Jacques Palais Big Horn -

The Jacques Palais Big Horn refers to a specific issue (often cited in catalogues as "Palais No. 47" or "Le Grand Cornu"). The piece is instantly recognizable. It typically measures between 90mm and 180mm in diameter, making it a "plaquette" or large medallic round.

To understand the horn, you must first understand the man. Jacques Palais was a mid-20th-century French-born adventurer, industrialist, and, most importantly, a relentless hunter of the world’s most challenging ungulates. Unlike the aristocratic hunters of the British Empire, Palais was a continental European hunter who specialized in extreme terrain.

Active primarily during the 1950s and 1960s, Palais was among the first Western hunters to systematically pursue the wild sheep of Central Asia. While most of his contemporaries were focused on the Rocky Mountain bighorn or the Desert bighorn of Mexico, Palais set his sights on the "Big Horns" of the Himalayas and the Altai Mountains.

His name became synonymous with the Marco Polo argali (Ovis ammon polii) and the Altai argali, but it was one specific hunt—one specific ram—that would immortalize him. That hunt produced the specimen now known exclusively as the Jacques Palais Big Horn. jacques palais big horn

If you are a hunting historian or a collector looking to verify the authenticity of a potential "Palais" specimen, be aware of the following markers:

Why has this specific piece exploded in value over the last decade? Three factors drive the Jacques Palais Big Horn market:

The story, pieced together from faded hunting journals and secondhand accounts, places the hunt in the late summer of 1963. The location was the remote Altai Mountains, straddling the border between Mongolia, China, and the then-Soviet Union. This was a "no-man's land" of brutal winds, thin oxygen, and valleys that had never seen a wheel. The Jacques Palais Big Horn refers to a

Palais, accompanied by a small team of Mongolian guides and a single Russian translator, spent 21 days at altitudes exceeding 14,000 feet. The objective was the Altai argali (Ovis ammon ammon), a subspecies known for the thickest, heaviest horns in the entire sheep family.

On the 22nd day, they spotted him. Locals called him the "Ghost of the White Pass." The ram was standing alone on a shale slide, silhouetted against the morning sun. Even at 400 yards, Palais later wrote, "He did not look real. His horns were not crescents; they were massive battering rams, curling so wide you could see both tips from the front."

The shot was made at 350 meters with a 7mm Remington Magnum. The ram fell, rolled 100 feet down the scree, and came to rest in a dry creek bed. When Palais reached the animal, he reportedly sat down and wept. He knew he had taken something beyond a trophy—he had taken a biological anomaly. It typically measures between 90mm and 180mm in

Through limited pedigree tracing (available via equine databases like AllBreedPedigree.com or SporthorseData), horses with "Big Horn" in their bloodline tend to appear in the pedigrees of:

Is it truly an Altai argali, or is it a hybrid? Some biologists argue that the horn shape (specifically the flare of the tips) is more consistent with the Marco Polo sheep, which has longer, more sweeping horns but thinner bases. Palais insisted it was a true Altai "Big Horn," but without DNA evidence (the original skull was lost in a fire in the 1970s), the debate rages on.

As the fur trade declined in the 1850s due to the collapse of the beaver hat market, many mountain men settled down. Jacques Palais was among those who transitioned from a nomadic trapper to a settler.

He eventually established a homestead near the Little Bighorn River, situated in the valley that would later become infamous as the site of Custer's Last Stand (1876). Living in such a volatile region was dangerous; settlers like Palais lived on the sufferance of the local tribes.

Historical Anecdote: One of the few surviving records of Palais describes him as living in a small cabin near the confluence of the Little Bighorn. During the ramp-up to the Sioux Wars, many white settlers were forced to flee. Palais, however, was known to have maintained relatively good relations with the Crow, often acting as a middleman. When the military campaigns began in earnest, his intimate knowledge of the Big Horn terrain was sought after by army scouts, though he was largely retired by the time of the Great Sioux War.