ABSTRACT
Dogs were snarling and yelping. But the young white man confidently approached the village of Indian lodges and only half-threateningly pointed his gun while protecting his game bag. John Kirk Townsend had been in the West for more than two years, and he had found a good temporary place in an Indian village of the Chinooks not far from the Hudson's Bay Company's headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. Here he had a few days of undisturbed hunting in making his discoveries of the new birds of this so far scientifically unexplored and unclassified land. Political or material gain had been and would be the enthusiastic aim of most western travelers, but this was a new note. In his professional hunting, with no camera at hand, as decades later would be customary, Townsend had to kill the bright and beautiful birds, or the sleek small animals, of the plains and mountains.
