no less than three quarters of a century.

Lee Sherman Chadwick, aged 61 at the time and a highly successful engineer and inventor with over 250 patents to his name, was likely no less keyed up than any hunter on his way to sheep country today when he set out from his home in Cleveland, Ohio, in early August, 1936. In Pouce Coupé, south of Dawson Creek, he met up a Muskwa River trapper named Walter “Curly” Cochrane who had found a pocket of sheep in a remote area in the divide between headwater of the Muskwa and Prophet Rivers. With him was guide Roy Hargreaves with whom he taken a bighorn in the Willmore Wilderness on the BC/Alberta border the year prior.

From Pouce Coupé, they travelled by automobile to Dawson Creek to pick up an additional guide, Frank Golata, and then headed for Bear Flat, north of Fort St. John—this in the days before the Alaska Highway was built—where they met up with the pack train on August 9. From there, they picked their way northwest up the Halfway River, then cutting north past Trimble and Redfern Lakes, they finally forded the Prophet and, in mid-afternoon of August 27, set up camp in the shadow of Sleeping Chief Mountain. They had been in the saddle more than two weeks, bedevilled by mosquitoes and gnats, and often picking their way through impossible blowdowns.

First order of the day was to get some fresh meat for a change from the steady diet of salt pork. While Chadwick and Golata scouted around for game, Hargreaves set up a spotting scope along a ridge and quickly found a dozen rams, none of them remarkable. Then, in the fading light of the afternoon, three sheep skylined on a distant peak, one of them deserving a closer look. When they did catch up to the ram, their first reaction was that the animal was not nearly as big as they had hoped and Chadwick spent several minutes filming it before deciding to take it for meat. The first shot hit a touch low but they managed to catch up with the ram and anchor it.

“Even then, we were not too enthusiastic about our prize…” Chadwick said in an article that appeared in the 1937 issue of Outdoor Life magazine. “His body was small, at least for such a pair of horns. The big surprise came when we put the tape to him.”

Initial measurements put the left horn at a hair over 52 inches, but a two and a half inch piece had been broken off the right horn, to green measure out a just over 50 inches. Judging by the growth rings, the ram was estimated at about 14 years old, though still in prime condition.

That sheep, initially thought to be little more than a meat ram, still stands unchallenged in the record books 75 years later. Will it ever be dethroned? Well, perhaps, but it’s unlikely. Biologists monitoring Stone’s sheep populations in northern British Columbia say they’ve seen some magnificent rams from their aircraft, but none that could stand next to the Chadwick ram. And that’s driven home when you stand in front of the bronze replica in Fort Nelson.

Taken on: November 7, 2017

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