Carl M. Scrivens of Jackson, Wyoming, has taken impressive desert sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni), but this accomplished hunter has not shot a ram that compares to the extraordinary trophy he found in 1941 during a hunting trip to Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. In an article he penned in 1992 for Wild Sheep magazine, Scrivens explained how he obtained the trophy. Here’s an excerpt from that article.
“We finally arrived at our destination, a remote rancho on the southern end of the Sierra San Pedro Martir Mountains. While the vaqueros were rounding up the mules, we took a stroll around the rancho. We looked inside an old dilapidated wagon, and there was a skull and horns of a desert ram. What a head it was! My brothers and family were fairly knowledgeable about the size of desert rams, but this beat anything we had ever seen — and I was determined to have it before we left.”
“(Unfortunately) the history of the taking of this head is meager,” Scrivens continued. “According to the vaqueros at the rancho, the ram had been killed the previous year by a Native American meat hunter, who left the head lying. A vaquero brought the head to the rancho.
“When I acquired the head there was still a scrap of hide adhered to the skull, and it was black,” Scrivens explained. “Frequently, rams with black, or nearly black pelts are found in that area. We hunted this same area at later times and took other rams, but none as large as the one I bartered for.”
The Boone and Crockett Club’s Samuel Webb measured the head in 1946 and it scored 205-1/8 points. In 1992 this magnificent ram was bequeathed to the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society, of which Scrivens has been a lifelong member. After the Arizona Department of Fish and Game located a cape for this head, the restored mount was hung in the Boone and Crockett Club’s National Collection of Heads and Horns at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, on June 27, 1992. The ram remained with the collection until 2015 when the mount was returned to the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society.
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