July 1, 2025 • 55 mins
In the early 1800s, when American and European scientific explorers first began to probe the unfamiliar West with its landscapes and animals so remarkably different from those of the East, the Great Plains and its wildlife seemed the most fascinating part of the West, an “American Serengeti.” Commencing with Lewis and Clark’s adventures and their attempts to catalog western wildlife, it took the entire 19th century for American explorers to introduce to science the staggering biological diversity Native America had bequeathed the United States. Accounts from Lewis and Clark to Stephen Long to C. Hart Merriam give us inspiring descriptions of what the Natural West was only two centuries ago.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
When American explorers first entered the West, they found an
unfamiliar world of landscapes and animals. Their journals and accounts
preserved as an ecological baseline for what the West was
only two hundred years ago. I'm Dan Flores, and this
is the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Still in barrel.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the
season that calls us home.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
A portion of.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands,
waters and wildlife, enjoy responsibly the wild new world of
(00:51):
the American Serengetti. Once, for twenty years I lived on
the great Plains of the West. I've never been so
impressed with a landscape, if you can suspend disbelief over
that sentence for a moment. I grew up in forests,
have lived for the past three decades in or near
(01:13):
the Rocky mountains, and I'm passionately in love with deserts.
And I travel to oceans since, like most of us,
I find something hypnotic and satisfying in an ocean beach.
But here's the thing. The sea, the woods, the mountains
all suffer in comparison with the prairie. What Romantic Age
(01:35):
landscape painters used to call the sublime, by which they
meant on awe capable of stealing the dialogue in your head,
is reachable more easily in vast horizontal planes than in
any other kind of setting. That sublimity arises from the plains,
unfathomable boundaries and a self confident grandness of scale, combined
(02:00):
with an echoless calm, almost monotony of sensory effect. In
the years I lived there, I found the great plains
endlessly stunning me. The place is a sensual feast of
the minimal. But I do understand that there's something larger
going on here. For at least the past fifty thousand years,
(02:22):
since we humans left Africa and began to explore the planet,
taking the measure of one landscape after another, we seem
to have been searching. This may be a simple impulse,
for in the literature of exploration, the places that aroused
our strongest passions always resembled our original African home. Yellow
(02:44):
savannahs speckled to the limits of our site with herds
and packs of wild animals. Think of the Massai Mara
and the serengetti as our templates the sights of our
earliest rememberings of whence we'd come two hundred years ago.
(03:04):
Except for East Africa itself, no part of the globe
thrilled us in the same primeval way as the American
planes today. The Plains is a drought and dust plague
habitat of big farm machinery and hog farms or fracking wells.
Often ignored or laughed about flyover country. But once it
(03:27):
was not yet de buffaloed, dewolved, degressed, then the Great
Plains was one of the marvels of the world. With
its amazing ecology of big charismatic animals. The Plains enabled
Americans and Europeans of all backgrounds to experience home base
one last time. Because of that, the Plains once was
(03:49):
a destination for adventurers, for scientists, and for literary types
from around the globe. Out on these vast horizontal yellow
sweeps in the midst of grassland, bison herds and packs
of various kinds of wolves and flapping, hooting scavenging birds
was where American and European scientific and literary travelers, rediscovering
(04:11):
their home base, recorded our first impressions of the American West.
It was the early fall in eighteen o four, and
for four months, twenty eight year old Meriwether Lewis and
thirty two year old William Clark had been leading their
(04:35):
core of discovery up the Missouri through a setting and
among animals similar to those of Virginia, where they had
both grown up. They had found white tailed deer, black bears,
and elk numerous on the lower river. But late that summer,
and geographically they were roughly where today's Nebraska, South, Dakota,
(04:56):
and Iowa now meet, the country began to change. Trees
were shorter, horizons were farther away, and on the hills
above the river, they no longer had views of continuous forests,
what their French hunters called prairies, were replacing views of trees.
The air was growing drier, and the splines and pegs
(05:18):
on their keel boats started falling out of their fittings.
In the next three weeks, Lewis and Clark passed into
the American version of Asia, from which so many of
the West's animals had come, or Africa, whose planes these
horizontal grasslands resembled. The transformation happened between about ninety seven
(05:41):
and ninety nine degrees of west longitude, some two hundred
miles due west of the Mississippi River. If our modern
cities had existed, then the zone of change demarcating a
kind of an Appalachian in America from a rocky Mountain
America would have run roughly through Austin, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Wichita,
(06:04):
and Fargo. Today, some of those towns are more intriguing
than others, but one of the things they all share
is a sense of being on an edge. I grew
up a little farther east, but I still recall the
powerful feeling of some undefined but profound alteration looming just
beyond the western horizon. The feeling was always there, and
(06:26):
it excited me enough that as soon as I could
drive a car, I at once went west to see
Lewis and Clark got to experience the change entire Instructed
by Jefferson to seek out any and all new life forms.
On August twenty third, the party killed and died on
(06:47):
the first bison most of them had ever seen. By
September the seventh, they were among their first prairie dogs
colony squirrels that made nests in burrows in the ground
rather than in trees. A week later there was an
even more remarkable encounter what they called a buck goat
of this country, more like the antelope or gazella of
(07:09):
Africa than any other species of goat. The prong horne
was one of America's original contributions to evolution, the striped
thoroughbred of the West. Three days later, the explorers encountered
a curious kind of a deer of a dark gray color,
the ears large and long, and with a strange pogo
(07:31):
stick gait that'd seen a mule deer familiar to Spanish
settlers in New Mexico and California, but unlike any deer
seen by Americans from east to the Big River. This
came on the same day they saw a remarkable bird
of the species of corvas. It was their first sighting
of a black billed magpie, a beautiful thing, Clark wrote.
(07:55):
The day after that, in the vicinity of present day Chamberlain,
South Dakota, the explorers encountered another American original. All that
September they had been seeing what they assumed was some
new kind of fox, and on the eighteenth William Clark
finally shot one. The sleek caned was no fox, though,
but it wasn't the Eastern wolf the Americans knew either.
(08:19):
They decided to call it a prairie wolf. Decades later,
nationalists would discover that this was the same animal many
Native people and Spanish settlers knew as the coyote, the
avatar of the Western Indian deity coyote, and another special
contribution from North American evolution. Lewis and Clark had passed
(08:42):
through the portal into North America's version of the Serengetti.
That analog isn't specious either. Despite Jefferson's hopes, masdons, mammoths,
and camels no longer roamed the West, but its historic
bestieri preserved poetry and spectacle, with thronging masses of bison
(09:02):
playing a role similar to that of East Africa's migrating wildebeasts,
pronghorns resembling nothing less than antelopes or gazelles, gray wolves
filling the niche of wild dogs in Africa, coyotes doing
an almost exact impression of jackals, and an ancient American
animal that was now fast returning escaped wild horses functioning
(09:26):
like zebra hers. Africa had retained its lions, and its elephants,
of course, and its hyenas and cheetahs. While America had not,
but America Serengetti had another king of beasts, the grizzly bear.
As Lewis and Kark were about to discover, this formidable
bear played a lion like, almost a godlike role. In
(09:47):
the West, the open country was filled with a cacophony
of sound. Pary dog towns loaded the earl space with
chirruping and trilling. Redtailed hawks screamed overhead. Bull elk with
racks heavy enough to affect how they moved, whistled haunting challenges.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Bison muttered and.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Bellowed with a sound that resembled far away continuous thunder.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Coyotes, hip and wolves howled the.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Continent's original national anthem, morning and evening and throughout the nights.
And grizzly bears, well, grizzly bears had a repertoire of sounds,
some hair raising beyond all experience. These Americans hadn't heard
them yet. When they did, they would never forget. They
(10:38):
got their first intimation. They were in Grizzly Country on
October seventh of eighteen oh four, when they saw bear
tracks three times the size of their footprints. But the
fascinating animal of the moment, in part because it was
so unprecedented, was the pronghorn. It struck them as an
almost inexplicable creature. Already shot a buck and now hoping
(11:02):
to collect a female for science, Lewis stalked a harem
of seven, only to have them whirl away and disappear.
In another few minutes, he saw the same ban three
miles distant. I had this day an opportunity of witnessing
the agility and superior fleetness of this animal, which was
to me really astonishing, he wrote in his journal. When
(11:26):
I beheld the rapidity of their flight along the ridge
before me, it appeared rather the rapid flight of birds
than the motions of quadrupeds. The Americans had no way
of knowing that in prong horns they were seeing one
of the best extant expressions of deep continental evolution. When
Merriwether Lewis stood amazed at prong horn speed. Their predators
(11:49):
were gray wolves and coyotes, neither of which can run
much more than forty miles an hour, Yet with their
light bones, broad nostrils, and windpipes, delivering turbo charged oxygen
to outsize lungs and hearts. One hundred and twenty pound
buck prong horns can top fifty five miles an hour,
and slighter doze can hit sixty five to seventy Female
(12:13):
prong horns, Lewis and Clark ultimately discovered consistently bore twin fawns,
but wine in the matter of gazelles. In Africa, prong
horns formed herds that crowded younger animals to the outside.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
But again, why would they do that.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Prong horns possessed gigantic eyes, as if they were searching
for danger at some great distance. The American naturalists were
dazzled but endlessly puzzled at these antelope goats. On October twentieth,
a week shy of the Mandan villages where they planned
(12:52):
to spend the winter, and in the midst of what
they said were great numbers of buffalo, elk, deer, and goats,
the Americans got their first look at a white bear,
by which they meant a grizzly. In a premonition of
the relationship they would soon forge with grizzlies, they shot it,
but the bear seemed to shrug off the hit and escaped.
(13:13):
That winter of eighteen oh four to five, they heard
many grizzly stories from their Mandan hosts, whose awe of
and respect for the giant bears actually had the Americans
snickering in private. Heading up to the Missouri in the
spring of eighteen oh five, the Americans got their first
(13:36):
sense of grizzly natural history in what is now North Dakota,
about halfway between today's Man and Williston. Notice first that
these cities are far out on the Great Plains, which
in fact was a primary grizzly range in the west.
The party found drowned bison washed up on the riverbanks,
(13:57):
as well as many tracks of the white bear of
enormous size.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
As they put it, they.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Were seeing proof that grizzlies scavenged buffalo casualties. Over the
next two weeks, as the expedition pushed upriver towards the
present Montana border, bear tracks in the river mud increased.
But the only bears they glimpsed, as they put it,
are at a great distance and generally running from us.
(14:24):
The Indian account of them does not correspond with our
experience so far, Lewis confided to his journal that was
about to change. On the morning of April twenty ninth,
walking along the shore, Lewis encountered two grizzlies and shot
both of them.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
One escaped, but the other.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
A young male, at once came after the explorer, pursuing
Lewis until more shots, downding. This young animal was the
first grizzly bear Lewis was able to examine close up.
The legs of this bear are somewhat longer than those
of the black as are its talons and tusks incomparably
(15:04):
larger and longer. Its color is yellowish brown, the eyes
small black and piercing. The fur is finger thicker and
deeper than that of the black bear. While he contended
that it is a much more ferocious and formidable animal
and will frequently pursue the hunter when wounded, Lewis also
(15:25):
concluded that against their heavy rifles, grizzlies were by no
means as formidable or dangerous as they have been presented.
That was a foolhardy arrogance about American technology, and a
few days later, on May fifth, and encounter with a
fully grown bear would sow the first seeds of doubt.
(15:46):
This time they came up against a most tremendous looking
animal and extremely hard to kill, notwithstanding he had five
balls through his lungs and five others in various parts.
They also began to perceive the individuality of grizzly personalities.
This bear did not attack, but instead made the most
(16:07):
tremendous roaring from the moment he was shot, then swam
to a sandbar and took twenty minutes to die. Doing
a kind of field autopsy, Lewis found the bear's heart
to be the size of that of a large ox.
The maw ten times the size of a black bear's,
was filled with flesh and the fish the bear had
(16:29):
been catching when he had been unfortunate enough to fall
under the gaze of the American travelers. In his journal,
William Clark wrote that this bear was the largest of
the carnivorous kind I ever saw. Around the campfire that night,
several members of the party decided their curiosity about grizzly
bears is pretty well satisfied. But this was a group
(16:54):
of men straight out of the colonial experience. They were
used to shooting virtually every animal they saw, with grizzlies
in almost every case they were firing on an unsuspecting
animal minding its own business, unless they're guarding a carcass,
surprised at close range, or are females protecting their young.
(17:14):
Grizzly bears don't normally charge people, but they don't react
well to being attacked. As this rodeo repeated again and again,
the bears increasingly assumed the role in the explorer's journal
accounts of monsters. In Lewis's almost classic line, these bear
being so hard to die rather intimidates us all, and
(17:38):
there was an obvious solution to that. He could have
just told his men to stop shooting every grizzly they encountered,
but of course that was not the American way. I
know what it's like to be charged by a grizzly bear.
In twenty years of living in Montana with grizzly bears
in the mountains, I never had a bad bear encounter,
(18:01):
but I have had the experience of seeing a grizzly
come on at full gallop. So I struggled to understand
intentionally provoking a grizzly bear like some frat party dare
by shooting it in the ribs with a muzzle loader.
My own thirty or so seconds with a charging grizzly
was in Alaska. Our group saw a grizzly up ahead,
(18:23):
climbing a riverbank. As we approached the spot, my companions
and I were suddenly presented with the heart stopping vision
of a chestnut blonde grizzly launching at full speed directly
at us. All the eye could register were detach details
rippling fur in the sunlight, tiny and focused eyes, glimpses
(18:43):
of curved white fangs, and an irresistible onward motion closing
the distance too fast a register. Then our guide loosed
a piercing whistle that skidded the bear to a stop
barely sixty feet away. Handsome, symmetrical and upright ears scanning
the bear's black eyes suddenly locked a split second, What
(19:08):
the fuck crossed his face, followed by a studied, almost
nonchalant turned to his right, and then, like a quarter
horse under quirk, he was bounding and crashing through the
dwarf willows as hard as he could, run away from us.
After a few minutes of the gods were still alive confusion,
we realized what had happened. The bear had heard our
(19:31):
voices bouncing off a distant cutbank. Thought that's where we were,
and had fled in exactly the wrong direction. The charge
we just experienced was actually a grizzly bear running for
its life to escape us. Meriwether Lewis didn't tell his
men that science had been satisfied, though, so they just
(19:55):
kept tempting fate. At one point, six of them approached
to within in forty yards of a grizzly grazing quietly
on spring grass in the open prairie. Four men shot him,
while two reserved their fire. In an instant, this monster
ran at them with open mouth, Lewis scribbled that night,
they finally perforated the bear with eight balls, each hit
(20:19):
only serving to direct the furious animal to the shooter,
until several of them had to dive off a twenty
foot cliff into the river in a rage. The bear
plunged off the bank right after them, before finally expiring.
The Stories of these needless assaults on grizzly bears raised
no eyebrows back East when the Lewis and Clark journals
(20:39):
went into print, but they did manage to lay the
blame on the bears, giving the grizzly its Lenaean name
Ursus Harribelus. Lewis and Clark ended up encountering, usually confronting,
thirty seven grizzly bears during the course of their expedition.
By following rivers, they were conducting what field biology calls
(21:01):
line transsect sampling. Barriccologists believe Lewis and Clark's experiences on
the Missouri in eighteen oh four eighteen oh six give
us a good feel for how many grizzly bears were
in the West when Americans first arrived. The Americans saw
all their grizzlies in one thousand miles stretch in the
(21:21):
high plains east of the main chain of the Rockies.
They saw no grizzlies at all in the depths of
the mountains or in the Pacific Northwest, and their line
transect obviously missed grizzlies farther south in California, for example,
or in Colorado the desert southwest. Nonetheless, thirty seven bears
(21:41):
and roughly one thousand miles means they were seeing a
bear roughly every twenty five miles. As ecology infers population demographics,
that translates to nearly four grizzly bears in every block
of ground ten miles by ten miles and a half
million square miles of the grizzly bears range in the
(22:03):
lower forty eight from California to the western edges of Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri,
and Iowa. Bar ecologists estimate that in the early eighteen hundreds,
some fifty six thousand grizzly bears ranged across the West.
(22:24):
The Americans Line transact missed a great deal of the
bird and animal riches of the West, which is why
Jefferson planned other scientific explorations and why the rest of
the nineteenth century featured new US expeditions into the West
every subsequent decade. Though tragically depressive, Meriwether Lewis was a
kind of self taught American Humboldt, a brilliant field naturalist
(22:49):
for whom evidence based science appeal more than religion or
supernatural explanations. So it wasn't just grizzly bears or prong horns,
coyotes or magpies. The Party in introduced to the new
scientific understanding of nature in the West. Among their many
other discoveries were big horned sheep. These animals bound from
(23:10):
rock to rock and stand apparently in the most careless
manner on the sides of precipices of many hundreds of feet.
They are very shy and are quick of both scent
and sight. The horns occupy the crown of the head
almost entirely, is how they put it. They also saw plains,
gray wolves, the shepherds of the buffalo herds, they said,
(23:32):
black tail deer a version of mule deer, Roosevelt's elk
like black tails, a Pacific Northwest variation, mountain goats, white
tailed jackrabbits, swift foxes, western badgers, numerous species of ground squirrels.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
And beyond the mammals, all of.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
These cutthroat and steelhead trout, white sturgeon, two new species
of rattlesnakes, horn toads. As for birds, harry chickens, four
new corvids, including western ravens, sage grouse, and five other
new species of grouse. Three new geese, including the lesser Canadian.
(24:11):
Five new species of woodpeckers, among them a western piliated
woodpecker and a woodpecker named after Meriwether Lewis. Three new jays,
including the pinion jay, a new nighthawk, and a new
poor will the western meadowlark, the western tanager, the western
mourning dove, the long billed curlew, three new gulls, and
(24:32):
two new terns, more prairie birds, the prairie horned lark,
and McCown's long spur, and among several other birds, the
whistling swan. When they return with their specimens and their
voluminous notes, and despite their having seen wild horses fat
as seals grazing the Colombian gorge, all hoped that the
(24:55):
West might hold living masdons or camels faded. The West
offered up a completely different America than the East, which
now seemed a many partly tropical and partly European, but
with no elephants anywhere, extinction appeared to be final even
in the west. In the West, the world still seemed dewy, fresh,
(25:22):
and American Eden. The naturalists who went there were ecstatic.
In Lewis and Clark's time, American universities were only barely
starting to turn out trained field naturalists. It's why no
real naturalists accompanied Lewis and Clark. Trained naturalists weren't long
in coming, but most were Europeans. Thomas Nuttall, for example,
(25:46):
arrived from Yorkshire in eighteen oh eight at the age
of twenty two, and at once came to the attention
of a prominent American professor of the natural sciences, Benjamin
Smith Barton of the University of Pennsylvania. Martin had been
Jefferson's advisor on natural sciences for the President's Western expeditions.
One of his students, doctor Peter Custis, as I'll relate
(26:08):
in another podcast, became the first American trained scientist to
explore the West. Barton became a Nutall advocate, though introducing
him to William McClure of the American Philosophical Society, who
nominated Nuttall for membership in the society. With patrons like these,
Nutdall got to explore across the West for the next
(26:31):
three decades. In eighteen eighteen and eighteen nineteen, not All
embarked on a natural history expedition to the edge of
the Southern Prairies. Nudall's route took him diagonally southeast to northwest,
across the Arkansas Territory, then westward as far as central Oklahoma,
and on south to the Red River and the border
(26:53):
of Spanish Texas. If you read Nutall's Southwestern Journal today,
it's clear he was naturalizing along the edge of that
great ecological change from east to west. The change made
a huge impression on almost everyone. Every traveler who entered
the Great Plains from the east had an experience like Nutdalls.
(27:16):
The ecotone that marked this ecological boundary sometimes changed the
country from east to west in no more than twenty
or thirty miles. In eighteen nineteen, Nutall travel right down
that seam from the present Tulsa area southward along the
western stretches of the Washitaw Mountains to the Red River,
moving in and out of prairie country like an immense
(27:39):
meadow covered with luxuriant herbage and beautifully decorated flowers, he said,
and he encountered there bison, of course, which were the
commonest mammal marker of the edge.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Of the prairie.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Then, in eighteen nineteen and eighteen twenty, a government expedition
led by Stephen Long explored the Colorado Front Range and
returned across the plains, thinking that they were examining one
of President Jefferson's targeted rivers in the west, the Red
River of the South. Long's naturalists included Edwin James Thomas Say,
(28:16):
and Say was the grandson of the famed eighteenth century
American naturalist John Bartram and painters Samuel Seymour and Titian Peel,
crossing today's Texas and Oklahoma plains, and they were actually
on the Canadian River rather than the Red They traveled
through what they called inconceivable numbers of herbivorous animals and
(28:39):
innumerable birds and beasts of prey. Herds of wild horses
five hundred strong surrounded them, and with disease epidemics still
suppressing Native American populations, the animals were also tamed that
they appeared wholly unaccustomed to the side of men. The
bisons and the wool moved slowly off to the right
(29:02):
and left, leaving a lane for the party to pass
through long road. Long's official report claimed that the western
plains seemed peculiarly adapted as a range for buffaloes, wild goats,
and other wild game, and he concluded that country was
best left just as they had found it. Seymour's and
(29:23):
Peel's paintings portraying the West as a paradise of animals
and landscapes, were the first visual representations of the inland
west the world ever saw.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
The accolades kept coming too.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Englishman John Bradbury, a romantic nature lover who accompanied fur
trade parties for safety, had never seen the like the buffaloes,
elks and antelopes had made paths which were covered with
grass and flowers. I have never seen a place, however,
embellished by art equal to this in beauty on John
(30:00):
Kirk Townsend, who accompanied Nuddall with a fur trading party
up the Platte River in eighteen thirty four, thought the
pronghorn in particular one of the most beautiful animals I
ever saw. As it bounds over the plain, it seems
scarcely to touch the ground, so exceedingly light and agile
are its motions. On crossing south pass over the Rockies,
(30:23):
Townsend wrote, I never before saw so great a variety
of birds in the same space. All were beautiful, and
many were new to me. He sent his collections of
Western birds, like the Townsend solitaire, for example, and his
animal skins to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
(30:45):
As travelers moved from the East and began to enter
the west, Bison, elk, pronghorns, coyotes, and prairie dogs were
always the new animals whose presence coincided with the first
appearances of a grassland dominated landscape. Americans in the nineteenth
century were fascinated sensory observers of these changes, and repeatedly
(31:07):
recorded a predictable progression. Explorer John C. Fremont's journey Westford
from Chateaus landing on the Missouri in the year eighteen
forty two captured it. A month's travel up the Kansas River.
As the woodlands opened in the sweeping grassy prairies, Fremont
began to report pronghorns running.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Over the hills.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
The next day he noticed that artemisia or sagebrush had
become common. The day after that, elk began to appear
on the river. Within a week after that they were
among the buffalo herds, and at that point wolves in
great numbers surrounded us during the night, howling and trotting about.
(31:50):
It had become clear that the task of a close
examination of the West and describing all these brand new
species to Western science was going to take decades, and indeed,
with expirations by topographical engineers like Fremont in the eighteen forties,
William Emery Marveling at the Desert Southwest on the Mexican
(32:13):
Boundary Survey in the eighteen fifties, John Wesley Powell's The
Sense of the Grand Canyon for the US Geological Survey
in the eighteen seventies, and the work of Seehart Miriam's
Biological Survey in the eighteen nineties. This was a scientific
task that took up the whole of the nineteenth century.
(32:35):
By its end, though science and the American government had
laid out for the world not just the Great Plains,
but the landscapes and animal life of the whole of
the American West, the American publican just about everyone else
was bewitched. Despite all the change and all the loss,
that magical sense of the West has never yet gone away.
(33:00):
While of Stegner's timeless phrase, the region remains today a
geography of hope.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
In this episode, a lot of what you talk about
is euro Americans crossing this ecological gradient in the continent,
sort of the revelation of all these new species in
this unfamiliar beastiary. And you know, the the plains, right,
(34:02):
And I'm just curious what strikes me about that is
I had my own I mean, obviously it's like a
very different experience in two thousand and eight. But I
remember when I was twenty one getting in my truck
and driving west and having this that immersive experience and
watching the land change underneath your feet. Yeah, And I
(34:25):
know you grew up in Louisiana, and I wonder what
your personal journey was like for the first time crossing
into the West.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Well, I.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Had an absolute fascination with what was immediately to the
west of me because I grew up in northwestern Louisiana
and Cattle Parish, which is near Shreveport in Cattle Parish,
and my family had been in Louisiana for three hundred years,
(35:05):
and I knew that we had in our background, we
had stories still and when I was in graduate school,
I got to read about read actual accounts of some
of these people who were traders to the tribes up
the Red River, and so I kind of had this
sense of I had ancestors who had gone up the
(35:28):
Red River and gone into the West, and so I
was really fascinated with it. And as soon as my
parents would and I got a driver's license, and my
parents thought that I could be trusted to go overnight
or for a couple of nights. The first thing I
did in a car was to drive straight west, and
(35:51):
I only drove to I drove past Dallas and Fort Worth,
where the country really fort Worth it really begins to change,
or in what's called the Grand Prairie, and so it
really opens up. And I drove about as far west
I think as Wichita Falls or something, and then turned
(36:11):
up north into Oklahoma and drove through some of southern
Oklahoma up to Lawton, which is where the Comanches and
the Kiowas and the southern Cheyennes ended up, and also
the Caddos who had come out of the country where
I grew up, and then drove back to Louisiana. But
I've never gotten over the experience of that, and one
(36:34):
of the things that I've always remembered about it. Two
things I really remember about it at night was that
when the night fell, I was used to living in
a country where you couldn't see one hundred yards because
of the density of the forest, and when night fell,
I began to see the lights of towns that appeared
to be twenty thirty miles away, and I thought that
(36:57):
was tremendously exciting. And then the other thing that I
got to see at night was it looked like the
stars were bigger, polished. The night skies looked far more
vibrant than I was ever used to in Louisiana. So
in those ways, I mean, I didn't see many animals,
(37:19):
you know, and I was hoping to see prong horns
and prairie dogs, and I don't remember seeing very many animals.
But I got at least to see that change, that
ecological change, and I think that's been something magical for
people coming out of the East for a long time.
I think, you know, the Spaniards coming up from say
(37:40):
Mexico through the Chihuahuan Desert to Santa Fe or to California,
they didn't experience that kind of transformation. But going from
the East and entering the West for the first time,
I think it was really moving. So that's one of
the things I was trying to kind of describe in
this episode.
Speaker 4 (38:00):
Met this kid one time that had moved from Florida.
He was living on by Fort Myers, Florida, and he
moved to bos of Montana, and he was telling me
he didn't like it because it was such a big town.
And I said, this town is not a fraction size
of Fort Myers. He goes, but yeah, but you can
(38:21):
see it all in Fort Myers.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
You don't know how big it is. That's exactly it.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Yeah, you can see it, and you know, the ability
to see the world is to me a very really
powerful thing. I mean, you know, as I kind of
argued in this episode, and a lot of this comes
from my book American Serengetti, I mean, I think this
is kind of a genetic memory because I think this
(38:51):
humans we sort of emerged into who we were in
the open country of Africa, and I think we were
there for a very long time. I mean, you know,
I've even I'm convinced that this is true. I've never
really seen any scientific corroboration for it. But I think
the reason everybody sets the thermostat at seventy two degrees
(39:12):
or somewhere around seventy two degrees, whether you're in Edmonton
or you're down in Mexico City, is because we grew.
We come, in a evolutionary sense, from a place where
that was what we evolved to. Yeah, that was the
mean temptuary, that was what was comfortable to humans, and
so one of the things that enabled us to go
(39:32):
around the world was the invention of fire because we
could go to much colder places and keep it seventy
two degrees around the campfire. So yeah, I think that
there's a you know, beyond just staying warm or cooler
or whatever. There's a genetic memory of that kind of
open landscape that is pretty deep in US, and it
(39:54):
certainly has it moves me.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Where do you think of.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
When you when you imagine a a sort of baseline
for North American ecology. You know, there are people and
we've had some you know, you and I have some
exposure to folks at Colossal biosciences who are looking at
like an ecological baseline being pre human for North America,
(40:25):
meaning that the interest in like bringing back Willie mammoths
and other things. I tend to when I picture in
my mind the like what it ought to look like?
I always go to it ought to look like what
Lewis and Clark saw. J I mean like like it's
(40:47):
it seems achievable in some ways, in some places it's achievable.
It just seems like that if we're talking about what
was it like it was that day?
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Yeah, you know it was that.
Speaker 4 (41:00):
No, I'm there where do you where do you sit
on that?
Speaker 1 (41:04):
That's That's that's where I am too. And I when
I imagine, you know, the West is I ideally want
it to be, It's that world. And I think that's
one of the great things that the Lewis and Clark
expedition did for us is it gave us a mental
image of what the West was like before it really
(41:29):
was being degraded and and you know, just kind of eaten.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Away at the edges.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
And Lewis and Clark, I think they saw it at
a moment when it still was the country that you know,
Native people had been living in and had managed, and
that all those populations of wild creatures were still there
and still healthy. And so they give us an image
(41:59):
of what that was. I think that's part of the
fascination with Lewis and Clark. And it's only about three
decades later that it really starts coming unraveled, but man,
their image of it is a really powerful thing. Yeah,
that's the one for me and I. You know, so
Steve and I are both involved with colossal biosciences, and
(42:20):
they kind of have a plis to scene idea of
how they would like the world to look and I
would love.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
To see that.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
But you can kind of go to Africa, you know,
and see the Pleista scene. It still exists in places
like Kenya and Tanzania and South Africa. But this particular world,
it's the Lewis and Clark world, is really a special one.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
In this episode, you draw a lot on the descriptions
of naturalists who are experiencing this world for the first time,
and it strikes like, obviously Lewis wasn't a trained naturalist,
but his description of pronghorn moving, I think is probably
(43:06):
better than anything that I could imagine. I mean, that
sort of makes the hair on my next stand up.
But I wonder if you can just talk a little
bit about this whole genre of travel writing and sort
of where its strongest in terms of capturing what the
world looked like and where there are omissions or blind
(43:27):
spots in these in these naturalists they're headed west.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Well, I think that this kind of natural history travel
writing is one of the foundations of American literature. I mean,
I think you know you can certainly you can trace
it back to people like William Bartram, for example, who
with his book Travels, which he wrote in seventeen ninety
one was the first book written by an American that
(43:54):
really attracted the attention of you know, the European intellectual
and literary community and finally decide, well, these Americans, you know,
they may turn out to amount to something after all.
And I think that established a tradition, and you can
track it through time right into Edward Abbey.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Or somebody like that.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
I mean, it's and it appears in every decade through
most of American history. I mean from Thureau to Abbey
and then back to William Bartram in the seventeen nineties.
There's just a continuous threat of this. I think what
is distinctive a little bit about the American situation in
(44:35):
writing about the West, traveling to the West, writing about
all these animals they're seeing, adding them all to science,
to Western science, to Lenayan science, placing everything into a
family and a genus and creating a species, is that
(45:00):
it doesn't ever quite rise to the point of doing
what say physics was doing, which was coming up with
a big explanatory theory to sort of cover everything from
(45:20):
an apple falling on Newton's head to the Earth revolving
around the Sun and Jupiter's moons revolving around Jupiter, and
what they kept doing was just kind of adding more
pebbles to the pile, stacking the pebbles higher and higher
(45:40):
and higher. And then along comes somebody like Charles Darwin,
who is twenty five years old, is actually in college
in order to become an ordained minister, and happens to
get a gig on the USS Beagle and travels around
a lot of the world and comes back and has
an epiphany that no human being in history has ever had.
(46:05):
I suddenly understand. He realizes, at the age of about
twenty six or twenty seven, why there is such a
diversity of life on the planet. I understand how it works.
And that was always been to me when I've studied
American naturalists and all these people going west and writing
all these wonderful accounts like the Long Expedition account of
(46:29):
traveling through huge herds of bison and wild horses, and
the wolves and the bison just sort of move out
of the way unless you go through. I mean, I
love those descriptions, but they never none of the Americans
ever got to the point of understanding the big picture.
And you know, once Darwin publishes On the Origin of
species in eighteen fifty nine, and then certainly we began
(46:52):
to have whether you're an American or not, you begin
to have plenty of opportunity to start plugging your work
into this theory.
Speaker 4 (47:01):
But it's so funny that age, because he looks like
he was you see, he looks like he was born old.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Picture hard picture at twenty five. Well, you know, I mean,
we right, he does kind of. We always seehim, oh
as this scraggly haired old.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Guy and like the black wool. Yeah, he was boring,
But I mean.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
Part of it is that he waits for thirty five
years before he ever writes the damn book. And he
knows this all through the eighteen twenties, eighteen thirties, eighteen forties.
He knows how it all works. But he says, you know,
at one point he said, if I wrote about this,
it would be like committing murder, you know, I just
(47:41):
and then of course Wallace writes him a letter and says,
you know, I sort of come up with something. I'm
not sure what to call it. You know, Darwin had
already resolved on the idea of natural selection. I'm not
sure what to call it, but it looks like, to me,
this is how nature works.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
And that's when Darwin.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Decided, Okay, I've got to got to publish.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
Can't keep sitting on this.
Speaker 4 (48:03):
In your episode, you you talk about Lewis.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
And Clark.
Speaker 4 (48:09):
Coming out and just they're like they can't help with themselves,
but try to mix it up with grizzlies.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
They can't help.
Speaker 4 (48:15):
Like they see it and they're like, it's just we're
just gonna have to go over and shoot it.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (48:22):
Yeah, there's a there was a nez Perce man named
yellow Wolf. I told you I was gonna ask about
yellow Wolf, a nez pers Man named yellow Wolf who
after the nez Perce War and eighteen seventy seven, he
goes into Canada. Was sitting bowl and they go and
I don't.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Know what we'd call it.
Speaker 4 (48:40):
They're like, Uhney, well, how would you describe when they
go into Canada? Well, the refugees, Yeah, to become refugees
and trying to escape the US military. Yeah, but some
of these of these hundreds of people that are up there,
young guys kind of trickle back down just to go
see what's going on, you know.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
Back where these live.
Speaker 4 (49:01):
And in this in this character yellow Wolf and a
couple of the young men to start filtering the way
back down down through the Great Plains and into the
rockies around the Bitterroot Mountains.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
But yellow Wolf will describe that.
Speaker 4 (49:16):
He had that same problem Lewis and Clark had, like
when he ran into a grizzly, he had to confront it,
but it was like a personal calling of his. He
he knew it was unusual that he had to confront it.
He had to go after it. It was like part
of his identity. That seems to like like that would
be anomalous, right, I mean, doesn't it seem like most
(49:37):
of the tribes and the Great Plains and Inner Mountain
West and you know.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Avoided the animals.
Speaker 4 (49:44):
Yeah, Like, is there a fair way to is there
like a fair way to sort of encapsulate what the
attitude was toward grizzly bears.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Well, I think the attitude, you know, it was in
some ways individualistic, as yellow Wolf's experiences kind of imply
there were some people who I think believe that in
order to establish your credentials as a warrior or a
potential leader of your people, I mean a grizzly taking
(50:12):
on a grizzly bear was equivalent to taking on someone
else in the battle, because this was an animal that
was equally dangerous.
Speaker 4 (50:21):
Well, so you do encounter tales like that.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
You do encounter that, You do encounter some tales like that,
you know, and even and I'll talk about this in
a later episode when I talk about the the Safaris
that you know, all these European elites began to take
in the West from the eighteen thirties on. They were
(50:45):
doing it in Africa at the same time too, and
they were going out on they called it prairie fever.
They would go out on the Great Plains.
Speaker 4 (50:52):
And being Randall felt that, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:56):
Every now and then.
Speaker 2 (50:57):
Yeah, prairie fever.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
So one of the things that they that some of
the people who had experiences in Africa prior to coming
to North America would do is they would equate a
battle with a grizzly bear as the same thing as
shooting a lion in Africa. And so if you took
on a lion in Africa and you won that contest,
(51:21):
then this was something in North America that was the equivalent.
So people actually did that, and I've got I'll tell
in a later podcast a really kind of funny story
about a guy who was determined to do that and
it didn't turn out quite the way he was hoping
that it would.
Speaker 4 (51:35):
But well, let me ask you. I was gonna say
the same thing in a different way, but it's a
different question. Just like today. Just like today, in grizzly
bear country, you can just go out and walk down
a trail, you know, do nothing wrong. There's a bear
and it's got a dead moose calf. You stumble into it.
(51:57):
Its response is, you know, to get you away from Yeah,
it hits you, maybe bites you, and if it goes
wrong for you, you're just dead.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Yep right.
Speaker 4 (52:08):
And and this bear didn't put any thought into it.
It took him ten seconds and he just was simply saying,
don't take my thing.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
Right.
Speaker 4 (52:17):
That had to be happening, Oh it did, you mean,
like it had to be a part of it had
to be a part of native life that you just
now and then stumbled into the wrong thing and people
got killed by grizzlies.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
Oh yeah, they did.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
I mean, so the you know, the Hugh Glass story
is one of the classic ones. That's the one that
they made into the Revenant, and that's one where it
obviously happened to a mountain man where he just happens
he's at the wrong place at the wrong time, and
he stumbles into a bear, and it becomes one of
the epic Western stories. I mean, I tell the story
(52:49):
in American Serengetti of one of these kind of events
happening in the eighteen twenties, a little earlier than Huglass
down in Colorado, where a bunch of guys out of
Arkansas and Louisiana who I'm convinced have no idea what
the hell of grizzly bear is. They make a camp
and cops of willows at the base of pretty close
(53:11):
to Pike's Peak. And while they're making camp, somebody lets
out a shout bear bear and this one guy and
this seems to be something fairly common in these grizzly
bear encounters.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
I mean, this is a group of twenty five or
thirty people.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
The bear singles out one guy and goes after this
one guy, and this guy cannot get away. He climbs
up a tree and the bear drags him out of
the tree, and finally they manage the other other guys
in the group managed to kill the bear.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
I mean he's a big old male.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
And the guy that the bear has been going after,
you know, I mean, he's still alive. And they all
sit around camp and ask it, so are you oky,
how are you doing? It looks like you're.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
Gonna You're gonna be okay.
Speaker 1 (54:03):
Man, that was incredible, and the guy says, nope, I
heard my skull break. I ain't gonna make it. And
as they sat around that night, they said, he got
quieter and quieter, and during the night one of the
guys got up and went over to check on him,
and they could see something running out of the side
(54:23):
of his head where the bear had only one canine left,
but that one canine had penetrated his skull and by
morning he had died. But that kind of thing where
you just happened and don't really have any idea what's
going on, you know, I mean, Lewis and Clark were saying, damn,
there's a bear. Let's you know, let's get five or
(54:44):
six guys and.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
You hold your fire.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
Yeah, but this was happening to people where they had
no they were just stumbling into.
Speaker 4 (54:52):
The experience, and presumably it had to happen to Native Americans.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
Oh yeah, there's no doubt it did.
Speaker 4 (54:57):
Yeah, well Dan, thanks again man, look forward to talking
about the next show.
Speaker 1 (55:02):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (55:02):
It's been fun, fun with you guys. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
M M m
When American explorers first entered the West, they found an
unfamiliar world of landscapes and animals. Their journals and accounts
preserved as an ecological baseline for what the West was
only two hundred years ago. I'm Dan Flores, and this
is the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Still in barrel.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the
season that calls us home.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
A portion of.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands,
waters and wildlife, enjoy responsibly the wild new world of
(00:51):
the American Serengetti. Once, for twenty years I lived on
the great Plains of the West. I've never been so
impressed with a landscape, if you can suspend disbelief over
that sentence for a moment. I grew up in forests,
have lived for the past three decades in or near
(01:13):
the Rocky mountains, and I'm passionately in love with deserts.
And I travel to oceans since, like most of us,
I find something hypnotic and satisfying in an ocean beach.
But here's the thing. The sea, the woods, the mountains
all suffer in comparison with the prairie. What Romantic Age
(01:35):
landscape painters used to call the sublime, by which they
meant on awe capable of stealing the dialogue in your head,
is reachable more easily in vast horizontal planes than in
any other kind of setting. That sublimity arises from the plains,
unfathomable boundaries and a self confident grandness of scale, combined
(02:00):
with an echoless calm, almost monotony of sensory effect. In
the years I lived there, I found the great plains
endlessly stunning me. The place is a sensual feast of
the minimal. But I do understand that there's something larger
going on here. For at least the past fifty thousand years,
(02:22):
since we humans left Africa and began to explore the planet,
taking the measure of one landscape after another, we seem
to have been searching. This may be a simple impulse,
for in the literature of exploration, the places that aroused
our strongest passions always resembled our original African home. Yellow
(02:44):
savannahs speckled to the limits of our site with herds
and packs of wild animals. Think of the Massai Mara
and the serengetti as our templates the sights of our
earliest rememberings of whence we'd come two hundred years ago.
(03:04):
Except for East Africa itself, no part of the globe
thrilled us in the same primeval way as the American
planes today. The Plains is a drought and dust plague
habitat of big farm machinery and hog farms or fracking wells.
Often ignored or laughed about flyover country. But once it
(03:27):
was not yet de buffaloed, dewolved, degressed, then the Great
Plains was one of the marvels of the world. With
its amazing ecology of big charismatic animals. The Plains enabled
Americans and Europeans of all backgrounds to experience home base
one last time. Because of that, the Plains once was
(03:49):
a destination for adventurers, for scientists, and for literary types
from around the globe. Out on these vast horizontal yellow
sweeps in the midst of grassland, bison herds and packs
of various kinds of wolves and flapping, hooting scavenging birds
was where American and European scientific and literary travelers, rediscovering
(04:11):
their home base, recorded our first impressions of the American West.
It was the early fall in eighteen o four, and
for four months, twenty eight year old Meriwether Lewis and
thirty two year old William Clark had been leading their
(04:35):
core of discovery up the Missouri through a setting and
among animals similar to those of Virginia, where they had
both grown up. They had found white tailed deer, black bears,
and elk numerous on the lower river. But late that summer,
and geographically they were roughly where today's Nebraska, South, Dakota,
(04:56):
and Iowa now meet, the country began to change. Trees
were shorter, horizons were farther away, and on the hills
above the river, they no longer had views of continuous forests,
what their French hunters called prairies, were replacing views of trees.
The air was growing drier, and the splines and pegs
(05:18):
on their keel boats started falling out of their fittings.
In the next three weeks, Lewis and Clark passed into
the American version of Asia, from which so many of
the West's animals had come, or Africa, whose planes these
horizontal grasslands resembled. The transformation happened between about ninety seven
(05:41):
and ninety nine degrees of west longitude, some two hundred
miles due west of the Mississippi River. If our modern
cities had existed, then the zone of change demarcating a
kind of an Appalachian in America from a rocky Mountain
America would have run roughly through Austin, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Wichita,
(06:04):
and Fargo. Today, some of those towns are more intriguing
than others, but one of the things they all share
is a sense of being on an edge. I grew
up a little farther east, but I still recall the
powerful feeling of some undefined but profound alteration looming just
beyond the western horizon. The feeling was always there, and
(06:26):
it excited me enough that as soon as I could
drive a car, I at once went west to see
Lewis and Clark got to experience the change entire Instructed
by Jefferson to seek out any and all new life forms.
On August twenty third, the party killed and died on
(06:47):
the first bison most of them had ever seen. By
September the seventh, they were among their first prairie dogs
colony squirrels that made nests in burrows in the ground
rather than in trees. A week later there was an
even more remarkable encounter what they called a buck goat
of this country, more like the antelope or gazella of
(07:09):
Africa than any other species of goat. The prong horne
was one of America's original contributions to evolution, the striped
thoroughbred of the West. Three days later, the explorers encountered
a curious kind of a deer of a dark gray color,
the ears large and long, and with a strange pogo
(07:31):
stick gait that'd seen a mule deer familiar to Spanish
settlers in New Mexico and California, but unlike any deer
seen by Americans from east to the Big River. This
came on the same day they saw a remarkable bird
of the species of corvas. It was their first sighting
of a black billed magpie, a beautiful thing, Clark wrote.
(07:55):
The day after that, in the vicinity of present day Chamberlain,
South Dakota, the explorers encountered another American original. All that
September they had been seeing what they assumed was some
new kind of fox, and on the eighteenth William Clark
finally shot one. The sleek caned was no fox, though,
but it wasn't the Eastern wolf the Americans knew either.
(08:19):
They decided to call it a prairie wolf. Decades later,
nationalists would discover that this was the same animal many
Native people and Spanish settlers knew as the coyote, the
avatar of the Western Indian deity coyote, and another special
contribution from North American evolution. Lewis and Clark had passed
(08:42):
through the portal into North America's version of the Serengetti.
That analog isn't specious either. Despite Jefferson's hopes, masdons, mammoths,
and camels no longer roamed the West, but its historic
bestieri preserved poetry and spectacle, with thronging masses of bison
(09:02):
playing a role similar to that of East Africa's migrating wildebeasts,
pronghorns resembling nothing less than antelopes or gazelles, gray wolves
filling the niche of wild dogs in Africa, coyotes doing
an almost exact impression of jackals, and an ancient American
animal that was now fast returning escaped wild horses functioning
(09:26):
like zebra hers. Africa had retained its lions, and its elephants,
of course, and its hyenas and cheetahs. While America had not,
but America Serengetti had another king of beasts, the grizzly bear.
As Lewis and Kark were about to discover, this formidable
bear played a lion like, almost a godlike role. In
(09:47):
the West, the open country was filled with a cacophony
of sound. Pary dog towns loaded the earl space with
chirruping and trilling. Redtailed hawks screamed overhead. Bull elk with
racks heavy enough to affect how they moved, whistled haunting challenges.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Bison muttered and.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Bellowed with a sound that resembled far away continuous thunder.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Coyotes, hip and wolves howled the.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Continent's original national anthem, morning and evening and throughout the nights.
And grizzly bears, well, grizzly bears had a repertoire of sounds,
some hair raising beyond all experience. These Americans hadn't heard
them yet. When they did, they would never forget. They
(10:38):
got their first intimation. They were in Grizzly Country on
October seventh of eighteen oh four, when they saw bear
tracks three times the size of their footprints. But the
fascinating animal of the moment, in part because it was
so unprecedented, was the pronghorn. It struck them as an
almost inexplicable creature. Already shot a buck and now hoping
(11:02):
to collect a female for science, Lewis stalked a harem
of seven, only to have them whirl away and disappear.
In another few minutes, he saw the same ban three
miles distant. I had this day an opportunity of witnessing
the agility and superior fleetness of this animal, which was
to me really astonishing, he wrote in his journal. When
(11:26):
I beheld the rapidity of their flight along the ridge
before me, it appeared rather the rapid flight of birds
than the motions of quadrupeds. The Americans had no way
of knowing that in prong horns they were seeing one
of the best extant expressions of deep continental evolution. When
Merriwether Lewis stood amazed at prong horn speed. Their predators
(11:49):
were gray wolves and coyotes, neither of which can run
much more than forty miles an hour, Yet with their
light bones, broad nostrils, and windpipes, delivering turbo charged oxygen
to outsize lungs and hearts. One hundred and twenty pound
buck prong horns can top fifty five miles an hour,
and slighter doze can hit sixty five to seventy Female
(12:13):
prong horns, Lewis and Clark ultimately discovered consistently bore twin fawns,
but wine in the matter of gazelles. In Africa, prong
horns formed herds that crowded younger animals to the outside.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
But again, why would they do that.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Prong horns possessed gigantic eyes, as if they were searching
for danger at some great distance. The American naturalists were
dazzled but endlessly puzzled at these antelope goats. On October twentieth,
a week shy of the Mandan villages where they planned
(12:52):
to spend the winter, and in the midst of what
they said were great numbers of buffalo, elk, deer, and goats,
the Americans got their first look at a white bear,
by which they meant a grizzly. In a premonition of
the relationship they would soon forge with grizzlies, they shot it,
but the bear seemed to shrug off the hit and escaped.
(13:13):
That winter of eighteen oh four to five, they heard
many grizzly stories from their Mandan hosts, whose awe of
and respect for the giant bears actually had the Americans
snickering in private. Heading up to the Missouri in the
spring of eighteen oh five, the Americans got their first
(13:36):
sense of grizzly natural history in what is now North Dakota,
about halfway between today's Man and Williston. Notice first that
these cities are far out on the Great Plains, which
in fact was a primary grizzly range in the west.
The party found drowned bison washed up on the riverbanks,
(13:57):
as well as many tracks of the white bear of
enormous size.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
As they put it, they.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Were seeing proof that grizzlies scavenged buffalo casualties. Over the
next two weeks, as the expedition pushed upriver towards the
present Montana border, bear tracks in the river mud increased.
But the only bears they glimpsed, as they put it,
are at a great distance and generally running from us.
(14:24):
The Indian account of them does not correspond with our
experience so far, Lewis confided to his journal that was
about to change. On the morning of April twenty ninth,
walking along the shore, Lewis encountered two grizzlies and shot
both of them.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
One escaped, but the other.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
A young male, at once came after the explorer, pursuing
Lewis until more shots, downding. This young animal was the
first grizzly bear Lewis was able to examine close up.
The legs of this bear are somewhat longer than those
of the black as are its talons and tusks incomparably
(15:04):
larger and longer. Its color is yellowish brown, the eyes
small black and piercing. The fur is finger thicker and
deeper than that of the black bear. While he contended
that it is a much more ferocious and formidable animal
and will frequently pursue the hunter when wounded, Lewis also
(15:25):
concluded that against their heavy rifles, grizzlies were by no
means as formidable or dangerous as they have been presented.
That was a foolhardy arrogance about American technology, and a
few days later, on May fifth, and encounter with a
fully grown bear would sow the first seeds of doubt.
(15:46):
This time they came up against a most tremendous looking
animal and extremely hard to kill, notwithstanding he had five
balls through his lungs and five others in various parts.
They also began to perceive the individuality of grizzly personalities.
This bear did not attack, but instead made the most
(16:07):
tremendous roaring from the moment he was shot, then swam
to a sandbar and took twenty minutes to die. Doing
a kind of field autopsy, Lewis found the bear's heart
to be the size of that of a large ox.
The maw ten times the size of a black bear's,
was filled with flesh and the fish the bear had
(16:29):
been catching when he had been unfortunate enough to fall
under the gaze of the American travelers. In his journal,
William Clark wrote that this bear was the largest of
the carnivorous kind I ever saw. Around the campfire that night,
several members of the party decided their curiosity about grizzly
bears is pretty well satisfied. But this was a group
(16:54):
of men straight out of the colonial experience. They were
used to shooting virtually every animal they saw, with grizzlies
in almost every case they were firing on an unsuspecting
animal minding its own business, unless they're guarding a carcass,
surprised at close range, or are females protecting their young.
(17:14):
Grizzly bears don't normally charge people, but they don't react
well to being attacked. As this rodeo repeated again and again,
the bears increasingly assumed the role in the explorer's journal
accounts of monsters. In Lewis's almost classic line, these bear
being so hard to die rather intimidates us all, and
(17:38):
there was an obvious solution to that. He could have
just told his men to stop shooting every grizzly they encountered,
but of course that was not the American way. I
know what it's like to be charged by a grizzly bear.
In twenty years of living in Montana with grizzly bears
in the mountains, I never had a bad bear encounter,
(18:01):
but I have had the experience of seeing a grizzly
come on at full gallop. So I struggled to understand
intentionally provoking a grizzly bear like some frat party dare
by shooting it in the ribs with a muzzle loader.
My own thirty or so seconds with a charging grizzly
was in Alaska. Our group saw a grizzly up ahead,
(18:23):
climbing a riverbank. As we approached the spot, my companions
and I were suddenly presented with the heart stopping vision
of a chestnut blonde grizzly launching at full speed directly
at us. All the eye could register were detach details
rippling fur in the sunlight, tiny and focused eyes, glimpses
(18:43):
of curved white fangs, and an irresistible onward motion closing
the distance too fast a register. Then our guide loosed
a piercing whistle that skidded the bear to a stop
barely sixty feet away. Handsome, symmetrical and upright ears scanning
the bear's black eyes suddenly locked a split second, What
(19:08):
the fuck crossed his face, followed by a studied, almost
nonchalant turned to his right, and then, like a quarter
horse under quirk, he was bounding and crashing through the
dwarf willows as hard as he could, run away from us.
After a few minutes of the gods were still alive confusion,
we realized what had happened. The bear had heard our
(19:31):
voices bouncing off a distant cutbank. Thought that's where we were,
and had fled in exactly the wrong direction. The charge
we just experienced was actually a grizzly bear running for
its life to escape us. Meriwether Lewis didn't tell his
men that science had been satisfied, though, so they just
(19:55):
kept tempting fate. At one point, six of them approached
to within in forty yards of a grizzly grazing quietly
on spring grass in the open prairie. Four men shot him,
while two reserved their fire. In an instant, this monster
ran at them with open mouth, Lewis scribbled that night,
they finally perforated the bear with eight balls, each hit
(20:19):
only serving to direct the furious animal to the shooter,
until several of them had to dive off a twenty
foot cliff into the river in a rage. The bear
plunged off the bank right after them, before finally expiring.
The Stories of these needless assaults on grizzly bears raised
no eyebrows back East when the Lewis and Clark journals
(20:39):
went into print, but they did manage to lay the
blame on the bears, giving the grizzly its Lenaean name
Ursus Harribelus. Lewis and Clark ended up encountering, usually confronting,
thirty seven grizzly bears during the course of their expedition.
By following rivers, they were conducting what field biology calls
(21:01):
line transsect sampling. Barriccologists believe Lewis and Clark's experiences on
the Missouri in eighteen oh four eighteen oh six give
us a good feel for how many grizzly bears were
in the West when Americans first arrived. The Americans saw
all their grizzlies in one thousand miles stretch in the
(21:21):
high plains east of the main chain of the Rockies.
They saw no grizzlies at all in the depths of
the mountains or in the Pacific Northwest, and their line
transect obviously missed grizzlies farther south in California, for example,
or in Colorado the desert southwest. Nonetheless, thirty seven bears
(21:41):
and roughly one thousand miles means they were seeing a
bear roughly every twenty five miles. As ecology infers population demographics,
that translates to nearly four grizzly bears in every block
of ground ten miles by ten miles and a half
million square miles of the grizzly bears range in the
(22:03):
lower forty eight from California to the western edges of Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri,
and Iowa. Bar ecologists estimate that in the early eighteen hundreds,
some fifty six thousand grizzly bears ranged across the West.
(22:24):
The Americans Line transact missed a great deal of the
bird and animal riches of the West, which is why
Jefferson planned other scientific explorations and why the rest of
the nineteenth century featured new US expeditions into the West
every subsequent decade. Though tragically depressive, Meriwether Lewis was a
kind of self taught American Humboldt, a brilliant field naturalist
(22:49):
for whom evidence based science appeal more than religion or
supernatural explanations. So it wasn't just grizzly bears or prong horns,
coyotes or magpies. The Party in introduced to the new
scientific understanding of nature in the West. Among their many
other discoveries were big horned sheep. These animals bound from
(23:10):
rock to rock and stand apparently in the most careless
manner on the sides of precipices of many hundreds of feet.
They are very shy and are quick of both scent
and sight. The horns occupy the crown of the head
almost entirely, is how they put it. They also saw plains,
gray wolves, the shepherds of the buffalo herds, they said,
(23:32):
black tail deer a version of mule deer, Roosevelt's elk
like black tails, a Pacific Northwest variation, mountain goats, white
tailed jackrabbits, swift foxes, western badgers, numerous species of ground squirrels.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
And beyond the mammals, all of.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
These cutthroat and steelhead trout, white sturgeon, two new species
of rattlesnakes, horn toads. As for birds, harry chickens, four
new corvids, including western ravens, sage grouse, and five other
new species of grouse. Three new geese, including the lesser Canadian.
(24:11):
Five new species of woodpeckers, among them a western piliated
woodpecker and a woodpecker named after Meriwether Lewis. Three new jays,
including the pinion jay, a new nighthawk, and a new
poor will the western meadowlark, the western tanager, the western
mourning dove, the long billed curlew, three new gulls, and
(24:32):
two new terns, more prairie birds, the prairie horned lark,
and McCown's long spur, and among several other birds, the
whistling swan. When they return with their specimens and their
voluminous notes, and despite their having seen wild horses fat
as seals grazing the Colombian gorge, all hoped that the
(24:55):
West might hold living masdons or camels faded. The West
offered up a completely different America than the East, which
now seemed a many partly tropical and partly European, but
with no elephants anywhere, extinction appeared to be final even
in the west. In the West, the world still seemed dewy, fresh,
(25:22):
and American Eden. The naturalists who went there were ecstatic.
In Lewis and Clark's time, American universities were only barely
starting to turn out trained field naturalists. It's why no
real naturalists accompanied Lewis and Clark. Trained naturalists weren't long
in coming, but most were Europeans. Thomas Nuttall, for example,
(25:46):
arrived from Yorkshire in eighteen oh eight at the age
of twenty two, and at once came to the attention
of a prominent American professor of the natural sciences, Benjamin
Smith Barton of the University of Pennsylvania. Martin had been
Jefferson's advisor on natural sciences for the President's Western expeditions.
One of his students, doctor Peter Custis, as I'll relate
(26:08):
in another podcast, became the first American trained scientist to
explore the West. Barton became a Nutall advocate, though introducing
him to William McClure of the American Philosophical Society, who
nominated Nuttall for membership in the society. With patrons like these,
Nutdall got to explore across the West for the next
(26:31):
three decades. In eighteen eighteen and eighteen nineteen, not All
embarked on a natural history expedition to the edge of
the Southern Prairies. Nudall's route took him diagonally southeast to northwest,
across the Arkansas Territory, then westward as far as central Oklahoma,
and on south to the Red River and the border
(26:53):
of Spanish Texas. If you read Nutall's Southwestern Journal today,
it's clear he was naturalizing along the edge of that
great ecological change from east to west. The change made
a huge impression on almost everyone. Every traveler who entered
the Great Plains from the east had an experience like Nutdalls.
(27:16):
The ecotone that marked this ecological boundary sometimes changed the
country from east to west in no more than twenty
or thirty miles. In eighteen nineteen, Nutall travel right down
that seam from the present Tulsa area southward along the
western stretches of the Washitaw Mountains to the Red River,
moving in and out of prairie country like an immense
(27:39):
meadow covered with luxuriant herbage and beautifully decorated flowers, he said,
and he encountered there bison, of course, which were the
commonest mammal marker of the edge.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Of the prairie.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Then, in eighteen nineteen and eighteen twenty, a government expedition
led by Stephen Long explored the Colorado Front Range and
returned across the plains, thinking that they were examining one
of President Jefferson's targeted rivers in the west, the Red
River of the South. Long's naturalists included Edwin James Thomas Say,
(28:16):
and Say was the grandson of the famed eighteenth century
American naturalist John Bartram and painters Samuel Seymour and Titian Peel,
crossing today's Texas and Oklahoma plains, and they were actually
on the Canadian River rather than the Red They traveled
through what they called inconceivable numbers of herbivorous animals and
(28:39):
innumerable birds and beasts of prey. Herds of wild horses
five hundred strong surrounded them, and with disease epidemics still
suppressing Native American populations, the animals were also tamed that
they appeared wholly unaccustomed to the side of men. The
bisons and the wool moved slowly off to the right
(29:02):
and left, leaving a lane for the party to pass
through long road. Long's official report claimed that the western
plains seemed peculiarly adapted as a range for buffaloes, wild goats,
and other wild game, and he concluded that country was
best left just as they had found it. Seymour's and
(29:23):
Peel's paintings portraying the West as a paradise of animals
and landscapes, were the first visual representations of the inland
west the world ever saw.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
The accolades kept coming too.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Englishman John Bradbury, a romantic nature lover who accompanied fur
trade parties for safety, had never seen the like the buffaloes,
elks and antelopes had made paths which were covered with
grass and flowers. I have never seen a place, however,
embellished by art equal to this in beauty on John
(30:00):
Kirk Townsend, who accompanied Nuddall with a fur trading party
up the Platte River in eighteen thirty four, thought the
pronghorn in particular one of the most beautiful animals I
ever saw. As it bounds over the plain, it seems
scarcely to touch the ground, so exceedingly light and agile
are its motions. On crossing south pass over the Rockies,
(30:23):
Townsend wrote, I never before saw so great a variety
of birds in the same space. All were beautiful, and
many were new to me. He sent his collections of
Western birds, like the Townsend solitaire, for example, and his
animal skins to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
(30:45):
As travelers moved from the East and began to enter
the west, Bison, elk, pronghorns, coyotes, and prairie dogs were
always the new animals whose presence coincided with the first
appearances of a grassland dominated landscape. Americans in the nineteenth
century were fascinated sensory observers of these changes, and repeatedly
(31:07):
recorded a predictable progression. Explorer John C. Fremont's journey Westford
from Chateaus landing on the Missouri in the year eighteen
forty two captured it. A month's travel up the Kansas River.
As the woodlands opened in the sweeping grassy prairies, Fremont
began to report pronghorns running.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Over the hills.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
The next day he noticed that artemisia or sagebrush had
become common. The day after that, elk began to appear
on the river. Within a week after that they were
among the buffalo herds, and at that point wolves in
great numbers surrounded us during the night, howling and trotting about.
(31:50):
It had become clear that the task of a close
examination of the West and describing all these brand new
species to Western science was going to take decades, and indeed,
with expirations by topographical engineers like Fremont in the eighteen forties,
William Emery Marveling at the Desert Southwest on the Mexican
(32:13):
Boundary Survey in the eighteen fifties, John Wesley Powell's The
Sense of the Grand Canyon for the US Geological Survey
in the eighteen seventies, and the work of Seehart Miriam's
Biological Survey in the eighteen nineties. This was a scientific
task that took up the whole of the nineteenth century.
(32:35):
By its end, though science and the American government had
laid out for the world not just the Great Plains,
but the landscapes and animal life of the whole of
the American West, the American publican just about everyone else
was bewitched. Despite all the change and all the loss,
that magical sense of the West has never yet gone away.
(33:00):
While of Stegner's timeless phrase, the region remains today a
geography of hope.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
In this episode, a lot of what you talk about
is euro Americans crossing this ecological gradient in the continent,
sort of the revelation of all these new species in
this unfamiliar beastiary. And you know, the the plains, right,
(34:02):
And I'm just curious what strikes me about that is
I had my own I mean, obviously it's like a
very different experience in two thousand and eight. But I
remember when I was twenty one getting in my truck
and driving west and having this that immersive experience and
watching the land change underneath your feet. Yeah, And I
(34:25):
know you grew up in Louisiana, and I wonder what
your personal journey was like for the first time crossing
into the West.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Well, I.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Had an absolute fascination with what was immediately to the
west of me because I grew up in northwestern Louisiana
and Cattle Parish, which is near Shreveport in Cattle Parish,
and my family had been in Louisiana for three hundred years,
(35:05):
and I knew that we had in our background, we
had stories still and when I was in graduate school,
I got to read about read actual accounts of some
of these people who were traders to the tribes up
the Red River, and so I kind of had this
sense of I had ancestors who had gone up the
(35:28):
Red River and gone into the West, and so I
was really fascinated with it. And as soon as my
parents would and I got a driver's license, and my
parents thought that I could be trusted to go overnight
or for a couple of nights. The first thing I
did in a car was to drive straight west, and
(35:51):
I only drove to I drove past Dallas and Fort Worth,
where the country really fort Worth it really begins to change,
or in what's called the Grand Prairie, and so it
really opens up. And I drove about as far west
I think as Wichita Falls or something, and then turned
(36:11):
up north into Oklahoma and drove through some of southern
Oklahoma up to Lawton, which is where the Comanches and
the Kiowas and the southern Cheyennes ended up, and also
the Caddos who had come out of the country where
I grew up, and then drove back to Louisiana. But
I've never gotten over the experience of that, and one
(36:34):
of the things that I've always remembered about it. Two
things I really remember about it at night was that
when the night fell, I was used to living in
a country where you couldn't see one hundred yards because
of the density of the forest, and when night fell,
I began to see the lights of towns that appeared
to be twenty thirty miles away, and I thought that
(36:57):
was tremendously exciting. And then the other thing that I
got to see at night was it looked like the
stars were bigger, polished. The night skies looked far more
vibrant than I was ever used to in Louisiana. So
in those ways, I mean, I didn't see many animals,
(37:19):
you know, and I was hoping to see prong horns
and prairie dogs, and I don't remember seeing very many animals.
But I got at least to see that change, that
ecological change, and I think that's been something magical for
people coming out of the East for a long time.
I think, you know, the Spaniards coming up from say
(37:40):
Mexico through the Chihuahuan Desert to Santa Fe or to California,
they didn't experience that kind of transformation. But going from
the East and entering the West for the first time,
I think it was really moving. So that's one of
the things I was trying to kind of describe in
this episode.
Speaker 4 (38:00):
Met this kid one time that had moved from Florida.
He was living on by Fort Myers, Florida, and he
moved to bos of Montana, and he was telling me
he didn't like it because it was such a big town.
And I said, this town is not a fraction size
of Fort Myers. He goes, but yeah, but you can
(38:21):
see it all in Fort Myers.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
You don't know how big it is. That's exactly it.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Yeah, you can see it, and you know, the ability
to see the world is to me a very really
powerful thing. I mean, you know, as I kind of
argued in this episode, and a lot of this comes
from my book American Serengetti, I mean, I think this
is kind of a genetic memory because I think this
(38:51):
humans we sort of emerged into who we were in
the open country of Africa, and I think we were
there for a very long time. I mean, you know,
I've even I'm convinced that this is true. I've never
really seen any scientific corroboration for it. But I think
the reason everybody sets the thermostat at seventy two degrees
(39:12):
or somewhere around seventy two degrees, whether you're in Edmonton
or you're down in Mexico City, is because we grew.
We come, in a evolutionary sense, from a place where
that was what we evolved to. Yeah, that was the
mean temptuary, that was what was comfortable to humans, and
so one of the things that enabled us to go
(39:32):
around the world was the invention of fire because we
could go to much colder places and keep it seventy
two degrees around the campfire. So yeah, I think that
there's a you know, beyond just staying warm or cooler
or whatever. There's a genetic memory of that kind of
open landscape that is pretty deep in US, and it
(39:54):
certainly has it moves me.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Where do you think of.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
When you when you imagine a a sort of baseline
for North American ecology. You know, there are people and
we've had some you know, you and I have some
exposure to folks at Colossal biosciences who are looking at
like an ecological baseline being pre human for North America,
(40:25):
meaning that the interest in like bringing back Willie mammoths
and other things. I tend to when I picture in
my mind the like what it ought to look like?
I always go to it ought to look like what
Lewis and Clark saw. J I mean like like it's
(40:47):
it seems achievable in some ways, in some places it's achievable.
It just seems like that if we're talking about what
was it like it was that day?
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Yeah, you know it was that.
Speaker 4 (41:00):
No, I'm there where do you where do you sit
on that?
Speaker 1 (41:04):
That's That's that's where I am too. And I when
I imagine, you know, the West is I ideally want
it to be, It's that world. And I think that's
one of the great things that the Lewis and Clark
expedition did for us is it gave us a mental
image of what the West was like before it really
(41:29):
was being degraded and and you know, just kind of eaten.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Away at the edges.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
And Lewis and Clark, I think they saw it at
a moment when it still was the country that you know,
Native people had been living in and had managed, and
that all those populations of wild creatures were still there
and still healthy. And so they give us an image
(41:59):
of what that was. I think that's part of the
fascination with Lewis and Clark. And it's only about three
decades later that it really starts coming unraveled, but man,
their image of it is a really powerful thing. Yeah,
that's the one for me and I. You know, so
Steve and I are both involved with colossal biosciences, and
(42:20):
they kind of have a plis to scene idea of
how they would like the world to look and I
would love.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
To see that.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
But you can kind of go to Africa, you know,
and see the Pleista scene. It still exists in places
like Kenya and Tanzania and South Africa. But this particular world,
it's the Lewis and Clark world, is really a special one.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
In this episode, you draw a lot on the descriptions
of naturalists who are experiencing this world for the first time,
and it strikes like, obviously Lewis wasn't a trained naturalist,
but his description of pronghorn moving, I think is probably
(43:06):
better than anything that I could imagine. I mean, that
sort of makes the hair on my next stand up.
But I wonder if you can just talk a little
bit about this whole genre of travel writing and sort
of where its strongest in terms of capturing what the
world looked like and where there are omissions or blind
(43:27):
spots in these in these naturalists they're headed west.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Well, I think that this kind of natural history travel
writing is one of the foundations of American literature. I mean,
I think you know you can certainly you can trace
it back to people like William Bartram, for example, who
with his book Travels, which he wrote in seventeen ninety
one was the first book written by an American that
(43:54):
really attracted the attention of you know, the European intellectual
and literary community and finally decide, well, these Americans, you know,
they may turn out to amount to something after all.
And I think that established a tradition, and you can
track it through time right into Edward Abbey.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Or somebody like that.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
I mean, it's and it appears in every decade through
most of American history. I mean from Thureau to Abbey
and then back to William Bartram in the seventeen nineties.
There's just a continuous threat of this. I think what
is distinctive a little bit about the American situation in
(44:35):
writing about the West, traveling to the West, writing about
all these animals they're seeing, adding them all to science,
to Western science, to Lenayan science, placing everything into a
family and a genus and creating a species, is that
(45:00):
it doesn't ever quite rise to the point of doing
what say physics was doing, which was coming up with
a big explanatory theory to sort of cover everything from
(45:20):
an apple falling on Newton's head to the Earth revolving
around the Sun and Jupiter's moons revolving around Jupiter, and
what they kept doing was just kind of adding more
pebbles to the pile, stacking the pebbles higher and higher
(45:40):
and higher. And then along comes somebody like Charles Darwin,
who is twenty five years old, is actually in college
in order to become an ordained minister, and happens to
get a gig on the USS Beagle and travels around
a lot of the world and comes back and has
an epiphany that no human being in history has ever had.
(46:05):
I suddenly understand. He realizes, at the age of about
twenty six or twenty seven, why there is such a
diversity of life on the planet. I understand how it works.
And that was always been to me when I've studied
American naturalists and all these people going west and writing
all these wonderful accounts like the Long Expedition account of
(46:29):
traveling through huge herds of bison and wild horses, and
the wolves and the bison just sort of move out
of the way unless you go through. I mean, I
love those descriptions, but they never none of the Americans
ever got to the point of understanding the big picture.
And you know, once Darwin publishes On the Origin of
species in eighteen fifty nine, and then certainly we began
(46:52):
to have whether you're an American or not, you begin
to have plenty of opportunity to start plugging your work
into this theory.
Speaker 4 (47:01):
But it's so funny that age, because he looks like
he was you see, he looks like he was born old.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Picture hard picture at twenty five. Well, you know, I mean,
we right, he does kind of. We always seehim, oh
as this scraggly haired old.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Guy and like the black wool. Yeah, he was boring,
But I mean.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
Part of it is that he waits for thirty five
years before he ever writes the damn book. And he
knows this all through the eighteen twenties, eighteen thirties, eighteen forties.
He knows how it all works. But he says, you know,
at one point he said, if I wrote about this,
it would be like committing murder, you know, I just
(47:41):
and then of course Wallace writes him a letter and says,
you know, I sort of come up with something. I'm
not sure what to call it. You know, Darwin had
already resolved on the idea of natural selection. I'm not
sure what to call it, but it looks like, to me,
this is how nature works.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
And that's when Darwin.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Decided, Okay, I've got to got to publish.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
Can't keep sitting on this.
Speaker 4 (48:03):
In your episode, you you talk about Lewis.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
And Clark.
Speaker 4 (48:09):
Coming out and just they're like they can't help with themselves,
but try to mix it up with grizzlies.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
They can't help.
Speaker 4 (48:15):
Like they see it and they're like, it's just we're
just gonna have to go over and shoot it.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (48:22):
Yeah, there's a there was a nez Perce man named
yellow Wolf. I told you I was gonna ask about
yellow Wolf, a nez pers Man named yellow Wolf who
after the nez Perce War and eighteen seventy seven, he
goes into Canada. Was sitting bowl and they go and
I don't.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
Know what we'd call it.
Speaker 4 (48:40):
They're like, Uhney, well, how would you describe when they
go into Canada? Well, the refugees, Yeah, to become refugees
and trying to escape the US military. Yeah, but some
of these of these hundreds of people that are up there,
young guys kind of trickle back down just to go
see what's going on, you know.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
Back where these live.
Speaker 4 (49:01):
And in this in this character yellow Wolf and a
couple of the young men to start filtering the way
back down down through the Great Plains and into the
rockies around the Bitterroot Mountains.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
But yellow Wolf will describe that.
Speaker 4 (49:16):
He had that same problem Lewis and Clark had, like
when he ran into a grizzly, he had to confront it,
but it was like a personal calling of his. He
he knew it was unusual that he had to confront it.
He had to go after it. It was like part
of his identity. That seems to like like that would
be anomalous, right, I mean, doesn't it seem like most
(49:37):
of the tribes and the Great Plains and Inner Mountain
West and you know.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Avoided the animals.
Speaker 4 (49:44):
Yeah, Like, is there a fair way to is there
like a fair way to sort of encapsulate what the
attitude was toward grizzly bears.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Well, I think the attitude, you know, it was in
some ways individualistic, as yellow Wolf's experiences kind of imply
there were some people who I think believe that in
order to establish your credentials as a warrior or a
potential leader of your people, I mean a grizzly taking
(50:12):
on a grizzly bear was equivalent to taking on someone
else in the battle, because this was an animal that
was equally dangerous.
Speaker 4 (50:21):
Well, so you do encounter tales like that.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
You do encounter that, You do encounter some tales like that,
you know, and even and I'll talk about this in
a later episode when I talk about the the Safaris
that you know, all these European elites began to take
in the West from the eighteen thirties on. They were
(50:45):
doing it in Africa at the same time too, and
they were going out on they called it prairie fever.
They would go out on the Great Plains.
Speaker 4 (50:52):
And being Randall felt that, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:56):
Every now and then.
Speaker 2 (50:57):
Yeah, prairie fever.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
So one of the things that they that some of
the people who had experiences in Africa prior to coming
to North America would do is they would equate a
battle with a grizzly bear as the same thing as
shooting a lion in Africa. And so if you took
on a lion in Africa and you won that contest,
(51:21):
then this was something in North America that was the equivalent.
So people actually did that, and I've got I'll tell
in a later podcast a really kind of funny story
about a guy who was determined to do that and
it didn't turn out quite the way he was hoping
that it would.
Speaker 4 (51:35):
But well, let me ask you. I was gonna say
the same thing in a different way, but it's a
different question. Just like today. Just like today, in grizzly
bear country, you can just go out and walk down
a trail, you know, do nothing wrong. There's a bear
and it's got a dead moose calf. You stumble into it.
(51:57):
Its response is, you know, to get you away from Yeah,
it hits you, maybe bites you, and if it goes
wrong for you, you're just dead.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Yep right.
Speaker 4 (52:08):
And and this bear didn't put any thought into it.
It took him ten seconds and he just was simply saying,
don't take my thing.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
Right.
Speaker 4 (52:17):
That had to be happening, Oh it did, you mean,
like it had to be a part of it had
to be a part of native life that you just
now and then stumbled into the wrong thing and people
got killed by grizzlies.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
Oh yeah, they did.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
I mean, so the you know, the Hugh Glass story
is one of the classic ones. That's the one that
they made into the Revenant, and that's one where it
obviously happened to a mountain man where he just happens
he's at the wrong place at the wrong time, and
he stumbles into a bear, and it becomes one of
the epic Western stories. I mean, I tell the story
(52:49):
in American Serengetti of one of these kind of events
happening in the eighteen twenties, a little earlier than Huglass
down in Colorado, where a bunch of guys out of
Arkansas and Louisiana who I'm convinced have no idea what
the hell of grizzly bear is. They make a camp
and cops of willows at the base of pretty close
(53:11):
to Pike's Peak. And while they're making camp, somebody lets
out a shout bear bear and this one guy and
this seems to be something fairly common in these grizzly
bear encounters.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
I mean, this is a group of twenty five or
thirty people.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
The bear singles out one guy and goes after this
one guy, and this guy cannot get away. He climbs
up a tree and the bear drags him out of
the tree, and finally they manage the other other guys
in the group managed to kill the bear.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
I mean he's a big old male.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
And the guy that the bear has been going after,
you know, I mean, he's still alive. And they all
sit around camp and ask it, so are you oky,
how are you doing? It looks like you're.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
Gonna You're gonna be okay.
Speaker 1 (54:03):
Man, that was incredible, and the guy says, nope, I
heard my skull break. I ain't gonna make it. And
as they sat around that night, they said, he got
quieter and quieter, and during the night one of the
guys got up and went over to check on him,
and they could see something running out of the side
(54:23):
of his head where the bear had only one canine left,
but that one canine had penetrated his skull and by
morning he had died. But that kind of thing where
you just happened and don't really have any idea what's
going on, you know, I mean, Lewis and Clark were saying, damn,
there's a bear. Let's you know, let's get five or
(54:44):
six guys and.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
You hold your fire.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
Yeah, but this was happening to people where they had
no they were just stumbling into.
Speaker 4 (54:52):
The experience, and presumably it had to happen to Native Americans.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
Oh yeah, there's no doubt it did.
Speaker 4 (54:57):
Yeah, well Dan, thanks again man, look forward to talking
about the next show.
Speaker 1 (55:02):
Ye.
Speaker 2 (55:02):
It's been fun, fun with you guys. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
M M m
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