Speaker 1: Since Americans encountered the beautiful Western prong horn, We've struggled
Speaker 1: to understand an animal that looked like a gazelle but
Speaker 1: couldn't jump, could outrun all its predators by twenty miles
Speaker 1: per hour, yet like bison, was on the cliff of
Speaker 1: extinction by nineteen hundred. I'm Dan Flores and this is
Speaker 1: the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck. Still
Speaker 1: in barrel. Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time
Speaker 1: for the season that calls us home. A portion of
Speaker 1: every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands,
Speaker 1: waters and wildlife, enjoy responsibly survivors from a lost world.
Speaker 1: From the accounts of all the Indians I have seen,
Speaker 1: it is probable there may be a species of antelope
Speaker 1: near the headwaters of Red River. Those words were written
Speaker 1: by a young Virginia named Peter Custis, who from Louisiana
Speaker 1: was taking a wistful look up the Red River of
Speaker 1: the South in the year eighteen oh six. I'll have
Speaker 1: much more to say in the next episode about Custis
Speaker 1: and why he was on the edge of the West
Speaker 1: that early in the nineteenth century. But the Louisiana purchase
Speaker 1: had just doubled the size of the United States, and
Speaker 1: Custus's wonderment about a likely African type antelope roaming the
Speaker 1: horizontal Yellow Prairies was just the kind of story literary
Speaker 1: Americans were hearing from their native Spanish and French predecessors
Speaker 1: in the West. And while accounts of unicorns, giant horned serpents,
Speaker 1: and mountains made of pure salt in the West were
Speaker 1: like the early stories of mermaids in New England waters,
Speaker 1: the antelopes that Custus heard about were very real. I've
Speaker 1: long been drawn to pronghorns, the more accurate name for
Speaker 1: America's gorgeous striped western antelopes, at least since driving a
Speaker 1: dusty two track along the Powder River of Wyoming many
Speaker 1: years ago and watching a young buck pronghorn running at
Speaker 1: fifty miles an hour clocked by the speedometer alongside me.
Speaker 1: Suddenly crossing the road in front of my bronco at speed.
Speaker 1: He turned straight towards a barbed wire fence, but rather
Speaker 1: than jumping over it, more quickly than I could register
Speaker 1: the move, he turned his body sideways and darted between
Speaker 1: the strands. The impact of thwanging explosion of white hairs
Speaker 1: drifting in the wind as he trotted off, daydreaming of, well,
Speaker 1: what do prong horns daydream about? As my panic for
Speaker 1: him subsided, I decided I ought to try to find
Speaker 1: out when Americans finally made it to the Great Plains
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We call these
Speaker 1: fabled animals antelopes for good reason, since in size, form,
Speaker 1: and speed they resemble no other creatures quite so much
Speaker 1: as the antelopes and gazelles of Africa. But prong horns
Speaker 1: are not true antelopes. The antelope capri day antelope goats
Speaker 1: emerged as a distinctly American family of animals roughly twenty
Speaker 1: five million years ago, but paleontologists still don't agree on
Speaker 1: their earlier provenance. They may be anciently related to the Servidae,
Speaker 1: the deer family, but there are some modern biologists who
Speaker 1: think pronghorns closest living relatives are in the family Giraffiday,
Speaker 1: the giraffes whose legs resemble pronghorn legs. Whatever their origins
Speaker 1: in ancient America, modern pronghorns are actually.
Speaker 2: Just like us.
Speaker 1: There are species that today represents the sole remaining survivor
Speaker 1: of a large family of animals and thus a rarity
Speaker 1: in nature. Fossil records in North America show that the
Speaker 1: antelope Caapridae actually consisted of two major, big subfamilies. The
Speaker 1: earlier of these subfamilies included several species of graceful, dainty
Speaker 1: ungulates possessed of permanent, multi branched, antler like horns. This
Speaker 1: group of creatures was extinct by the end of the
Speaker 1: Miocene around five point three million years ago, but they
Speaker 1: gave rise the other subfamily, which soon replaced them on
Speaker 1: the grasslands that were then starting to emerge in Western America.
Speaker 1: This subfamily of larger antelope goats were high speed runners,
Speaker 1: but with quite different horns made around a deciduous sheath,
Speaker 1: with some versions sporting four horns and others as many
Speaker 1: as six. There was even a dwarfed four horned version
Speaker 1: not much larger than a jack rabbit, so this quite
Speaker 1: real version of a jackalope still spreaded across the Great
Speaker 1: Plains as late as ten thousand years ago. Occasionally, four
Speaker 1: horned fawns are still born to pronghorns as one genetic
Speaker 1: reminder among a great number. As we're about to see
Speaker 1: of the pronghorn's deep and varied past Antelo capra Americana.
Speaker 1: Our present day pronghorn from this evolutionary family, dating back
Speaker 1: twenty five million years, is now the last living representative
Speaker 1: of evolution's wild genetic experimentation, with America's answer to the
Speaker 1: gazelles of Africa. Back in nineteen ninety seven, a biologist
Speaker 1: named John Byers, who had spent years studying pronghorn behavior
Speaker 1: and natural history on western Montana's National Bison Range, stepped
Speaker 1: up to answer most of my questions about the mysterious
Speaker 1: nature of the American pronghorn. Buyers's provocative argument finally made
Speaker 1: clear much about an animal that had seemed inexplicable to
Speaker 1: its admirers. Many of us had noted the pronghorn's apparent disinclination.
Speaker 1: It's probably not a true inability, but a disinclination to
Speaker 1: jump fences. Why would a creature as fleet and athletic
Speaker 1: prefer to go through barbed wire fences rather than over them?
Speaker 1: With long suspected pronghorn evolution as the answer, and Buyers agreed,
Speaker 1: a grasslands creature shaped by the open country niche it occupied,
Speaker 1: pronghorns never experienced any selective pressures to be able to
Speaker 1: jump obstacles that produced the kind of drama I'd witnessed
Speaker 1: in Wyoming. But unfortunately, it could also become a maladaptation
Speaker 1: in a fenced modern world, and one that played a
Speaker 1: critical role in pronghorn history over the past one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years. Pronghorns are one of only a handful
Speaker 1: of great plain species that managed to survive the epic
Speaker 1: extinction crash that ended the Pleisisain ten thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: a best shary simplification that still stands as the most
Speaker 1: profound ecological alteration in America since the extinction of the
Speaker 1: dinosaurs in the biography of a species like us or
Speaker 1: prong horns. How however, the Pleistocene was only a few
Speaker 1: heart beats in the past. So what if much about
Speaker 1: the behavior of modern prong horns has little to do
Speaker 1: with their present circumstances.
Speaker 3: As we find them.
Speaker 1: The primary predators of prong horns for the past ten
Speaker 1: thousand years we know, have been wolves and coyotes, neither
Speaker 1: of which is capable flat out of running much more
Speaker 1: than about forty to forty five miles an hour. Prong Horns,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, are the ferraris of the American
Speaker 1: natural world. Their delicate bones in frames and remarkably low
Speaker 1: body fat keep them light, while broad nostrils and a
Speaker 1: huge windpipe deliver turbocharged oxygen to their outsize lungs and
Speaker 1: heart pedal to the metal. They top eighty five kilometers
Speaker 1: per hour at a dead run, some fifty five miles
Speaker 1: an hour for the one hundred and twenty pound males
Speaker 1: and as high as sixty five to seventy miles per
Speaker 1: hour for the low females. That's as fast as an
Speaker 1: African cheetah. Prong Horns can also run at ninety percent
Speaker 1: of top end for more than two miles. Like horses,
Speaker 1: to detect predators at great distances, they too evolve gigantic eyes.
Speaker 3: Prong Horn behavior features other oddities.
Speaker 1: Like Thompson's gazelles and other African ugults pursued by big cats.
Speaker 1: Prong Horns have a powerful inclination towards a form of
Speaker 1: grouping known as the selfish herd, with much of their
Speaker 1: expression of dominance and rank focused on their physical position.
Speaker 1: Inside these herd groups, the lower ranking, less dominant animals
Speaker 1: get pushed to the outer margins, where if prong horns
Speaker 1: were on the African veild, the low ranking members would
Speaker 1: be in much greater danger from predatory attacks. But as adults,
Speaker 1: American prong horns have no predators at all because of
Speaker 1: the impossible speed. Once they're grown, pronghorns are subject to
Speaker 1: predation only as fonts. If a prong worn fund survives
Speaker 1: to six or eight months of age, it will join
Speaker 1: all other surviving fauns in living to the ripe old
Speaker 1: age of eleven or twelve years old. Yet adult pronghorns
Speaker 1: still persist in grouping and still fight for position in
Speaker 1: those groups, as if predation somehow mattered to them. So why,
Speaker 1: in a world where gray wolves and coyotes and maybe
Speaker 1: occasionally a mountain lion are their threats, do prong horns
Speaker 1: express so much protective excess. The question John Byers posed
Speaker 1: then was this, what if most of their physical characteristics
Speaker 1: and behavior are actually adaptations to a lost world that
Speaker 1: winked out around them ten thousand years ago, leaving pronghorns
Speaker 1: still living out their existence among us reacting to a
Speaker 1: world of ghosts. The fascinating question, then, is whether the
Speaker 1: whole suite of pronghorn behaviors, and not just their lack
Speaker 1: of jumping ability has to do with the lost world
Speaker 1: of the Pleistocene Great Plains. Prog Warns emerged in their
Speaker 1: modern form at a time when the American Planes was
Speaker 1: the scene of one of the great assemblages of savannah
Speaker 1: step creatures anywhere on Earth, a more diverse collection of
Speaker 1: animals than present today in the Serengetti or the Massaimara.
Speaker 1: Along with the elephants and longhorned bison and enormous herds
Speaker 1: of horses, along with bands of numerous types of camels
Speaker 1: and deer, and of course elk and prong horns, the
Speaker 1: Pleistocene planes featured an array of truly formidable predators that
Speaker 1: hunted and scavenged. Among all those millions of ungulates, prog
Speaker 1: Warns then spent the better part of four million years
Speaker 1: perfecting their ability to survive. Where large and fast predators
Speaker 1: looked hungrily at them over bright teeth. There were grass
Speaker 1: aisle active and aggressive short faced bears. The smilodons are
Speaker 1: sabertoothed cats that attacked mammoth calves, a steadily changing lineup
Speaker 1: of wolf and coyote packs. There were jaguars and cougars
Speaker 1: along with the steppe lion, a far larger version of
Speaker 1: the African lion, as predators of the fastest grazers, the
Speaker 1: horses and prong horns. There was a slender, limbed lion
Speaker 1: size running cat known as the scimitar cat, along with
Speaker 1: a particularly rapid and legging American hunting hyena. And there
Speaker 1: were two species of large American false cheetahs, cats from
Speaker 1: the same evolutionary line that produced cougars, but with elongated,
Speaker 1: curved spines, long legs, and wide nostrils for gulping air
Speaker 1: in open country pursuit are in rock slide ambushes. These
Speaker 1: vanished creatures of the ancient planes, at least so biologists
Speaker 1: like Buyers now argue, however long ago they passed the
Speaker 1: veil of extinction, or why pronghorns seem mysterious and almost
Speaker 1: alien to us now, why they struck early observers like
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark as possessing a speed that resemble more
Speaker 1: the flight of birds than anything else. Pronghorns are at
Speaker 1: once breathtakingly beautiful yet outrageously overbuilt relics that have outlasted
Speaker 1: the conditions that created them. They offer almost our only
Speaker 1: remaining glimpse of the American Pleistocene. Like most wild ungulates
Speaker 1: then are now, pronghorns follow a yearly routine that varies
Speaker 1: considerably by the seasons. At the conclusion of the September rut,
Speaker 1: the exhausted bucks, which would once have been prime targets
Speaker 1: for predators in that condition, disguised themselves by mimicking the females.
Speaker 1: They shed the outer husk of their horns, and they
Speaker 1: joined the female herds. Since the Pleistocene, winter has been
Speaker 1: a time of migration for northern pronghorns. A few years ago,
Speaker 1: with a friend who lives in Jackson Hole, I photographed
Speaker 1: the famous Sublet pronghorn herd, which summers in Grand Teta
Speaker 1: National Park but still migrates more than two hundred miles
Speaker 1: south to near Green River, Wyoming in winter. This inclination
Speaker 1: to migrate before severe winter storms was adaptive in the wild,
Speaker 1: but couple with their inclination not to jump obstacles, ultimately
Speaker 1: reproduced tragedy in the late nineteenth century, when legendary winters
Speaker 1: in the eighteen eighties sent pronghorns southward by the thousands
Speaker 1: into a new world of barbed wire in the spring.
Speaker 1: From a year old until they're three, young pronghorn bucks
Speaker 1: segregate themselves into bachelor bands and spend most of their
Speaker 1: time in all male groups. There, they express group position
Speaker 1: dominance just as females do, but they also spar and
Speaker 1: practice moves they will later use in earnest. Around three
Speaker 1: years of age, pronghorn males become solitary for most of
Speaker 1: the spring and summer, during which time, at least in
Speaker 1: most pronghorn country, they set up territories of perhaps one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty acres whose perimeter they sent mark and
Speaker 1: will use to cloister a harem of females to hide
Speaker 1: from other males during the rut. In other circumstances, male
Speaker 1: pronghorns protect harems of females, but without defending a territory.
Speaker 1: Rather than our prime resource location, pronghorn territories actually seem
Speaker 1: to be merely tactical space for defending females. Pronghorn bucks
Speaker 1: fight over females too, in violent, quick and quite often mortal,
Speaker 1: as high as fifteen percent of the encounter's fights. Reproduction
Speaker 1: success is the prime directive, and some prong horned bucks
Speaker 1: win the lottery. Others spend their entire lives without ever
Speaker 1: siring any offspring at all. Then there is female selective behavior.
Speaker 1: Female prong horns, which reach sexual maturity at eighteen months
Speaker 1: of age and give birth every spring for the rest
Speaker 1: of their lives, find themselves in harems that male pronghorns
Speaker 1: judiciously protect during the brief September mating season. During the rut,
Speaker 1: females repeatedly break away from their cloistered harems, however, joining
Speaker 1: the other harems of other males and inviting males to.
Speaker 3: Compete for them. What exactly are they looking for?
Speaker 1: Apparently they're setting up contests of stamina, speed, and resolve
Speaker 1: but between various males and observing the outcome before surrendering
Speaker 1: themselves up to be bred by the winner, the pronghorn
Speaker 1: male who demonstrates his genetic fitness by running faster and
Speaker 1: longer than his rivals. But if you're already almost twenty
Speaker 1: miles an hour faster than your fastest predators, why would
Speaker 1: females set up games of natural selection and choose who
Speaker 1: will impregnate them based on fitness as demonstrated by speed,
Speaker 1: Because apparently you never know when American cheetahs are going
Speaker 1: to show up on the planes again. Prong worn females
Speaker 1: have evolved another strategy that's interesting with respect to what
Speaker 1: it says about both past and present. After a remarkably
Speaker 1: long gestation period of some two hundred and fifty two days,
Speaker 1: they give birth not to single offspring, but to litters,
Speaker 1: specifically litters of two fawns every spring, and they do
Speaker 1: this throughout their reproductive lives. Twining, as well as the
Speaker 1: week's long hiding of fawns which lie motionless and silent
Speaker 1: for most of the day, are clearly responses to serious predation.
Speaker 3: They too, probably.
Speaker 1: Emerge as adaptations to the distant past, when pronghorns lived
Speaker 1: in a world where they.
Speaker 2: Were prey for three or four different predators.
Speaker 1: Today, it means that coyotes, the principal predators of pronghorn
Speaker 1: fawns for probably the last million years, are able to
Speaker 1: pull down as much as fifty percent of a pronghorn
Speaker 1: fawn crop without appreciably affecting pronghorn populations with litters, and
Speaker 1: with their extremely high adult survivability rates, pronghorns were anciently
Speaker 1: prepared to survive the culling of even so efficient a
Speaker 1: predator of fawns as coyotes. But a mother pronghorn will
Speaker 1: attack and fight a coyote to keep it from her faunds.
Speaker 1: Pronghorn bucks don't defend faunds. Some biologists argue that this
Speaker 1: is another leftover behavior from the Pleistocene, when fast predators
Speaker 1: scattered groups of pronghorns across wide territories, and a male
Speaker 1: pronghorn thus could never be sure that a fawn it
Speaker 1: defended was its own. As cutschewing rumnants capable of processing
Speaker 1: forbes and shrubs, pronghorns demonstrate yet another adaptation to the
Speaker 1: ancient savannah ecology of Western America. For maybe four hundred
Speaker 1: thousand years, pronghorns had been evolving a mutualistic relationship with
Speaker 1: the bison herds. Bison i had survived the Pleistocene extinctions
Speaker 1: and had increased dramatically in their wake, in numbers that
Speaker 1: likely range somewhere between twenty and thirty million animals, depending
Speaker 1: on climate cycles. So waves of bison and waves of
Speaker 1: pronghorns cropping the same country produced mutually beneficial results. Cropping
Speaker 1: the grasses and ignoring the often poisonous species like local weed,
Speaker 1: rabbit brush, and sagebrush. Bison grazing encouraged forbes and shrubs
Speaker 1: in their wake, coming along after the bison herds and
Speaker 1: concentrating instead on the flowering plants and shrubs. Pronghorn browsing
Speaker 1: shifted the advantage back to the grasses. Both preferred succulent
Speaker 1: vegetation sprouting up after recent fires, which was a fact
Speaker 1: that Native people long noted. So deep time history created
Speaker 1: an entirely unique situation for pronghorn antelope. Since pronghorns had
Speaker 1: out survived almost all their predators, had ended up with
Speaker 1: few competitors for the often toxic shrubs and forbes they ate.
Speaker 1: We're read everywhere there were vast horizontal planes, and they
Speaker 1: increased into the millions. The writer Ernest Thompson's Seaton famously
Speaker 1: estimated that in eighteen hundred, the moment in time when
Speaker 1: pronghorns were in the verge of discovery by formal Western science,
Speaker 1: there were as many as forty million of them in
Speaker 1: the West. More recent estimates have advanced original figures of
Speaker 1: something like fifteen million.
Speaker 2: What we can.
Speaker 1: Probably say is that on the Great Plains, where there
Speaker 1: ranges overlap most precisely, pronghorn numbers very likely matched those
Speaker 1: of buffalo.
Speaker 3: We've long thought of the historic era.
Speaker 1: Great Plans as the Great Bison Belt. In truth, it
Speaker 1: was just as much the Great pronghorn Savannah. Their range
Speaker 1: doesn't appear to advanced eastward beyond the ninety seventh meridian,
Speaker 1: though at least in places like Texas and Mexico, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem to have gone beyond the ninety third already,
Speaker 1: and farther north in Iowa and Minnesota. But they were
Speaker 1: found westward all the way to Baja California and into
Speaker 1: eastern Oregon and Washington. Southward on the continent, prong horns
Speaker 1: were able to colonize the desert grasslands of Mexico all
Speaker 1: the way down to the vicinity of Mexico City at
Speaker 1: twenty degrees latitude, considerably south of where bison ever ventured.
Speaker 1: Although prong horns can derive adequate water from the plants
Speaker 1: they browse in optimal wet years, they do need to
Speaker 1: drink about three and a half quarts of water a
Speaker 1: day during hot weather, which limited their numbers in the
Speaker 1: Great Basin the Mohave, Chihuahuan, and Sonoran deserts. Abundant and
Speaker 1: widespread as they were, prong worns attracted the attention of
Speaker 1: Indian hunters from the very beginning of human arrival. There
Speaker 1: a butchered prong horn remains in some of the Clovis
Speaker 1: and Folksome archaeola logical sites, so at least some paleo
Speaker 1: hunters did take the occasional pronghorn to vary a diet
Speaker 1: of mammoth and bison cuts.
Speaker 3: But it took fifteen or twenty.
Speaker 1: Pronghorns to equal the caloric possibilities of a single giant bison,
Speaker 1: and since prong worn flesh was so very lean, prog
Speaker 1: worns commonly ranked well down the list of pursued prey
Speaker 1: among Southwestern peoples. In fact, pronghorns ranked lower than rabbits,
Speaker 1: even though it took sixteen jack rabbits to match the
Speaker 1: edible flesh of a prong worn Native people, from hundreds
Speaker 1: of generations of experience with pronghorns knew how to exploit
Speaker 1: their weaknesses and utilize pronghorned leather horns and hoofs for
Speaker 1: a variety of purposes. One aspect of pronghorn natural history
Speaker 1: that made them vulnerable to Indian hunters was their disinclination
Speaker 1: to leave their home ranges. Parts of the West yet
Speaker 1: show fading evidence of ancient pronghorn correct such as the
Speaker 1: Fort Bridger trap site in southwestern Wyoming, where local herds
Speaker 1: evidently were enclosed and pushed to run in circles until
Speaker 1: they were exhausted and could be clubbed to death. Another
Speaker 1: technique involved v shaped pairs of fence wings, often miles long,
Speaker 1: made from piled up sagebrush, that sent stampeded pronghorns into
Speaker 1: corrals or pits. There are also references from a variety
Speaker 1: of sources of horse mounted planes indians engaging in the
Speaker 1: kind of pronghorns surround They often used for bison, again
Speaker 1: with the goal of getting a pronghorn band to run
Speaker 1: in circles until the spent and stumbling animals could be
Speaker 1: ridden down on horseback. According to the writer Richard Irving Dodge,
Speaker 1: when pronghorns collected into the thousands in wintertime, some tribes
Speaker 1: even used rifles in pronghorn hunts from horseback, reacting as
Speaker 1: if pursued by editors. The antelope crowded together in their fright,
Speaker 1: Dodge wrote, and thus were easily shot down. When bison
Speaker 1: were scarce, planes hunters preferred antelope to deer because you
Speaker 1: could take an entire herd of prong horns at once.
Speaker 1: Because local herds could be completely extirpated, by mass techniques.
Speaker 1: Like these, Indian hunters often spared some animals in order
Speaker 1: to preserve the herd stock, whatever the technique. Unlike bison
Speaker 1: or elk, prong horns butchered out as all protein and
Speaker 1: very little precious fat. Their lean body mass may be
Speaker 1: the reason no tribe ever bothered to domesticate prong horns,
Speaker 1: which are actually easier to tame than any African antelope.
Speaker 1: Among Europeans, prong horns were first encountered by numerous Spanish
Speaker 1: travelers on the Southern Plains and in California, where they
Speaker 1: were known as barndos, and by French travelers to the
Speaker 1: Great Plains, who called them cool de Blanc. Francisco Hernandez's
Speaker 1: sixteen fifty one Natural History of Mexico described and even
Speaker 1: provided an initial illustration of the western pronghorn, But like
Speaker 1: so many charismatic animals from the American West, pronghorns did
Speaker 1: not come to the official notice of Enlightenment age science
Speaker 1: until the time of the Jeffersonian expeditions into the New
Speaker 1: Louisiana Purchase. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark collected the type
Speaker 1: specimen of the species for Western science in eighteen o five,
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark made more than two hundred pronghorn entries
Speaker 1: in their journals, although they found the animals like elk
Speaker 1: and deer far less numerous west of the continental divide.
Speaker 1: Back east, George Ord of Philadelphia Naturalists and Ornithologists, who
Speaker 1: was working up many of the Lewis and Clark specimens,
Speaker 1: published a science to description and the Lenaean name for
Speaker 1: the pronghorn in eighteen eighteen. Ord recognized that, despite their
Speaker 1: similarities to African antelopes and gazelle's, pronghorns were actually unrelated
Speaker 1: to any existing family of animals that he could find.
Speaker 1: So Antilope capra day the family name he devised, and
Speaker 1: Antilope capra the genus Ord fashion for an animal that
Speaker 1: seemed to combine the traits of both antelopes and goats
Speaker 1: have stood ever since. One of the best selling books
Speaker 1: of the West in the nineteenth century was the trader
Speaker 1: naturalist Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies, first published in
Speaker 1: eighteen forty six. This is what greg had to say
Speaker 1: about the pronghorn. That species of gazelle, known as the antelope,
Speaker 1: is very numerous upon the high plains, This beautiful animal
Speaker 1: is most remarkable for its fleetness, not bounding like the deer,
Speaker 1: but skimming over the ground as though upon skates. The
Speaker 1: flesh of the antelope is but little esteemed, though consequently
Speaker 1: no great efforts are made to take them. Being as
Speaker 1: wild as fleet the hunting of them is very difficult
Speaker 1: as well. The commercial market hunt of wildlife in the West,
Speaker 1: though and more of that to come in future episodes,
Speaker 1: had been underway in earnest since at least the eighteen twenties,
Speaker 1: but so long as beaver lasted or bison roamed in
Speaker 1: numbers enough to produce robes, hides, and tongs, and as
Speaker 1: long as wolves and coyotes remained targets of traps and
Speaker 1: poisoned bait, the market hunt left pronghorns largely alone.
Speaker 3: Prong Horns had already reaped.
Speaker 1: The whirlwind in mining areas like California, where they were
Speaker 1: corralled and killed to feed miners, but was not until
Speaker 1: bison numbers began to drop that prong horns finally started
Speaker 1: to attract attention in the slaughter of Western animals for profit.
Speaker 1: With more than five thousand professional hunters in the West
Speaker 1: in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. Once every last
Speaker 1: buffalo had been pursued to ground, hunters looked to see
Speaker 1: what they might turn their guns on for a final
Speaker 1: killing spree. Big horned sheep in the bad lands lasted
Speaker 1: only a handful of years, and those in the mountains
Speaker 1: only a handful more. Elk and even deer had mostly
Speaker 1: fled the open country by that time to the safety
Speaker 1: of the mountains. In the eighteen eighties, only two primary
Speaker 1: charismatic animals remained on the Great Plains, wild horses and pronghorns.
Speaker 1: The horses would get caught and sold overseas buyers whenever
Speaker 1: Europeans were involved in wars her Brother the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: get rounded up as a source of dog food for
Speaker 1: the American pet industry, or they were simply shot down
Speaker 1: by cowboys as nuisances. But prong horns had evolved on
Speaker 1: the Great Plains, they had survived fearsome predators, they'd lived
Speaker 1: through the pleistosine extinctions. Erasing them from America was going
Speaker 1: to require some effort. Naturally, the market hunt, though, was
Speaker 1: up to the task. There were multiple causes for what
Speaker 1: began to happen to pronghorns homesteading steadily tore up the
Speaker 1: prairie and prong horn habitat. Ranchers overstocked the planes with
Speaker 1: cattle and sheep that undermined vegetation. Prong horns depended on
Speaker 1: the new barbed wire fences, demarketing a West that was
Speaker 1: fast becoming private property went straight to the prong horns
Speaker 1: evolutionary weakness, fences preventing the herds from migrating and from
Speaker 1: escaping winter blizzards. Without bison, the trump down the snow,
Speaker 1: prong horns couldn't get at the plants they ate anymore,
Speaker 1: add fences to block their migrations, and the horrific Western
Speaker 1: winners of the eighteen eighties devastated them, and an event
Speaker 1: that became all too common. Homesteaders in the Texas Panhandle
Speaker 1: and the winner of eighteen eighty two discovered more than
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred prong horns blown like a deck of cards
Speaker 1: against a curb, trapped and piled many feet high against
Speaker 1: a barbed wire fence. Even hard bitten homesheads were horrified
Speaker 1: by that. Then there was the market hunt. The generally
Speaker 1: poor opinion of pronghorned leather and meat had long kept
Speaker 1: prong horns out of the rifle sights of men who
Speaker 1: killed animals for money. But with everything else gone and
Speaker 1: a deathly silence beginning to fall across the West, market
Speaker 1: hunters finally turned their rifles on prong horns, and the
Speaker 1: story became all too familiar. What had once been millions
Speaker 1: of wild creatures fell for a pittance in return. Winter
Speaker 1: concentrations of prong horns around the Black Hills got slaughtered.
Speaker 1: In two or three seasons, a hunter in California killed
Speaker 1: five thousand of them for their hides. When a drought
Speaker 1: drove almost all the prong horns in the area to
Speaker 1: a few remaining water holes, hunters, desperate to keep their
Speaker 1: market lifestyle going, sold pronghorn meat to butchers in Kansas
Speaker 1: for two to three cents a pound. In eighteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: an Iowa firm shipped some thirty two thousand pronghorn and
Speaker 1: deer skins via railroad from the plains, barely making a
Speaker 1: dollar apiece for all the effort of hunting, skinning, and shipping.
Speaker 1: When George byrd Grennell, the Great Conservationist, alerted future President
Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt to the impact of market hunting, a step
Speaker 1: that led to the formation of the Boon and Crocket
Speaker 1: Club to protect American game animals. One of the victims
Speaker 1: Grenelle mentioned was the pronghorn that put prong horns before
Speaker 1: an influential group, but by the time Roosevelt was president,
Speaker 1: pronghorn numbers had dropped frighteningly low. In eighteen hundred, there
Speaker 1: may have been fifteen million prong horns in the West,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned, but in eighteen ninety nine, biologist Vernon Bailey,
Speaker 1: crossing one hundred miles of the Texas Panhandle, counted a
Speaker 1: mere thirty two in what had once lay near the
Speaker 1: center of their range. A decade later, the New York
Speaker 1: Zoological Society estimated that fewer than five thousand of these
Speaker 1: twenty five million year old natives of America were left.
Speaker 1: Rescuing them from almost certain extinction required cooperation between the
Speaker 1: states in the West, which Roosevelt facilitated, along with pronghorn
Speaker 1: stocking in Yellowstone and on the National Wildlife Refuge. Is
Speaker 1: that Teddy Roosevelt was creating. Two lucky breaks helped the pronghorns, though,
Speaker 1: and one was the refuges which the Boone and Crocket
Speaker 1: Club and the American Bison Society stocked with remnant animals.
Speaker 1: The other break was evolutionary good fortune. In a nation
Speaker 1: where economics trumped everything as four rather than grass eaters,
Speaker 1: prong horns didn't compete with cattle and only marginally with sheep,
Speaker 1: so Western livestock associations, if grudgingly, became tolerant of them. Today,
Speaker 1: the United States and Canadian population of prong horns hovers
Speaker 1: around seven hundred thousand animals, half of them in the
Speaker 1: state of Wyoming, with another twelve hundred in Mexico. A
Speaker 1: series of highway overpasses now allows some of them to
Speaker 1: continue their winter migrations, and as one of the original
Speaker 1: Western animals tapped for sport hunting, pronghorns are now privileged
Speaker 1: in a way that a lot of other creatures are not.
Speaker 1: I am still transfixed, though by a moment in Western
Speaker 1: history I once came across when among all Western animals
Speaker 1: three ancient Americans, wild horses, coyotes, and pronghorns were the
Speaker 1: last holdouts remaining. This was in April of eighteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: and it appeared in a letter written by a cowboy
Speaker 1: named George Wolforth, who was riding his horse up over
Speaker 1: the rim of West Texas Yellow House Canyon, about where
Speaker 1: the city of Lubbock now stands. Wolforth described a scene
Speaker 1: that seared itself into his memory and into mine too.
Speaker 1: As far as we could see, he wrote, there were
Speaker 1: only antelopes and mustangs grazing in the waving.
Speaker 3: Sea of grass.
Speaker 1: The whole tableau, he went on, rendered misty and unreal
Speaker 1: by the mirage that hovered over the plains. These were
Speaker 1: the sole survivors of the big animals of the Great Plains.
Speaker 1: Almost all the rest had suffered extinction or extirpation, or
Speaker 1: had been driven into the mountains across the previous thirty years.
Speaker 1: But even this moment was brief, merely a romantic thing
Speaker 1: to hold onto in the mind, truly a mirage.
Speaker 4: Dan, I think one of the things when you read
Speaker 4: primary sources from the Lewis and Clark era forward, a
Speaker 4: lot of times I'm struck by animals not being where
Speaker 4: I expect them to be, or at least where I
Speaker 4: wouldn't have expected them to be before I knew better.
Speaker 4: But grizzlies and salt Dakota grizzlies out on the plains,
Speaker 4: big horns dominating Elk country, Elk out on the prairie.
Speaker 4: You know, it seems like they're all familiar animals, but
Speaker 4: there's always sort of there's like something about it that
Speaker 4: doesn't line up with our present day awareness of the
Speaker 4: animals around us. But pronghorn are the exception to that
Speaker 4: general rule. And here I think you yeah, I mean
Speaker 4: a prong horn is a prong horn is a prong horn,
Speaker 4: And I guess it's it's striking to me, but you
Speaker 4: make a strong case why it's deeply rooted in their
Speaker 4: genetics and in their evolutionary history.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: I mean, these are animals that come from specifically from
Speaker 1: North American evolution for twenty five million years, and so,
Speaker 1: you know, and prong horns are like us, they're the
Speaker 1: sole remaining representative of what was at one time really
Speaker 1: big in their case, a couple of different subfamilies of animals,
Speaker 1: many of them with multiple horns, and some of them
Speaker 1: with horns unlike the present day animal that weren't deciduous
Speaker 1: but were solid like antlers. And so it's a it's
Speaker 1: kind of a remarkable thing to me. The most remarkable
Speaker 1: aspect of the prong horns story is how long we
Speaker 1: tried to figure them out. You know, I mean, we
Speaker 1: just couldn't quite. I mean, everybody knew, okay, they won't
Speaker 1: jump fences, and that's probably because they evolved on the planes.
Speaker 1: But you know, on the other hand, Thompson's gazelles, you know,
Speaker 1: jumped like crazy in Africa, showing I think what they're
Speaker 1: doing is starting to show their fitness, so that the
Speaker 1: cheetah that's after the goes after one that's stumbling along
Speaker 1: or something. But prong horns never they never developed that ability,
Speaker 1: and the inability or disinclination to jump over things really
Speaker 1: kind of set them in a bad situation when the
Speaker 1: West started being basically covered with barbed wire fences because
Speaker 1: a lot of them ended up, you know, because they
Speaker 1: migrated in front of winter storms. That was another thing
Speaker 1: about their long term evolution that they would pile up
Speaker 1: against those fences. But you know that biologist John Buyers,
Speaker 1: who about twenty five years ago was working on prong
Speaker 1: horns in the Montana National Bison Refuge. I mean, he's
Speaker 1: the one who kind of figured all this out, all
Speaker 1: these inexplicable parts of their natural history, you know, starting
Speaker 1: with one of the damn things, why are they capable
Speaker 1: of running sixty five miles an hour when anything that's
Speaker 1: chasing them can't run more than about forty or forty five.
Speaker 1: I mean, what's the explanation for the excessive speed? And
Speaker 1: what he came up with, of course, was that with
Speaker 1: prong horns, we're getting to witness and it's really kind
Speaker 1: of the only animal that we're getting to see do
Speaker 1: this we're getting to witness applies to seeing animal that's
Speaker 1: still through its natural selection ten thousand years ago. It's
Speaker 1: still doing the kinds of things that would have enabled
Speaker 1: it to succeed when there were fast running cheetahs and
Speaker 1: aenas and things chasing them. And so it's a you know,
Speaker 1: it's an animal that's kind of living in its head
Speaker 1: in a world of ghosts.
Speaker 4: And I think one thing when I look, especially having
Speaker 4: grown up in the East, when I look at pronghorn,
Speaker 4: I think to myself, that doesn't look like it belongs here.
Speaker 4: It doesn't look like anything else. It looks like it
Speaker 4: should be in Africa, when in fact it is the
Speaker 4: the animal of all the ones that I know.
Speaker 2: Today that has the deepest roots.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think it is. It's twenty five
Speaker 1: million years back, as you know, and of course we
Speaker 1: still have them. I mean, passenger pigeons go back fifteen
Speaker 1: million years here, but we don't have them anymore. But
Speaker 1: this is a creature that goes back a long way,
Speaker 1: and so it's really kind of it's as America. And
Speaker 1: this is another kind of mind bender about all this
Speaker 1: deep time evolution. It's as American almost as horses, which
Speaker 1: evolved here fifty six million years ago, you know. And
Speaker 1: so in the case of prong horns, they managed to
Speaker 1: get through the plastaink sanctions and survive, and horses, obviously,
Speaker 1: while they survived elsewhere around the world, they didn't survive here.
Speaker 2: But those are the two to me that have the
Speaker 2: deepest time.
Speaker 1: The other really deep time animals like camels, they were
Speaker 1: about forty five million years old, and of course they
Speaker 1: didn't they didn't make it.
Speaker 5: Speaking of deep antiquity, you had to comment and you
Speaker 5: just touched on it again a second ago. You had
Speaker 5: to comment in your in your show and mention it
Speaker 5: now where you said, like us, they're the only one left.
Speaker 5: And it was fighting that really struck me. It hadn't
Speaker 5: occurred to me, But I'm often find myself explaining to
Speaker 5: visitors who come out. We're driving around looking at wildlife.
Speaker 5: I'll explain to him, I kind of get into like
Speaker 5: what it means that they're the only to be the
Speaker 5: only member like of your genus, and to have me
Speaker 5: you came like it's hard to even find a relative right.
Speaker 5: And I never thought I'm gonna start saying when I
Speaker 5: do that little spiel, I'm gonna start saying, like us
Speaker 5: like this, you can go like, there's this thing, there's
Speaker 5: a chimpanzee.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's probably Bob. As close as close as we're
Speaker 2: gonna get.
Speaker 5: But I made the comment in our we did an
Speaker 5: outdoor cookbook, and in the introduction of the outdoor cookbook
Speaker 5: I made I made a comment that at the right
Speaker 5: place and time, you know, in the Middle East, southern Spain, whatever,
Speaker 5: at the right place and time, it would have been
Speaker 5: possible for a human to have to see a fire
Speaker 5: and the need to also and see figures sitting around
Speaker 5: a fire at night, and you would need to wonder,
Speaker 5: I wonder what species of human that is, which one
Speaker 5: of us that is?
Speaker 2: It was just like so hard to picture, I know.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's I read somewhere several years ago that
Speaker 1: at one point in time, there may have been as
Speaker 1: many as eight different human species coexisting in Africa, and
Speaker 1: I think it was Africa. I don't think that many
Speaker 1: made it to the Middle East or further north, but
Speaker 1: as many as eight different ones, So I mean, wow,
Speaker 1: you know, you really there's actually I saw a movie
Speaker 1: on I think it was on Netflix. It was on HBO,
Speaker 1: I think, and I don't remember the name of it,
Speaker 1: but it's basically was a movie about this group of
Speaker 1: anatomically modern humans Homo sapiens, who are traveling across the
Speaker 1: landscape and they camp out in woods one night and
Speaker 1: some group attacks them and steals one of their you know,
Speaker 1: one of their children. And so the father and a
Speaker 1: couple of other guys of this group and I think
Speaker 1: of female, maybe the mother of the child too, they
Speaker 1: track this other band and when they find them, they're
Speaker 1: not Homo sapiens. They are some other species, you know,
Speaker 1: and they're standing looking in the cave and what in
Speaker 1: the hell? Yeah, So that was that was possible in
Speaker 1: our past. It obviously was possible in the programing past,
Speaker 1: but not.
Speaker 2: For either one of us anymore. You know.
Speaker 5: One time, when I was working on a book project,
Speaker 5: I spent some time with an organization that was then
Speaker 5: called the Buffalo Field Campaign. I remember you remember because
Speaker 5: we had a mutual friend when I was a student
Speaker 5: of yours.
Speaker 1: Dan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was kid in our class that.
Speaker 5: Was was involved with Buffalo Field Campaign. And of course
Speaker 5: that is a buffalo being a term that has fallen
Speaker 5: out of favor and it's sort of taken the back
Speaker 5: seat to the term bison, right, people explaining that it's
Speaker 5: not actually a buffalo, it's it's a bison, and you're
Speaker 5: confusing everybody by calling it a buffalo.
Speaker 2: Away.
Speaker 5: I was sitting there with a kid from the Buffalo
Speaker 5: Field Campaigment. I was doing my reporting and I see
Speaker 5: off in the distance an analope. Okay, so I say, oh,
Speaker 5: there's an aneloe. He says, well, actually that's a prong horn.
Speaker 5: I was kind of like, well, don't get me started,
Speaker 5: because your whole organization is called buffalo.
Speaker 3: And actually you're protecting.
Speaker 5: So so with that said, I like, I'd like to
Speaker 5: hear your thoughts on what terms you use.
Speaker 2: I have I stick with buffalo.
Speaker 5: I noticed that Ken Burns has my back, but I
Speaker 5: have switched and I now even will crack my kids.
Speaker 2: I make them say pronghorn.
Speaker 1: Instead of antelope. Huh, well, I would admit I kind
Speaker 1: of us both for both animals I use and I
Speaker 1: know I've got buffalo several times and written stuff, and
Speaker 1: I think probably in this podcast in an episode or two,
Speaker 1: I use the term buffalo. It's a good interchangeable word
Speaker 1: with bison, you know. And as a writer, you're always
Speaker 1: trying to Okay, I don't want to use the same
Speaker 1: damn word over and over and over again. So here's
Speaker 1: a good interchangement word. And everybody knows exactly what it is. Yeah, pronghorn.
Speaker 1: I tend to stick pretty closely with pronghorn. But in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, almost anybody you quote, like Josiah Gregg,
Speaker 1: you know, it's an antelope. I mean, and that's how
Speaker 1: they all describe it. It's an antelope.
Speaker 4: When we were I got really in the habit of
Speaker 4: only using bison sort of in the academic context. And
Speaker 4: then when we were working in the Long Hunter book,
Speaker 4: Steve pointed out that none of these guys ever saw
Speaker 4: a bison.
Speaker 2: They saw buffalo. So we went through and changed that
Speaker 2: for consistency.
Speaker 5: I just haven't encountered a ton of confusion. If I'm
Speaker 5: talking to someone and I'm saying like, hey, you know,
Speaker 5: we can go down that way and you might see
Speaker 5: some buffalo. They're never picturing an asiatic water buffalo.
Speaker 2: They're just not.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I just never. It's like, I never have problems
Speaker 5: with it. But you know, I like pronghorn. I guess
Speaker 5: you know, I accept the interchangeability. And then I also
Speaker 5: kind of as much as I like to word police
Speaker 5: other people, when people word police me, I get prickly.
Speaker 4: So Steve and I have been going around to different
Speaker 4: universities talking about the Mountain Men project that we worked on,
Speaker 4: and in the course of that talk, I described some
Speaker 4: of the primary sources that we use, and one of
Speaker 4: them I describe as Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper.
Speaker 4: And I make the point though, I make the point
Speaker 4: that in I said, it's it's just this wonderful source
Speaker 4: and it can go from this very mundane we went
Speaker 4: three miles north, no Beaver, we went three miles west,
Speaker 4: no Beaver, we went you know, and then he has
Speaker 4: these long, sort of flourishes of description and he includes
Speaker 4: his own thoughts and reflections, and one of the points
Speaker 4: that I've been highlighting as sort of a joke is
Speaker 4: that when he describes the pronghorn, he says that he
Speaker 4: thinks they can be easily domesticated. And I sort of
Speaker 4: share that with the crowd for a cheap laugh. And
Speaker 4: then here I am and going through your episode and
Speaker 4: you make the same point, and it makes me pause
Speaker 4: and reflect on whether I've just embarrassed myself before several crowds.
Speaker 5: According to the physiologist Jared Diamond, what does he say, well,
Speaker 5: the whole have you read guns, germs and steel?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, But he lays out this.
Speaker 5: Theory that he starts with this foundational question, why did
Speaker 5: who's a guy that came and attacked the Incas?
Speaker 2: Bisarrow?
Speaker 5: Why did Pizarro cross from Europe to attack the Incas?
Speaker 5: Why didn't the Incas come from the east to attack Bizarrow?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 5: And then part of it gets into this this cocktail
Speaker 5: of things. One thing is how many people live along
Speaker 5: the same latitude so that they can develop certain agricultural
Speaker 5: crops and technologies and it winds up being transferable. Are
Speaker 5: you oriented north south or east west? And then he
Speaker 5: gets into how many beasts did you have that could
Speaker 5: be domesticated? And he says that here none.
Speaker 2: None, So I mean the turkey.
Speaker 1: So the two animals that I think would have been
Speaker 1: fairly easy to domesticate would have been prong horns and
Speaker 1: bighorn sheep.
Speaker 2: And the reason I say that Dan Osborne and Russell's.
Speaker 1: The reason I say that about bighorn sheep is because
Speaker 1: I've read these sheep eater accounts around Yellowstone where some
Speaker 1: of the archaeologist supposed his name whole Krantz or something,
Speaker 1: who did that big sheep eater study, and he said
Speaker 1: the sheep eaters told him the sheep eaters has shown.
Speaker 1: He told him that big oorn sheep were really easy
Speaker 1: to catch. He's just kind of lurked by one of
Speaker 1: their trails and you had yourself a net, and especially
Speaker 1: if you had a little depression or some kind of
Speaker 1: little pit, you just threw the net over the top
Speaker 1: of them, and they just kind of did this. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, there's another step you have to make from
Speaker 1: catching one to domesticating it. I mean you have to obviously,
Speaker 1: you have to be able to train in some way.
Speaker 5: The snakes are easy to catch, but that's uh.
Speaker 1: And I can't say that I've seen anybody specifically, and
Speaker 1: you know, maybe I have, but I don't recall anybody
Speaker 1: specifically running with that as a possibility, but I have
Speaker 1: a sneaking suspicion that for a lot of these hunter
Speaker 1: gatherer groups like that, they weren't interested in having domesticate
Speaker 1: animals because they hadn't reached the stage that old worlders
Speaker 1: had where Okay, man, there's kind of nothing left here.
Speaker 1: We got to come up with We've got to come
Speaker 1: up with some way to keep all this going. So
Speaker 1: let's take those those goats right there. Let's see if
Speaker 1: we can't tame them and get them to start following
Speaker 1: us around and stuff. But a lot of the people
Speaker 1: in the West, particularly outside the agricultural region of the
Speaker 1: of the Southwest, with the pueblos, I mean, they're hunters
Speaker 1: and gatherers, and they kind of don't have any need
Speaker 1: or interest in domesticating anything.
Speaker 5: You know what backs you up on this, As you said,
Speaker 5: this is a great point you're making. Think about the
Speaker 5: end of the near end of the buffalo. What winds
Speaker 5: up happening when there aren't andy left. People start feeding
Speaker 5: them with bottles, hitching them up, keeping the pastures, putting
Speaker 5: them in barns. So it's like when there was yeah,
Speaker 5: like you're saying, like if they had if people had
Speaker 5: got pushed and pushed and pushed to where the only
Speaker 5: way you were going to have protein reserves was if
Speaker 5: you had it in your yard and took with.
Speaker 1: You, and you would take the step because I mean,
Speaker 1: think of this, you know. I mean, camels are nasty,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean they would be nasty to try
Speaker 1: to mistigate.
Speaker 3: And horses.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you ever spent a whole lot of
Speaker 1: time around horses, and I have had horses for some
Speaker 1: of my life, I.
Speaker 3: Mean, damnation.
Speaker 1: The first people who domesticated a horse must have been
Speaker 1: pretty hard up. I mean those things, you know. The
Speaker 1: reason they buck, of course, is that because cats had
Speaker 1: always jumped on their backs, and of course they can
Speaker 1: kick and bite it and they strike with their fore feet,
Speaker 1: and I mean that would not have been an easy
Speaker 1: animal to domesticate. So I think anybody who decides we're
Speaker 1: going to domesticate a horse or a camel's backs against
Speaker 1: the wall.
Speaker 2: And they never got there with prong worn.
Speaker 1: I don't think they needed to. Yeah, I think that's it.
Speaker 1: They didn't need to