Martin Bovey was just 14 when he went on his first big game hunt in 1916 with his father. Their guide was renowned packer and outfitter F.H. Bert Riggall. On that trip, Bovey killed a Rocky Mountain goat. A few years later, after serving in World War I and just before starting college, Bovey hired Riggall again, hoping for a bighorn. Riggall knew just where to go.

You see, Riggall was one of the best outfitters and guides to set foot in the Canadian Rockies. He was also a hunter, trapper, rancher, naturalist, photographer, and writer—all wrapped up in one magnificent mustache. Throughout his extraordinary life in the Canadian wilds, Riggall took more than 14,000 photographs and recorded his family’s life in diaries, maps, and letters. He was a masterful storyteller, penning articles for American Rifleman, Outdoor Life, and others. His record of life on the Canadian frontier promoted tourism in the region and helped conserve the wild places where Riggall’s rams roamed.

F.H. Riggall and packhorse crossing Boundary Creek in 1909. Archives and Library, Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.

Riggall’s knowledge of the land and the animals it held meant that he knew where to find the biggest trophies. In 1920, he loaded up Bovey and his companion, Martin Bennet, and they rode deep into the High Rock Range. Just three years prior, it was there that Riggall had spotted the biggest ram he’d ever seen. In a 1952 article for Outdoor Life, he wrote, “I turned my glasses to the cliffs above. And there, in the bottom of a deep notch that looked like the V of a rifle sight, were three giant rams….That sight alone was worth a thousand miles of travel.”

The first day in camp, the hunters saw 37 sheep, seven of them rams. None of them were the one. After a week, Riggall spotted a dozen rams, with four of them being absolute toads. Beyond the big rams was another group of three rams. It was the three rams he had seen years ago and dubbed them the Three Musketeers.

After spying them, the men stayed put all day. Eventually, the rams got up and began to feed in the late afternoon. The hunters slowly got into a shooting position. Bennett won the toss for the first shot, and he took a bead with his .30-06 sporting a Lyman 48 peep sight and gold-bead front site. (Riggall was a writer with an eye for detail.) The rams started head-butting each other. “Like playful puppies, all three started to frolic, rushing downhill past us at forty miles an hour, and darting in and out of bushes,” Riggall wrote.

Bennett took a shot but hit low in the rocks. Shrapnel from the rocks spooked the rams. Bennett kept shooting and eventually killed the smallest ram of the three. The other two left only vapor trails. Even though it was the smallest of the bunch, the head on Bennett’s ram still weighed 80 pounds. Two years later, Riggall took another group of hunters into the area. One hunter managed to take the smaller of the original Three Musketeers. The largest of the group was still alive.

In 1924, Riggall returned to Gould Mountain to guide for bighorns. This time, he brought with him Martin Bovey and his brother Charlie. They were on the mountain for the sheep opener and had one ram on their mind. They saw rams but nothing fit the bill. With two days left in the hunt, the snow came, and so did the sheep. While glassing in the afternoon, Riggall spotted what he thought was the curl of a ram’s horn. He watched and waited. Finally, the ram stood. “He looked huge, outlined against the clouds, and there was no doubt in my mind that here was the last of the Three Musketeers,” Riggall wrote.

The men crawled into position as the ram and a dozen others fed 200 yards away. Bovey lined up his Savage .250/3000 on the ram’s neck. Two of his 87-grain bullets sealed the deal. After congratulations, Riggall wrote that they took out the tape. The curls were 46 inches. The girth was nearly 17. Jack O’Connor later told Riggall, “That was probably the best trophy ever taken on the North American continent.”

Riggall wrote that being there on that hunt was the high point of his career as a hunter and an outfitter. Or so he thought. Years later, when the Club revamped its scoring system, numerous heads were remeasured using the new criteria. Bovey was invited to have the horns remeasured, and he met measurers Grancel Fitz and Samuel B. Webb in New York in the mid-1950s. When Bovey got the news that his ram was the new World’s Record in 1952, the first thing he did was get an airmail off to Riggall.

Like Riggall, Bovey became a wildlife photographer, writer, lecturer, and documentary film producer. In the end, the Bovey family sold the head to a collector in 2003 for an undisclosed amount.

The Bovey ram has since been dethroned and currently sits at number eight of All-time and number four for Alberta. Even so, that does little to extinguish the passion with which both Riggall and Bovey invested in hunting this one particular ram. Thankfully, Riggall left behind numerous hunting tales for us to enjoy a century later.

PJ DelHomme writes and edits content from his home in western Montana. He runs Crazy Canyon Media and Crazy Canyon Journal. 

TROPHY STATS

#8 All-Time Bighorn Sheep

SCORE: 207-2/8 B&C points

LOCATION: Oyster Creek, AB

HUNTER: Martin K. Bovey

DATE: 1924

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About Adventures from the Archives

The Boone and Crockett Club’s records contain more than 70,000 big game entries, from musk ox to mule deer. Among those entries are more than a few stories of adventures afield. To celebrate those trophies, their habitat, and the hunter, we’re bringing those stories back to life with each installment of Boone and Crockett’s Adventures from the Archives.