July 15, 2025 • 53 mins
America’s pronghorn antelope has long struck observers as a beautiful feature of western landscapes, but as an enigma. Why does it run so fast? Why can’t it jump obstacles? And for those who really know its biography, why did its population fall from 15 million to a mere 5,000 over the course of a single century? This episode answers all those questions by arguing that the pronghorn is an American original who, like us, is the sole remaining member of a large, ancient family of animals. And that it seems enigmatic only because it is one of the few survivors of America’s Pleistocene extinctions, with behaviors strongly shaped by the vanished world to which it evolved.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Since Americans encountered the beautiful Western prong horn, We've struggled
to understand an animal that looked like a gazelle but
couldn't jump, could outrun all its predators by twenty miles
per hour, yet like bison, was on the cliff of
extinction by nineteen hundred. I'm Dan Flores and this is
the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck. Still
(00:25):
in barrel. Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time
for the season that calls us home. A portion of
every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands,
waters and wildlife, enjoy responsibly survivors from a lost world.
(01:00):
From the accounts of all the Indians I have seen,
it is probable there may be a species of antelope
near the headwaters of Red River. Those words were written
by a young Virginia named Peter Custis, who from Louisiana
was taking a wistful look up the Red River of
(01:20):
the South in the year eighteen oh six. I'll have
much more to say in the next episode about Custis
and why he was on the edge of the West
that early in the nineteenth century. But the Louisiana purchase
had just doubled the size of the United States, and
Custus's wonderment about a likely African type antelope roaming the
(01:42):
horizontal Yellow Prairies was just the kind of story literary
Americans were hearing from their native Spanish and French predecessors
in the West. And while accounts of unicorns, giant horned serpents,
and mountains made of pure salt in the West were
like the early stories of mermaids in New England waters,
(02:05):
the antelopes that Custus heard about were very real. I've
long been drawn to pronghorns, the more accurate name for
America's gorgeous striped western antelopes, at least since driving a
dusty two track along the Powder River of Wyoming many
years ago and watching a young buck pronghorn running at
(02:29):
fifty miles an hour clocked by the speedometer alongside me.
Suddenly crossing the road in front of my bronco at speed.
He turned straight towards a barbed wire fence, but rather
than jumping over it, more quickly than I could register
the move, he turned his body sideways and darted between
(02:52):
the strands. The impact of thwanging explosion of white hairs
drifting in the wind as he trotted off, daydreaming of, well,
what do prong horns daydream about? As my panic for
him subsided, I decided I ought to try to find
out when Americans finally made it to the Great Plains
(03:24):
at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We call these
fabled animals antelopes for good reason, since in size, form,
and speed they resemble no other creatures quite so much
as the antelopes and gazelles of Africa. But prong horns
are not true antelopes. The antelope capri day antelope goats
(03:46):
emerged as a distinctly American family of animals roughly twenty
five million years ago, but paleontologists still don't agree on
their earlier provenance. They may be anciently related to the Servidae,
the deer family, but there are some modern biologists who
think pronghorns closest living relatives are in the family Giraffiday,
(04:10):
the giraffes whose legs resemble pronghorn legs. Whatever their origins
in ancient America, modern pronghorns are actually.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Just like us.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
There are species that today represents the sole remaining survivor
of a large family of animals and thus a rarity
in nature. Fossil records in North America show that the
antelope Caapridae actually consisted of two major, big subfamilies. The
(04:41):
earlier of these subfamilies included several species of graceful, dainty
ungulates possessed of permanent, multi branched, antler like horns. This
group of creatures was extinct by the end of the
Miocene around five point three million years ago, but they
gave rise the other subfamily, which soon replaced them on
(05:03):
the grasslands that were then starting to emerge in Western America.
This subfamily of larger antelope goats were high speed runners,
but with quite different horns made around a deciduous sheath,
with some versions sporting four horns and others as many
as six. There was even a dwarfed four horned version
(05:27):
not much larger than a jack rabbit, so this quite
real version of a jackalope still spreaded across the Great
Plains as late as ten thousand years ago. Occasionally, four
horned fawns are still born to pronghorns as one genetic
reminder among a great number. As we're about to see
(05:49):
of the pronghorn's deep and varied past Antelo capra Americana.
Our present day pronghorn from this evolutionary family, dating back
twenty five million years, is now the last living representative
of evolution's wild genetic experimentation, with America's answer to the
gazelles of Africa. Back in nineteen ninety seven, a biologist
(06:19):
named John Byers, who had spent years studying pronghorn behavior
and natural history on western Montana's National Bison Range, stepped
up to answer most of my questions about the mysterious
nature of the American pronghorn. Buyers's provocative argument finally made
clear much about an animal that had seemed inexplicable to
(06:41):
its admirers. Many of us had noted the pronghorn's apparent disinclination.
It's probably not a true inability, but a disinclination to
jump fences. Why would a creature as fleet and athletic
prefer to go through barbed wire fences rather than over them?
With long suspected pronghorn evolution as the answer, and Buyers agreed,
(07:05):
a grasslands creature shaped by the open country niche it occupied,
pronghorns never experienced any selective pressures to be able to
jump obstacles that produced the kind of drama I'd witnessed
in Wyoming. But unfortunately, it could also become a maladaptation
in a fenced modern world, and one that played a
(07:27):
critical role in pronghorn history over the past one hundred
and fifty years. Pronghorns are one of only a handful
of great plain species that managed to survive the epic
extinction crash that ended the Pleisisain ten thousand years ago,
a best shary simplification that still stands as the most
(07:49):
profound ecological alteration in America since the extinction of the
dinosaurs in the biography of a species like us or
prong horns. How however, the Pleistocene was only a few
heart beats in the past. So what if much about
the behavior of modern prong horns has little to do
(08:10):
with their present circumstances.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
As we find them.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
The primary predators of prong horns for the past ten
thousand years we know, have been wolves and coyotes, neither
of which is capable flat out of running much more
than about forty to forty five miles an hour. Prong Horns,
on the other hand, are the ferraris of the American
natural world. Their delicate bones in frames and remarkably low
(08:35):
body fat keep them light, while broad nostrils and a
huge windpipe deliver turbocharged oxygen to their outsize lungs and
heart pedal to the metal. They top eighty five kilometers
per hour at a dead run, some fifty five miles
an hour for the one hundred and twenty pound males
(08:55):
and as high as sixty five to seventy miles per
hour for the low females. That's as fast as an
African cheetah. Prong Horns can also run at ninety percent
of top end for more than two miles. Like horses,
to detect predators at great distances, they too evolve gigantic eyes.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Prong Horn behavior features other oddities.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Like Thompson's gazelles and other African ugults pursued by big cats.
Prong Horns have a powerful inclination towards a form of
grouping known as the selfish herd, with much of their
expression of dominance and rank focused on their physical position.
Inside these herd groups, the lower ranking, less dominant animals
(09:44):
get pushed to the outer margins, where if prong horns
were on the African veild, the low ranking members would
be in much greater danger from predatory attacks. But as adults,
American prong horns have no predators at all because of
the impossible speed. Once they're grown, pronghorns are subject to
predation only as fonts. If a prong worn fund survives
(10:08):
to six or eight months of age, it will join
all other surviving fauns in living to the ripe old
age of eleven or twelve years old. Yet adult pronghorns
still persist in grouping and still fight for position in
those groups, as if predation somehow mattered to them. So why,
(10:29):
in a world where gray wolves and coyotes and maybe
occasionally a mountain lion are their threats, do prong horns
express so much protective excess. The question John Byers posed
then was this, what if most of their physical characteristics
and behavior are actually adaptations to a lost world that
(10:52):
winked out around them ten thousand years ago, leaving pronghorns
still living out their existence among us reacting to a
world of ghosts. The fascinating question, then, is whether the
whole suite of pronghorn behaviors, and not just their lack
of jumping ability has to do with the lost world
(11:13):
of the Pleistocene Great Plains. Prog Warns emerged in their
modern form at a time when the American Planes was
the scene of one of the great assemblages of savannah
step creatures anywhere on Earth, a more diverse collection of
animals than present today in the Serengetti or the Massaimara.
Along with the elephants and longhorned bison and enormous herds
(11:35):
of horses, along with bands of numerous types of camels
and deer, and of course elk and prong horns, the
Pleistocene planes featured an array of truly formidable predators that
hunted and scavenged. Among all those millions of ungulates, prog
Warns then spent the better part of four million years
perfecting their ability to survive. Where large and fast predators
(12:00):
looked hungrily at them over bright teeth. There were grass
aisle active and aggressive short faced bears. The smilodons are
sabertoothed cats that attacked mammoth calves, a steadily changing lineup
of wolf and coyote packs. There were jaguars and cougars
(12:21):
along with the steppe lion, a far larger version of
the African lion, as predators of the fastest grazers, the
horses and prong horns. There was a slender, limbed lion
size running cat known as the scimitar cat, along with
a particularly rapid and legging American hunting hyena. And there
(12:43):
were two species of large American false cheetahs, cats from
the same evolutionary line that produced cougars, but with elongated,
curved spines, long legs, and wide nostrils for gulping air
in open country pursuit are in rock slide ambushes. These
(13:03):
vanished creatures of the ancient planes, at least so biologists
like Buyers now argue, however long ago they passed the
veil of extinction, or why pronghorns seem mysterious and almost
alien to us now, why they struck early observers like
Lewis and Clark as possessing a speed that resemble more
the flight of birds than anything else. Pronghorns are at
(13:26):
once breathtakingly beautiful yet outrageously overbuilt relics that have outlasted
the conditions that created them. They offer almost our only
remaining glimpse of the American Pleistocene. Like most wild ungulates
(13:49):
then are now, pronghorns follow a yearly routine that varies
considerably by the seasons. At the conclusion of the September rut,
the exhausted bucks, which would once have been prime targets
for predators in that condition, disguised themselves by mimicking the females.
They shed the outer husk of their horns, and they
(14:12):
joined the female herds. Since the Pleistocene, winter has been
a time of migration for northern pronghorns. A few years ago,
with a friend who lives in Jackson Hole, I photographed
the famous Sublet pronghorn herd, which summers in Grand Teta
National Park but still migrates more than two hundred miles
south to near Green River, Wyoming in winter. This inclination
(14:37):
to migrate before severe winter storms was adaptive in the wild,
but couple with their inclination not to jump obstacles, ultimately
reproduced tragedy in the late nineteenth century, when legendary winters
in the eighteen eighties sent pronghorns southward by the thousands
into a new world of barbed wire in the spring.
(15:00):
From a year old until they're three, young pronghorn bucks
segregate themselves into bachelor bands and spend most of their
time in all male groups. There, they express group position
dominance just as females do, but they also spar and
practice moves they will later use in earnest. Around three
(15:21):
years of age, pronghorn males become solitary for most of
the spring and summer, during which time, at least in
most pronghorn country, they set up territories of perhaps one
hundred and fifty acres whose perimeter they sent mark and
will use to cloister a harem of females to hide
from other males during the rut. In other circumstances, male
(15:43):
pronghorns protect harems of females, but without defending a territory.
Rather than our prime resource location, pronghorn territories actually seem
to be merely tactical space for defending females. Pronghorn bucks
fight over females too, in violent, quick and quite often mortal,
(16:04):
as high as fifteen percent of the encounter's fights. Reproduction
success is the prime directive, and some prong horned bucks
win the lottery. Others spend their entire lives without ever
siring any offspring at all. Then there is female selective behavior.
Female prong horns, which reach sexual maturity at eighteen months
(16:28):
of age and give birth every spring for the rest
of their lives, find themselves in harems that male pronghorns
judiciously protect during the brief September mating season. During the rut,
females repeatedly break away from their cloistered harems, however, joining
the other harems of other males and inviting males to.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Compete for them. What exactly are they looking for?
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Apparently they're setting up contests of stamina, speed, and resolve
but between various males and observing the outcome before surrendering
themselves up to be bred by the winner, the pronghorn
male who demonstrates his genetic fitness by running faster and
longer than his rivals. But if you're already almost twenty
(17:17):
miles an hour faster than your fastest predators, why would
females set up games of natural selection and choose who
will impregnate them based on fitness as demonstrated by speed,
Because apparently you never know when American cheetahs are going
to show up on the planes again. Prong worn females
(17:40):
have evolved another strategy that's interesting with respect to what
it says about both past and present. After a remarkably
long gestation period of some two hundred and fifty two days,
they give birth not to single offspring, but to litters,
specifically litters of two fawns every spring, and they do
(18:03):
this throughout their reproductive lives. Twining, as well as the
week's long hiding of fawns which lie motionless and silent
for most of the day, are clearly responses to serious predation.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
They too, probably.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Emerge as adaptations to the distant past, when pronghorns lived
in a world where they.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Were prey for three or four different predators.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Today, it means that coyotes, the principal predators of pronghorn
fawns for probably the last million years, are able to
pull down as much as fifty percent of a pronghorn
fawn crop without appreciably affecting pronghorn populations with litters, and
with their extremely high adult survivability rates, pronghorns were anciently
(18:52):
prepared to survive the culling of even so efficient a
predator of fawns as coyotes. But a mother pronghorn will
attack and fight a coyote to keep it from her faunds.
Pronghorn bucks don't defend faunds. Some biologists argue that this
is another leftover behavior from the Pleistocene, when fast predators
(19:13):
scattered groups of pronghorns across wide territories, and a male
pronghorn thus could never be sure that a fawn it
defended was its own. As cutschewing rumnants capable of processing
forbes and shrubs, pronghorns demonstrate yet another adaptation to the
ancient savannah ecology of Western America. For maybe four hundred
(19:36):
thousand years, pronghorns had been evolving a mutualistic relationship with
the bison herds. Bison i had survived the Pleistocene extinctions
and had increased dramatically in their wake, in numbers that
likely range somewhere between twenty and thirty million animals, depending
(19:56):
on climate cycles. So waves of bison and waves of
pronghorns cropping the same country produced mutually beneficial results. Cropping
the grasses and ignoring the often poisonous species like local weed,
rabbit brush, and sagebrush. Bison grazing encouraged forbes and shrubs
(20:19):
in their wake, coming along after the bison herds and
concentrating instead on the flowering plants and shrubs. Pronghorn browsing
shifted the advantage back to the grasses. Both preferred succulent
vegetation sprouting up after recent fires, which was a fact
that Native people long noted. So deep time history created
(20:47):
an entirely unique situation for pronghorn antelope. Since pronghorns had
out survived almost all their predators, had ended up with
few competitors for the often toxic shrubs and forbes they ate.
We're read everywhere there were vast horizontal planes, and they
increased into the millions. The writer Ernest Thompson's Seaton famously
(21:09):
estimated that in eighteen hundred, the moment in time when
pronghorns were in the verge of discovery by formal Western science,
there were as many as forty million of them in
the West. More recent estimates have advanced original figures of
something like fifteen million.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
What we can.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Probably say is that on the Great Plains, where there
ranges overlap most precisely, pronghorn numbers very likely matched those
of buffalo.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
We've long thought of the historic era.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Great Plans as the Great Bison Belt. In truth, it
was just as much the Great pronghorn Savannah. Their range
doesn't appear to advanced eastward beyond the ninety seventh meridian,
though at least in places like Texas and Mexico, and
it doesn't seem to have gone beyond the ninety third already,
and farther north in Iowa and Minnesota. But they were
(22:05):
found westward all the way to Baja California and into
eastern Oregon and Washington. Southward on the continent, prong horns
were able to colonize the desert grasslands of Mexico all
the way down to the vicinity of Mexico City at
twenty degrees latitude, considerably south of where bison ever ventured.
(22:26):
Although prong horns can derive adequate water from the plants
they browse in optimal wet years, they do need to
drink about three and a half quarts of water a
day during hot weather, which limited their numbers in the
Great Basin the Mohave, Chihuahuan, and Sonoran deserts. Abundant and
(22:47):
widespread as they were, prong worns attracted the attention of
Indian hunters from the very beginning of human arrival. There
a butchered prong horn remains in some of the Clovis
and Folksome archaeola logical sites, so at least some paleo
hunters did take the occasional pronghorn to vary a diet
of mammoth and bison cuts.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
But it took fifteen or twenty.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Pronghorns to equal the caloric possibilities of a single giant bison,
and since prong worn flesh was so very lean, prog
worns commonly ranked well down the list of pursued prey
among Southwestern peoples. In fact, pronghorns ranked lower than rabbits,
even though it took sixteen jack rabbits to match the
(23:31):
edible flesh of a prong worn Native people, from hundreds
of generations of experience with pronghorns knew how to exploit
their weaknesses and utilize pronghorned leather horns and hoofs for
a variety of purposes. One aspect of pronghorn natural history
that made them vulnerable to Indian hunters was their disinclination
(23:53):
to leave their home ranges. Parts of the West yet
show fading evidence of ancient pronghorn correct such as the
Fort Bridger trap site in southwestern Wyoming, where local herds
evidently were enclosed and pushed to run in circles until
they were exhausted and could be clubbed to death. Another
(24:14):
technique involved v shaped pairs of fence wings, often miles long,
made from piled up sagebrush, that sent stampeded pronghorns into
corrals or pits. There are also references from a variety
of sources of horse mounted planes indians engaging in the
kind of pronghorns surround They often used for bison, again
(24:37):
with the goal of getting a pronghorn band to run
in circles until the spent and stumbling animals could be
ridden down on horseback. According to the writer Richard Irving Dodge,
when pronghorns collected into the thousands in wintertime, some tribes
even used rifles in pronghorn hunts from horseback, reacting as
(24:59):
if pursued by editors. The antelope crowded together in their fright,
Dodge wrote, and thus were easily shot down. When bison
were scarce, planes hunters preferred antelope to deer because you
could take an entire herd of prong horns at once.
Because local herds could be completely extirpated, by mass techniques.
(25:20):
Like these, Indian hunters often spared some animals in order
to preserve the herd stock, whatever the technique. Unlike bison
or elk, prong horns butchered out as all protein and
very little precious fat. Their lean body mass may be
the reason no tribe ever bothered to domesticate prong horns,
(25:41):
which are actually easier to tame than any African antelope.
Among Europeans, prong horns were first encountered by numerous Spanish
travelers on the Southern Plains and in California, where they
were known as barndos, and by French travelers to the
(26:01):
Great Plains, who called them cool de Blanc. Francisco Hernandez's
sixteen fifty one Natural History of Mexico described and even
provided an initial illustration of the western pronghorn, But like
so many charismatic animals from the American West, pronghorns did
(26:22):
not come to the official notice of Enlightenment age science
until the time of the Jeffersonian expeditions into the New
Louisiana Purchase. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark collected the type
specimen of the species for Western science in eighteen o five,
Lewis and Clark made more than two hundred pronghorn entries
in their journals, although they found the animals like elk
(26:45):
and deer far less numerous west of the continental divide.
Back east, George Ord of Philadelphia Naturalists and Ornithologists, who
was working up many of the Lewis and Clark specimens,
published a science to description and the Lenaean name for
the pronghorn in eighteen eighteen. Ord recognized that, despite their
(27:07):
similarities to African antelopes and gazelle's, pronghorns were actually unrelated
to any existing family of animals that he could find.
So Antilope capra day the family name he devised, and
Antilope capra the genus Ord fashion for an animal that
seemed to combine the traits of both antelopes and goats
(27:30):
have stood ever since. One of the best selling books
of the West in the nineteenth century was the trader
naturalist Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies, first published in
eighteen forty six. This is what greg had to say
about the pronghorn. That species of gazelle, known as the antelope,
(27:53):
is very numerous upon the high plains, This beautiful animal
is most remarkable for its fleetness, not bounding like the deer,
but skimming over the ground as though upon skates. The
flesh of the antelope is but little esteemed, though consequently
no great efforts are made to take them. Being as
(28:14):
wild as fleet the hunting of them is very difficult
as well. The commercial market hunt of wildlife in the West,
though and more of that to come in future episodes,
had been underway in earnest since at least the eighteen twenties,
but so long as beaver lasted or bison roamed in
(28:35):
numbers enough to produce robes, hides, and tongs, and as
long as wolves and coyotes remained targets of traps and
poisoned bait, the market hunt left pronghorns largely alone.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Prong Horns had already reaped.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
The whirlwind in mining areas like California, where they were
corralled and killed to feed miners, but was not until
bison numbers began to drop that prong horns finally started
to attract attention in the slaughter of Western animals for profit.
With more than five thousand professional hunters in the West
(29:11):
in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. Once every last
buffalo had been pursued to ground, hunters looked to see
what they might turn their guns on for a final
killing spree. Big horned sheep in the bad lands lasted
only a handful of years, and those in the mountains
only a handful more. Elk and even deer had mostly
(29:35):
fled the open country by that time to the safety
of the mountains. In the eighteen eighties, only two primary
charismatic animals remained on the Great Plains, wild horses and pronghorns.
The horses would get caught and sold overseas buyers whenever
Europeans were involved in wars her Brother the nineteen twenties,
(29:56):
get rounded up as a source of dog food for
the American pet industry, or they were simply shot down
by cowboys as nuisances. But prong horns had evolved on
the Great Plains, they had survived fearsome predators, they'd lived
through the pleistosine extinctions. Erasing them from America was going
to require some effort. Naturally, the market hunt, though, was
(30:20):
up to the task. There were multiple causes for what
began to happen to pronghorns homesteading steadily tore up the
prairie and prong horn habitat. Ranchers overstocked the planes with
cattle and sheep that undermined vegetation. Prong horns depended on
the new barbed wire fences, demarketing a West that was
fast becoming private property went straight to the prong horns
(30:44):
evolutionary weakness, fences preventing the herds from migrating and from
escaping winter blizzards. Without bison, the trump down the snow,
prong horns couldn't get at the plants they ate anymore,
add fences to block their migrations, and the horrific Western
winners of the eighteen eighties devastated them, and an event
(31:07):
that became all too common. Homesteaders in the Texas Panhandle
and the winner of eighteen eighty two discovered more than
fifteen hundred prong horns blown like a deck of cards
against a curb, trapped and piled many feet high against
a barbed wire fence. Even hard bitten homesheads were horrified
(31:28):
by that. Then there was the market hunt. The generally
poor opinion of pronghorned leather and meat had long kept
prong horns out of the rifle sights of men who
killed animals for money. But with everything else gone and
a deathly silence beginning to fall across the West, market
hunters finally turned their rifles on prong horns, and the
(31:51):
story became all too familiar. What had once been millions
of wild creatures fell for a pittance in return. Winter
concentrations of prong horns around the Black Hills got slaughtered.
In two or three seasons, a hunter in California killed
five thousand of them for their hides. When a drought
drove almost all the prong horns in the area to
(32:14):
a few remaining water holes, hunters, desperate to keep their
market lifestyle going, sold pronghorn meat to butchers in Kansas
for two to three cents a pound. In eighteen seventy three,
an Iowa firm shipped some thirty two thousand pronghorn and
deer skins via railroad from the plains, barely making a
(32:38):
dollar apiece for all the effort of hunting, skinning, and shipping.
When George byrd Grennell, the Great Conservationist, alerted future President
Teddy Roosevelt to the impact of market hunting, a step
that led to the formation of the Boon and Crocket
Club to protect American game animals. One of the victims
(32:59):
Grenelle mentioned was the pronghorn that put prong horns before
an influential group, but by the time Roosevelt was president,
pronghorn numbers had dropped frighteningly low. In eighteen hundred, there
may have been fifteen million prong horns in the West,
as I mentioned, but in eighteen ninety nine, biologist Vernon Bailey,
(33:22):
crossing one hundred miles of the Texas Panhandle, counted a
mere thirty two in what had once lay near the
center of their range. A decade later, the New York
Zoological Society estimated that fewer than five thousand of these
twenty five million year old natives of America were left.
(33:47):
Rescuing them from almost certain extinction required cooperation between the
states in the West, which Roosevelt facilitated, along with pronghorn
stocking in Yellowstone and on the National Wildlife Refuge. Is
that Teddy Roosevelt was creating. Two lucky breaks helped the pronghorns, though,
and one was the refuges which the Boone and Crocket
(34:08):
Club and the American Bison Society stocked with remnant animals.
The other break was evolutionary good fortune. In a nation
where economics trumped everything as four rather than grass eaters,
prong horns didn't compete with cattle and only marginally with sheep,
(34:30):
so Western livestock associations, if grudgingly, became tolerant of them. Today,
the United States and Canadian population of prong horns hovers
around seven hundred thousand animals, half of them in the
state of Wyoming, with another twelve hundred in Mexico. A
series of highway overpasses now allows some of them to
(34:52):
continue their winter migrations, and as one of the original
Western animals tapped for sport hunting, pronghorns are now privileged
in a way that a lot of other creatures are not.
I am still transfixed, though by a moment in Western
history I once came across when among all Western animals
(35:13):
three ancient Americans, wild horses, coyotes, and pronghorns were the
last holdouts remaining. This was in April of eighteen eighty four,
and it appeared in a letter written by a cowboy
named George Wolforth, who was riding his horse up over
(35:33):
the rim of West Texas Yellow House Canyon, about where
the city of Lubbock now stands. Wolforth described a scene
that seared itself into his memory and into mine too.
As far as we could see, he wrote, there were
only antelopes and mustangs grazing in the waving.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
Sea of grass.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
The whole tableau, he went on, rendered misty and unreal
by the mirage that hovered over the plains. These were
the sole survivors of the big animals of the Great Plains.
Almost all the rest had suffered extinction or extirpation, or
(36:18):
had been driven into the mountains across the previous thirty years.
But even this moment was brief, merely a romantic thing
to hold onto in the mind, truly a mirage.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Dan, I think one of the things when you read
primary sources from the Lewis and Clark era forward, a
lot of times I'm struck by animals not being where
I expect them to be, or at least where I
wouldn't have expected them to be before I knew better.
But grizzlies and salt Dakota grizzlies out on the plains,
(37:10):
big horns dominating Elk country, Elk out on the prairie.
You know, it seems like they're all familiar animals, but
there's always sort of there's like something about it that
doesn't line up with our present day awareness of the
animals around us. But pronghorn are the exception to that
(37:31):
general rule. And here I think you yeah, I mean
a prong horn is a prong horn is a prong horn,
And I guess it's it's striking to me, but you
make a strong case why it's deeply rooted in their
genetics and in their evolutionary history.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
I mean, these are animals that come from specifically from
North American evolution for twenty five million years, and so,
you know, and prong horns are like us, they're the
sole remaining representative of what was at one time really
big in their case, a couple of different subfamilies of animals,
(38:13):
many of them with multiple horns, and some of them
with horns unlike the present day animal that weren't deciduous
but were solid like antlers. And so it's a it's
kind of a remarkable thing to me. The most remarkable
aspect of the prong horns story is how long we
(38:37):
tried to figure them out. You know, I mean, we
just couldn't quite. I mean, everybody knew, okay, they won't
jump fences, and that's probably because they evolved on the planes.
But you know, on the other hand, Thompson's gazelles, you know,
jumped like crazy in Africa, showing I think what they're
doing is starting to show their fitness, so that the
(38:58):
cheetah that's after the goes after one that's stumbling along
or something. But prong horns never they never developed that ability,
and the inability or disinclination to jump over things really
kind of set them in a bad situation when the
West started being basically covered with barbed wire fences because
(39:22):
a lot of them ended up, you know, because they
migrated in front of winter storms. That was another thing
about their long term evolution that they would pile up
against those fences. But you know that biologist John Buyers,
who about twenty five years ago was working on prong
horns in the Montana National Bison Refuge. I mean, he's
(39:44):
the one who kind of figured all this out, all
these inexplicable parts of their natural history, you know, starting
with one of the damn things, why are they capable
of running sixty five miles an hour when anything that's
chasing them can't run more than about forty or forty five.
I mean, what's the explanation for the excessive speed? And
(40:07):
what he came up with, of course, was that with
prong horns, we're getting to witness and it's really kind
of the only animal that we're getting to see do
this we're getting to witness applies to seeing animal that's
still through its natural selection ten thousand years ago. It's
still doing the kinds of things that would have enabled
it to succeed when there were fast running cheetahs and
(40:28):
aenas and things chasing them. And so it's a you know,
it's an animal that's kind of living in its head
in a world of ghosts.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
And I think one thing when I look, especially having
grown up in the East, when I look at pronghorn,
I think to myself, that doesn't look like it belongs here.
It doesn't look like anything else. It looks like it
should be in Africa, when in fact it is the
the animal of all the ones that I know.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Today that has the deepest roots.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Yeah, I mean, I think it is. It's twenty five
million years back, as you know, and of course we
still have them. I mean, passenger pigeons go back fifteen
million years here, but we don't have them anymore. But
this is a creature that goes back a long way,
and so it's really kind of it's as America. And
this is another kind of mind bender about all this
(41:18):
deep time evolution. It's as American almost as horses, which
evolved here fifty six million years ago, you know. And
so in the case of prong horns, they managed to
get through the plastaink sanctions and survive, and horses, obviously,
while they survived elsewhere around the world, they didn't survive here.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
But those are the two to me that have the
deepest time.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
The other really deep time animals like camels, they were
about forty five million years old, and of course they
didn't they didn't make it.
Speaker 5 (41:52):
Speaking of deep antiquity, you had to comment and you
just touched on it again a second ago. You had
to comment in your in your show and mention it
now where you said, like us, they're the only one left.
And it was fighting that really struck me. It hadn't
occurred to me, But I'm often find myself explaining to
visitors who come out. We're driving around looking at wildlife.
(42:12):
I'll explain to him, I kind of get into like
what it means that they're the only to be the
only member like of your genus, and to have me
you came like it's hard to even find a relative right.
And I never thought I'm gonna start saying when I
do that little spiel, I'm gonna start saying, like us
(42:33):
like this, you can go like, there's this thing, there's
a chimpanzee.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
Oh, that's probably Bob. As close as close as we're
gonna get.
Speaker 5 (42:43):
But I made the comment in our we did an
outdoor cookbook, and in the introduction of the outdoor cookbook
I made I made a comment that at the right
place and time, you know, in the Middle East, southern Spain, whatever,
at the right place and time, it would have been
possible for a human to have to see a fire
(43:05):
and the need to also and see figures sitting around
a fire at night, and you would need to wonder,
I wonder what species of human that is, which one
of us that is?
Speaker 2 (43:18):
It was just like so hard to picture, I know.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
I mean, there's I read somewhere several years ago that
at one point in time, there may have been as
many as eight different human species coexisting in Africa, and
I think it was Africa. I don't think that many
made it to the Middle East or further north, but
as many as eight different ones, So I mean, wow,
(43:42):
you know, you really there's actually I saw a movie
on I think it was on Netflix. It was on HBO,
I think, and I don't remember the name of it,
but it's basically was a movie about this group of
anatomically modern humans Homo sapiens, who are traveling across the
landscape and they camp out in woods one night and
(44:04):
some group attacks them and steals one of their you know,
one of their children. And so the father and a
couple of other guys of this group and I think
of female, maybe the mother of the child too, they
track this other band and when they find them, they're
not Homo sapiens. They are some other species, you know,
(44:25):
and they're standing looking in the cave and what in
the hell? Yeah, So that was that was possible in
our past. It obviously was possible in the programing past,
but not.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
For either one of us anymore. You know.
Speaker 5 (44:40):
One time, when I was working on a book project,
I spent some time with an organization that was then
called the Buffalo Field Campaign. I remember you remember because
we had a mutual friend when I was a student
of yours.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
Dan.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Yeah, there was kid in our class that.
Speaker 5 (44:56):
Was was involved with Buffalo Field Campaign. And of course
that is a buffalo being a term that has fallen
out of favor and it's sort of taken the back
seat to the term bison, right, people explaining that it's
not actually a buffalo, it's it's a bison, and you're
confusing everybody by calling it a buffalo.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Away.
Speaker 5 (45:18):
I was sitting there with a kid from the Buffalo
Field Campaigment. I was doing my reporting and I see
off in the distance an analope. Okay, so I say, oh,
there's an aneloe. He says, well, actually that's a prong horn.
I was kind of like, well, don't get me started,
because your whole organization is called buffalo.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
And actually you're protecting.
Speaker 5 (45:38):
So so with that said, I like, I'd like to
hear your thoughts on what terms you use.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
I have I stick with buffalo.
Speaker 5 (45:51):
I noticed that Ken Burns has my back, but I
have switched and I now even will crack my kids.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
I make them say pronghorn.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Instead of antelope. Huh, well, I would admit I kind
of us both for both animals I use and I
know I've got buffalo several times and written stuff, and
I think probably in this podcast in an episode or two,
I use the term buffalo. It's a good interchangeable word
with bison, you know. And as a writer, you're always
trying to Okay, I don't want to use the same
(46:21):
damn word over and over and over again. So here's
a good interchangement word. And everybody knows exactly what it is. Yeah, pronghorn.
I tend to stick pretty closely with pronghorn. But in
the nineteenth century, almost anybody you quote, like Josiah Gregg,
you know, it's an antelope. I mean, and that's how
they all describe it. It's an antelope.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
When we were I got really in the habit of
only using bison sort of in the academic context. And
then when we were working in the Long Hunter book,
Steve pointed out that none of these guys ever saw
a bison.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
They saw buffalo. So we went through and changed that
for consistency.
Speaker 5 (47:03):
I just haven't encountered a ton of confusion. If I'm
talking to someone and I'm saying like, hey, you know,
we can go down that way and you might see
some buffalo. They're never picturing an asiatic water buffalo.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
They're just not.
Speaker 5 (47:16):
Yeah, I just never. It's like, I never have problems
with it. But you know, I like pronghorn. I guess
you know, I accept the interchangeability. And then I also
kind of as much as I like to word police
other people, when people word police me, I get prickly.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
So Steve and I have been going around to different
universities talking about the Mountain Men project that we worked on,
and in the course of that talk, I described some
of the primary sources that we use, and one of
them I describe as Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper.
And I make the point though, I make the point
(47:58):
that in I said, it's it's just this wonderful source
and it can go from this very mundane we went
three miles north, no Beaver, we went three miles west,
no Beaver, we went you know, and then he has
these long, sort of flourishes of description and he includes
his own thoughts and reflections, and one of the points
that I've been highlighting as sort of a joke is
(48:23):
that when he describes the pronghorn, he says that he
thinks they can be easily domesticated. And I sort of
share that with the crowd for a cheap laugh. And
then here I am and going through your episode and
you make the same point, and it makes me pause
and reflect on whether I've just embarrassed myself before several crowds.
Speaker 5 (48:45):
According to the physiologist Jared Diamond, what does he say, well,
the whole have you read guns, germs and steel?
Speaker 4 (48:54):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (48:54):
Yeah, But he lays out this.
Speaker 5 (48:56):
Theory that he starts with this foundational question, why did
who's a guy that came and attacked the Incas?
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Bisarrow?
Speaker 5 (49:08):
Why did Pizarro cross from Europe to attack the Incas?
Why didn't the Incas come from the east to attack Bizarrow?
Speaker 2 (49:23):
Right?
Speaker 5 (49:24):
And then part of it gets into this this cocktail
of things. One thing is how many people live along
the same latitude so that they can develop certain agricultural
crops and technologies and it winds up being transferable. Are
you oriented north south or east west? And then he
gets into how many beasts did you have that could
(49:49):
be domesticated? And he says that here none.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
None, So I mean the turkey.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
So the two animals that I think would have been
fairly easy to domesticate would have been prong horns and
bighorn sheep.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
And the reason I say that Dan Osborne and Russell's.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
The reason I say that about bighorn sheep is because
I've read these sheep eater accounts around Yellowstone where some
of the archaeologist supposed his name whole Krantz or something,
who did that big sheep eater study, and he said
the sheep eaters told him the sheep eaters has shown.
(50:31):
He told him that big oorn sheep were really easy
to catch. He's just kind of lurked by one of
their trails and you had yourself a net, and especially
if you had a little depression or some kind of
little pit, you just threw the net over the top
of them, and they just kind of did this. Now,
(50:52):
of course, there's another step you have to make from
catching one to domesticating it. I mean you have to obviously,
you have to be able to train in some way.
Speaker 5 (51:01):
The snakes are easy to catch, but that's uh.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
And I can't say that I've seen anybody specifically, and
you know, maybe I have, but I don't recall anybody
specifically running with that as a possibility, but I have
a sneaking suspicion that for a lot of these hunter
gatherer groups like that, they weren't interested in having domesticate
animals because they hadn't reached the stage that old worlders
(51:30):
had where Okay, man, there's kind of nothing left here.
We got to come up with We've got to come
up with some way to keep all this going. So
let's take those those goats right there. Let's see if
we can't tame them and get them to start following
us around and stuff. But a lot of the people
in the West, particularly outside the agricultural region of the
(51:52):
of the Southwest, with the pueblos, I mean, they're hunters
and gatherers, and they kind of don't have any need
or interest in domesticating anything.
Speaker 5 (52:00):
You know what backs you up on this, As you said,
this is a great point you're making. Think about the
end of the near end of the buffalo. What winds
up happening when there aren't andy left. People start feeding
them with bottles, hitching them up, keeping the pastures, putting
them in barns. So it's like when there was yeah,
(52:21):
like you're saying, like if they had if people had
got pushed and pushed and pushed to where the only
way you were going to have protein reserves was if
you had it in your yard and took with.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
You, and you would take the step because I mean,
think of this, you know. I mean, camels are nasty,
you know, I mean they would be nasty to try
to mistigate.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
And horses.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
I mean, if you ever spent a whole lot of
time around horses, and I have had horses for some
of my life, I.
Speaker 3 (52:46):
Mean, damnation.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
The first people who domesticated a horse must have been
pretty hard up. I mean those things, you know. The
reason they buck, of course, is that because cats had
always jumped on their backs, and of course they can
kick and bite it and they strike with their fore feet,
and I mean that would not have been an easy
animal to domesticate. So I think anybody who decides we're
(53:08):
going to domesticate a horse or a camel's backs against
the wall.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
And they never got there with prong worn.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
I don't think they needed to. Yeah, I think that's it.
They didn't need to
Since Americans encountered the beautiful Western prong horn, We've struggled
to understand an animal that looked like a gazelle but
couldn't jump, could outrun all its predators by twenty miles
per hour, yet like bison, was on the cliff of
extinction by nineteen hundred. I'm Dan Flores and this is
the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck. Still
(00:25):
in barrel. Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time
for the season that calls us home. A portion of
every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands,
waters and wildlife, enjoy responsibly survivors from a lost world.
(01:00):
From the accounts of all the Indians I have seen,
it is probable there may be a species of antelope
near the headwaters of Red River. Those words were written
by a young Virginia named Peter Custis, who from Louisiana
was taking a wistful look up the Red River of
(01:20):
the South in the year eighteen oh six. I'll have
much more to say in the next episode about Custis
and why he was on the edge of the West
that early in the nineteenth century. But the Louisiana purchase
had just doubled the size of the United States, and
Custus's wonderment about a likely African type antelope roaming the
(01:42):
horizontal Yellow Prairies was just the kind of story literary
Americans were hearing from their native Spanish and French predecessors
in the West. And while accounts of unicorns, giant horned serpents,
and mountains made of pure salt in the West were
like the early stories of mermaids in New England waters,
(02:05):
the antelopes that Custus heard about were very real. I've
long been drawn to pronghorns, the more accurate name for
America's gorgeous striped western antelopes, at least since driving a
dusty two track along the Powder River of Wyoming many
years ago and watching a young buck pronghorn running at
(02:29):
fifty miles an hour clocked by the speedometer alongside me.
Suddenly crossing the road in front of my bronco at speed.
He turned straight towards a barbed wire fence, but rather
than jumping over it, more quickly than I could register
the move, he turned his body sideways and darted between
(02:52):
the strands. The impact of thwanging explosion of white hairs
drifting in the wind as he trotted off, daydreaming of, well,
what do prong horns daydream about? As my panic for
him subsided, I decided I ought to try to find
out when Americans finally made it to the Great Plains
(03:24):
at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We call these
fabled animals antelopes for good reason, since in size, form,
and speed they resemble no other creatures quite so much
as the antelopes and gazelles of Africa. But prong horns
are not true antelopes. The antelope capri day antelope goats
(03:46):
emerged as a distinctly American family of animals roughly twenty
five million years ago, but paleontologists still don't agree on
their earlier provenance. They may be anciently related to the Servidae,
the deer family, but there are some modern biologists who
think pronghorns closest living relatives are in the family Giraffiday,
(04:10):
the giraffes whose legs resemble pronghorn legs. Whatever their origins
in ancient America, modern pronghorns are actually.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Just like us.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
There are species that today represents the sole remaining survivor
of a large family of animals and thus a rarity
in nature. Fossil records in North America show that the
antelope Caapridae actually consisted of two major, big subfamilies. The
(04:41):
earlier of these subfamilies included several species of graceful, dainty
ungulates possessed of permanent, multi branched, antler like horns. This
group of creatures was extinct by the end of the
Miocene around five point three million years ago, but they
gave rise the other subfamily, which soon replaced them on
(05:03):
the grasslands that were then starting to emerge in Western America.
This subfamily of larger antelope goats were high speed runners,
but with quite different horns made around a deciduous sheath,
with some versions sporting four horns and others as many
as six. There was even a dwarfed four horned version
(05:27):
not much larger than a jack rabbit, so this quite
real version of a jackalope still spreaded across the Great
Plains as late as ten thousand years ago. Occasionally, four
horned fawns are still born to pronghorns as one genetic
reminder among a great number. As we're about to see
(05:49):
of the pronghorn's deep and varied past Antelo capra Americana.
Our present day pronghorn from this evolutionary family, dating back
twenty five million years, is now the last living representative
of evolution's wild genetic experimentation, with America's answer to the
gazelles of Africa. Back in nineteen ninety seven, a biologist
(06:19):
named John Byers, who had spent years studying pronghorn behavior
and natural history on western Montana's National Bison Range, stepped
up to answer most of my questions about the mysterious
nature of the American pronghorn. Buyers's provocative argument finally made
clear much about an animal that had seemed inexplicable to
(06:41):
its admirers. Many of us had noted the pronghorn's apparent disinclination.
It's probably not a true inability, but a disinclination to
jump fences. Why would a creature as fleet and athletic
prefer to go through barbed wire fences rather than over them?
With long suspected pronghorn evolution as the answer, and Buyers agreed,
(07:05):
a grasslands creature shaped by the open country niche it occupied,
pronghorns never experienced any selective pressures to be able to
jump obstacles that produced the kind of drama I'd witnessed
in Wyoming. But unfortunately, it could also become a maladaptation
in a fenced modern world, and one that played a
(07:27):
critical role in pronghorn history over the past one hundred
and fifty years. Pronghorns are one of only a handful
of great plain species that managed to survive the epic
extinction crash that ended the Pleisisain ten thousand years ago,
a best shary simplification that still stands as the most
(07:49):
profound ecological alteration in America since the extinction of the
dinosaurs in the biography of a species like us or
prong horns. How however, the Pleistocene was only a few
heart beats in the past. So what if much about
the behavior of modern prong horns has little to do
(08:10):
with their present circumstances.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
As we find them.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
The primary predators of prong horns for the past ten
thousand years we know, have been wolves and coyotes, neither
of which is capable flat out of running much more
than about forty to forty five miles an hour. Prong Horns,
on the other hand, are the ferraris of the American
natural world. Their delicate bones in frames and remarkably low
(08:35):
body fat keep them light, while broad nostrils and a
huge windpipe deliver turbocharged oxygen to their outsize lungs and
heart pedal to the metal. They top eighty five kilometers
per hour at a dead run, some fifty five miles
an hour for the one hundred and twenty pound males
(08:55):
and as high as sixty five to seventy miles per
hour for the low females. That's as fast as an
African cheetah. Prong Horns can also run at ninety percent
of top end for more than two miles. Like horses,
to detect predators at great distances, they too evolve gigantic eyes.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Prong Horn behavior features other oddities.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Like Thompson's gazelles and other African ugults pursued by big cats.
Prong Horns have a powerful inclination towards a form of
grouping known as the selfish herd, with much of their
expression of dominance and rank focused on their physical position.
Inside these herd groups, the lower ranking, less dominant animals
(09:44):
get pushed to the outer margins, where if prong horns
were on the African veild, the low ranking members would
be in much greater danger from predatory attacks. But as adults,
American prong horns have no predators at all because of
the impossible speed. Once they're grown, pronghorns are subject to
predation only as fonts. If a prong worn fund survives
(10:08):
to six or eight months of age, it will join
all other surviving fauns in living to the ripe old
age of eleven or twelve years old. Yet adult pronghorns
still persist in grouping and still fight for position in
those groups, as if predation somehow mattered to them. So why,
(10:29):
in a world where gray wolves and coyotes and maybe
occasionally a mountain lion are their threats, do prong horns
express so much protective excess. The question John Byers posed
then was this, what if most of their physical characteristics
and behavior are actually adaptations to a lost world that
(10:52):
winked out around them ten thousand years ago, leaving pronghorns
still living out their existence among us reacting to a
world of ghosts. The fascinating question, then, is whether the
whole suite of pronghorn behaviors, and not just their lack
of jumping ability has to do with the lost world
(11:13):
of the Pleistocene Great Plains. Prog Warns emerged in their
modern form at a time when the American Planes was
the scene of one of the great assemblages of savannah
step creatures anywhere on Earth, a more diverse collection of
animals than present today in the Serengetti or the Massaimara.
Along with the elephants and longhorned bison and enormous herds
(11:35):
of horses, along with bands of numerous types of camels
and deer, and of course elk and prong horns, the
Pleistocene planes featured an array of truly formidable predators that
hunted and scavenged. Among all those millions of ungulates, prog
Warns then spent the better part of four million years
perfecting their ability to survive. Where large and fast predators
(12:00):
looked hungrily at them over bright teeth. There were grass
aisle active and aggressive short faced bears. The smilodons are
sabertoothed cats that attacked mammoth calves, a steadily changing lineup
of wolf and coyote packs. There were jaguars and cougars
(12:21):
along with the steppe lion, a far larger version of
the African lion, as predators of the fastest grazers, the
horses and prong horns. There was a slender, limbed lion
size running cat known as the scimitar cat, along with
a particularly rapid and legging American hunting hyena. And there
(12:43):
were two species of large American false cheetahs, cats from
the same evolutionary line that produced cougars, but with elongated,
curved spines, long legs, and wide nostrils for gulping air
in open country pursuit are in rock slide ambushes. These
(13:03):
vanished creatures of the ancient planes, at least so biologists
like Buyers now argue, however long ago they passed the
veil of extinction, or why pronghorns seem mysterious and almost
alien to us now, why they struck early observers like
Lewis and Clark as possessing a speed that resemble more
the flight of birds than anything else. Pronghorns are at
(13:26):
once breathtakingly beautiful yet outrageously overbuilt relics that have outlasted
the conditions that created them. They offer almost our only
remaining glimpse of the American Pleistocene. Like most wild ungulates
(13:49):
then are now, pronghorns follow a yearly routine that varies
considerably by the seasons. At the conclusion of the September rut,
the exhausted bucks, which would once have been prime targets
for predators in that condition, disguised themselves by mimicking the females.
They shed the outer husk of their horns, and they
(14:12):
joined the female herds. Since the Pleistocene, winter has been
a time of migration for northern pronghorns. A few years ago,
with a friend who lives in Jackson Hole, I photographed
the famous Sublet pronghorn herd, which summers in Grand Teta
National Park but still migrates more than two hundred miles
south to near Green River, Wyoming in winter. This inclination
(14:37):
to migrate before severe winter storms was adaptive in the wild,
but couple with their inclination not to jump obstacles, ultimately
reproduced tragedy in the late nineteenth century, when legendary winters
in the eighteen eighties sent pronghorns southward by the thousands
into a new world of barbed wire in the spring.
(15:00):
From a year old until they're three, young pronghorn bucks
segregate themselves into bachelor bands and spend most of their
time in all male groups. There, they express group position
dominance just as females do, but they also spar and
practice moves they will later use in earnest. Around three
(15:21):
years of age, pronghorn males become solitary for most of
the spring and summer, during which time, at least in
most pronghorn country, they set up territories of perhaps one
hundred and fifty acres whose perimeter they sent mark and
will use to cloister a harem of females to hide
from other males during the rut. In other circumstances, male
(15:43):
pronghorns protect harems of females, but without defending a territory.
Rather than our prime resource location, pronghorn territories actually seem
to be merely tactical space for defending females. Pronghorn bucks
fight over females too, in violent, quick and quite often mortal,
(16:04):
as high as fifteen percent of the encounter's fights. Reproduction
success is the prime directive, and some prong horned bucks
win the lottery. Others spend their entire lives without ever
siring any offspring at all. Then there is female selective behavior.
Female prong horns, which reach sexual maturity at eighteen months
(16:28):
of age and give birth every spring for the rest
of their lives, find themselves in harems that male pronghorns
judiciously protect during the brief September mating season. During the rut,
females repeatedly break away from their cloistered harems, however, joining
the other harems of other males and inviting males to.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Compete for them. What exactly are they looking for?
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Apparently they're setting up contests of stamina, speed, and resolve
but between various males and observing the outcome before surrendering
themselves up to be bred by the winner, the pronghorn
male who demonstrates his genetic fitness by running faster and
longer than his rivals. But if you're already almost twenty
(17:17):
miles an hour faster than your fastest predators, why would
females set up games of natural selection and choose who
will impregnate them based on fitness as demonstrated by speed,
Because apparently you never know when American cheetahs are going
to show up on the planes again. Prong worn females
(17:40):
have evolved another strategy that's interesting with respect to what
it says about both past and present. After a remarkably
long gestation period of some two hundred and fifty two days,
they give birth not to single offspring, but to litters,
specifically litters of two fawns every spring, and they do
(18:03):
this throughout their reproductive lives. Twining, as well as the
week's long hiding of fawns which lie motionless and silent
for most of the day, are clearly responses to serious predation.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
They too, probably.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Emerge as adaptations to the distant past, when pronghorns lived
in a world where they.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Were prey for three or four different predators.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Today, it means that coyotes, the principal predators of pronghorn
fawns for probably the last million years, are able to
pull down as much as fifty percent of a pronghorn
fawn crop without appreciably affecting pronghorn populations with litters, and
with their extremely high adult survivability rates, pronghorns were anciently
(18:52):
prepared to survive the culling of even so efficient a
predator of fawns as coyotes. But a mother pronghorn will
attack and fight a coyote to keep it from her faunds.
Pronghorn bucks don't defend faunds. Some biologists argue that this
is another leftover behavior from the Pleistocene, when fast predators
(19:13):
scattered groups of pronghorns across wide territories, and a male
pronghorn thus could never be sure that a fawn it
defended was its own. As cutschewing rumnants capable of processing
forbes and shrubs, pronghorns demonstrate yet another adaptation to the
ancient savannah ecology of Western America. For maybe four hundred
(19:36):
thousand years, pronghorns had been evolving a mutualistic relationship with
the bison herds. Bison i had survived the Pleistocene extinctions
and had increased dramatically in their wake, in numbers that
likely range somewhere between twenty and thirty million animals, depending
(19:56):
on climate cycles. So waves of bison and waves of
pronghorns cropping the same country produced mutually beneficial results. Cropping
the grasses and ignoring the often poisonous species like local weed,
rabbit brush, and sagebrush. Bison grazing encouraged forbes and shrubs
(20:19):
in their wake, coming along after the bison herds and
concentrating instead on the flowering plants and shrubs. Pronghorn browsing
shifted the advantage back to the grasses. Both preferred succulent
vegetation sprouting up after recent fires, which was a fact
that Native people long noted. So deep time history created
(20:47):
an entirely unique situation for pronghorn antelope. Since pronghorns had
out survived almost all their predators, had ended up with
few competitors for the often toxic shrubs and forbes they ate.
We're read everywhere there were vast horizontal planes, and they
increased into the millions. The writer Ernest Thompson's Seaton famously
(21:09):
estimated that in eighteen hundred, the moment in time when
pronghorns were in the verge of discovery by formal Western science,
there were as many as forty million of them in
the West. More recent estimates have advanced original figures of
something like fifteen million.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
What we can.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Probably say is that on the Great Plains, where there
ranges overlap most precisely, pronghorn numbers very likely matched those
of buffalo.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
We've long thought of the historic era.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Great Plans as the Great Bison Belt. In truth, it
was just as much the Great pronghorn Savannah. Their range
doesn't appear to advanced eastward beyond the ninety seventh meridian,
though at least in places like Texas and Mexico, and
it doesn't seem to have gone beyond the ninety third already,
and farther north in Iowa and Minnesota. But they were
(22:05):
found westward all the way to Baja California and into
eastern Oregon and Washington. Southward on the continent, prong horns
were able to colonize the desert grasslands of Mexico all
the way down to the vicinity of Mexico City at
twenty degrees latitude, considerably south of where bison ever ventured.
(22:26):
Although prong horns can derive adequate water from the plants
they browse in optimal wet years, they do need to
drink about three and a half quarts of water a
day during hot weather, which limited their numbers in the
Great Basin the Mohave, Chihuahuan, and Sonoran deserts. Abundant and
(22:47):
widespread as they were, prong worns attracted the attention of
Indian hunters from the very beginning of human arrival. There
a butchered prong horn remains in some of the Clovis
and Folksome archaeola logical sites, so at least some paleo
hunters did take the occasional pronghorn to vary a diet
of mammoth and bison cuts.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
But it took fifteen or twenty.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Pronghorns to equal the caloric possibilities of a single giant bison,
and since prong worn flesh was so very lean, prog
worns commonly ranked well down the list of pursued prey
among Southwestern peoples. In fact, pronghorns ranked lower than rabbits,
even though it took sixteen jack rabbits to match the
(23:31):
edible flesh of a prong worn Native people, from hundreds
of generations of experience with pronghorns knew how to exploit
their weaknesses and utilize pronghorned leather horns and hoofs for
a variety of purposes. One aspect of pronghorn natural history
that made them vulnerable to Indian hunters was their disinclination
(23:53):
to leave their home ranges. Parts of the West yet
show fading evidence of ancient pronghorn correct such as the
Fort Bridger trap site in southwestern Wyoming, where local herds
evidently were enclosed and pushed to run in circles until
they were exhausted and could be clubbed to death. Another
(24:14):
technique involved v shaped pairs of fence wings, often miles long,
made from piled up sagebrush, that sent stampeded pronghorns into
corrals or pits. There are also references from a variety
of sources of horse mounted planes indians engaging in the
kind of pronghorns surround They often used for bison, again
(24:37):
with the goal of getting a pronghorn band to run
in circles until the spent and stumbling animals could be
ridden down on horseback. According to the writer Richard Irving Dodge,
when pronghorns collected into the thousands in wintertime, some tribes
even used rifles in pronghorn hunts from horseback, reacting as
(24:59):
if pursued by editors. The antelope crowded together in their fright,
Dodge wrote, and thus were easily shot down. When bison
were scarce, planes hunters preferred antelope to deer because you
could take an entire herd of prong horns at once.
Because local herds could be completely extirpated, by mass techniques.
(25:20):
Like these, Indian hunters often spared some animals in order
to preserve the herd stock, whatever the technique. Unlike bison
or elk, prong horns butchered out as all protein and
very little precious fat. Their lean body mass may be
the reason no tribe ever bothered to domesticate prong horns,
(25:41):
which are actually easier to tame than any African antelope.
Among Europeans, prong horns were first encountered by numerous Spanish
travelers on the Southern Plains and in California, where they
were known as barndos, and by French travelers to the
(26:01):
Great Plains, who called them cool de Blanc. Francisco Hernandez's
sixteen fifty one Natural History of Mexico described and even
provided an initial illustration of the western pronghorn, But like
so many charismatic animals from the American West, pronghorns did
(26:22):
not come to the official notice of Enlightenment age science
until the time of the Jeffersonian expeditions into the New
Louisiana Purchase. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark collected the type
specimen of the species for Western science in eighteen o five,
Lewis and Clark made more than two hundred pronghorn entries
in their journals, although they found the animals like elk
(26:45):
and deer far less numerous west of the continental divide.
Back east, George Ord of Philadelphia Naturalists and Ornithologists, who
was working up many of the Lewis and Clark specimens,
published a science to description and the Lenaean name for
the pronghorn in eighteen eighteen. Ord recognized that, despite their
(27:07):
similarities to African antelopes and gazelle's, pronghorns were actually unrelated
to any existing family of animals that he could find.
So Antilope capra day the family name he devised, and
Antilope capra the genus Ord fashion for an animal that
seemed to combine the traits of both antelopes and goats
(27:30):
have stood ever since. One of the best selling books
of the West in the nineteenth century was the trader
naturalist Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies, first published in
eighteen forty six. This is what greg had to say
about the pronghorn. That species of gazelle, known as the antelope,
(27:53):
is very numerous upon the high plains, This beautiful animal
is most remarkable for its fleetness, not bounding like the deer,
but skimming over the ground as though upon skates. The
flesh of the antelope is but little esteemed, though consequently
no great efforts are made to take them. Being as
(28:14):
wild as fleet the hunting of them is very difficult
as well. The commercial market hunt of wildlife in the West,
though and more of that to come in future episodes,
had been underway in earnest since at least the eighteen twenties,
but so long as beaver lasted or bison roamed in
(28:35):
numbers enough to produce robes, hides, and tongs, and as
long as wolves and coyotes remained targets of traps and
poisoned bait, the market hunt left pronghorns largely alone.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Prong Horns had already reaped.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
The whirlwind in mining areas like California, where they were
corralled and killed to feed miners, but was not until
bison numbers began to drop that prong horns finally started
to attract attention in the slaughter of Western animals for profit.
With more than five thousand professional hunters in the West
(29:11):
in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. Once every last
buffalo had been pursued to ground, hunters looked to see
what they might turn their guns on for a final
killing spree. Big horned sheep in the bad lands lasted
only a handful of years, and those in the mountains
only a handful more. Elk and even deer had mostly
(29:35):
fled the open country by that time to the safety
of the mountains. In the eighteen eighties, only two primary
charismatic animals remained on the Great Plains, wild horses and pronghorns.
The horses would get caught and sold overseas buyers whenever
Europeans were involved in wars her Brother the nineteen twenties,
(29:56):
get rounded up as a source of dog food for
the American pet industry, or they were simply shot down
by cowboys as nuisances. But prong horns had evolved on
the Great Plains, they had survived fearsome predators, they'd lived
through the pleistosine extinctions. Erasing them from America was going
to require some effort. Naturally, the market hunt, though, was
(30:20):
up to the task. There were multiple causes for what
began to happen to pronghorns homesteading steadily tore up the
prairie and prong horn habitat. Ranchers overstocked the planes with
cattle and sheep that undermined vegetation. Prong horns depended on
the new barbed wire fences, demarketing a West that was
fast becoming private property went straight to the prong horns
(30:44):
evolutionary weakness, fences preventing the herds from migrating and from
escaping winter blizzards. Without bison, the trump down the snow,
prong horns couldn't get at the plants they ate anymore,
add fences to block their migrations, and the horrific Western
winners of the eighteen eighties devastated them, and an event
(31:07):
that became all too common. Homesteaders in the Texas Panhandle
and the winner of eighteen eighty two discovered more than
fifteen hundred prong horns blown like a deck of cards
against a curb, trapped and piled many feet high against
a barbed wire fence. Even hard bitten homesheads were horrified
(31:28):
by that. Then there was the market hunt. The generally
poor opinion of pronghorned leather and meat had long kept
prong horns out of the rifle sights of men who
killed animals for money. But with everything else gone and
a deathly silence beginning to fall across the West, market
hunters finally turned their rifles on prong horns, and the
(31:51):
story became all too familiar. What had once been millions
of wild creatures fell for a pittance in return. Winter
concentrations of prong horns around the Black Hills got slaughtered.
In two or three seasons, a hunter in California killed
five thousand of them for their hides. When a drought
drove almost all the prong horns in the area to
(32:14):
a few remaining water holes, hunters, desperate to keep their
market lifestyle going, sold pronghorn meat to butchers in Kansas
for two to three cents a pound. In eighteen seventy three,
an Iowa firm shipped some thirty two thousand pronghorn and
deer skins via railroad from the plains, barely making a
(32:38):
dollar apiece for all the effort of hunting, skinning, and shipping.
When George byrd Grennell, the Great Conservationist, alerted future President
Teddy Roosevelt to the impact of market hunting, a step
that led to the formation of the Boon and Crocket
Club to protect American game animals. One of the victims
(32:59):
Grenelle mentioned was the pronghorn that put prong horns before
an influential group, but by the time Roosevelt was president,
pronghorn numbers had dropped frighteningly low. In eighteen hundred, there
may have been fifteen million prong horns in the West,
as I mentioned, but in eighteen ninety nine, biologist Vernon Bailey,
(33:22):
crossing one hundred miles of the Texas Panhandle, counted a
mere thirty two in what had once lay near the
center of their range. A decade later, the New York
Zoological Society estimated that fewer than five thousand of these
twenty five million year old natives of America were left.
(33:47):
Rescuing them from almost certain extinction required cooperation between the
states in the West, which Roosevelt facilitated, along with pronghorn
stocking in Yellowstone and on the National Wildlife Refuge. Is
that Teddy Roosevelt was creating. Two lucky breaks helped the pronghorns, though,
and one was the refuges which the Boone and Crocket
(34:08):
Club and the American Bison Society stocked with remnant animals.
The other break was evolutionary good fortune. In a nation
where economics trumped everything as four rather than grass eaters,
prong horns didn't compete with cattle and only marginally with sheep,
(34:30):
so Western livestock associations, if grudgingly, became tolerant of them. Today,
the United States and Canadian population of prong horns hovers
around seven hundred thousand animals, half of them in the
state of Wyoming, with another twelve hundred in Mexico. A
series of highway overpasses now allows some of them to
(34:52):
continue their winter migrations, and as one of the original
Western animals tapped for sport hunting, pronghorns are now privileged
in a way that a lot of other creatures are not.
I am still transfixed, though by a moment in Western
history I once came across when among all Western animals
(35:13):
three ancient Americans, wild horses, coyotes, and pronghorns were the
last holdouts remaining. This was in April of eighteen eighty four,
and it appeared in a letter written by a cowboy
named George Wolforth, who was riding his horse up over
(35:33):
the rim of West Texas Yellow House Canyon, about where
the city of Lubbock now stands. Wolforth described a scene
that seared itself into his memory and into mine too.
As far as we could see, he wrote, there were
only antelopes and mustangs grazing in the waving.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
Sea of grass.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
The whole tableau, he went on, rendered misty and unreal
by the mirage that hovered over the plains. These were
the sole survivors of the big animals of the Great Plains.
Almost all the rest had suffered extinction or extirpation, or
(36:18):
had been driven into the mountains across the previous thirty years.
But even this moment was brief, merely a romantic thing
to hold onto in the mind, truly a mirage.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Dan, I think one of the things when you read
primary sources from the Lewis and Clark era forward, a
lot of times I'm struck by animals not being where
I expect them to be, or at least where I
wouldn't have expected them to be before I knew better.
But grizzlies and salt Dakota grizzlies out on the plains,
(37:10):
big horns dominating Elk country, Elk out on the prairie.
You know, it seems like they're all familiar animals, but
there's always sort of there's like something about it that
doesn't line up with our present day awareness of the
animals around us. But pronghorn are the exception to that
(37:31):
general rule. And here I think you yeah, I mean
a prong horn is a prong horn is a prong horn,
And I guess it's it's striking to me, but you
make a strong case why it's deeply rooted in their
genetics and in their evolutionary history.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
I mean, these are animals that come from specifically from
North American evolution for twenty five million years, and so,
you know, and prong horns are like us, they're the
sole remaining representative of what was at one time really
big in their case, a couple of different subfamilies of animals,
(38:13):
many of them with multiple horns, and some of them
with horns unlike the present day animal that weren't deciduous
but were solid like antlers. And so it's a it's
kind of a remarkable thing to me. The most remarkable
aspect of the prong horns story is how long we
(38:37):
tried to figure them out. You know, I mean, we
just couldn't quite. I mean, everybody knew, okay, they won't
jump fences, and that's probably because they evolved on the planes.
But you know, on the other hand, Thompson's gazelles, you know,
jumped like crazy in Africa, showing I think what they're
doing is starting to show their fitness, so that the
(38:58):
cheetah that's after the goes after one that's stumbling along
or something. But prong horns never they never developed that ability,
and the inability or disinclination to jump over things really
kind of set them in a bad situation when the
West started being basically covered with barbed wire fences because
(39:22):
a lot of them ended up, you know, because they
migrated in front of winter storms. That was another thing
about their long term evolution that they would pile up
against those fences. But you know that biologist John Buyers,
who about twenty five years ago was working on prong
horns in the Montana National Bison Refuge. I mean, he's
(39:44):
the one who kind of figured all this out, all
these inexplicable parts of their natural history, you know, starting
with one of the damn things, why are they capable
of running sixty five miles an hour when anything that's
chasing them can't run more than about forty or forty five.
I mean, what's the explanation for the excessive speed? And
(40:07):
what he came up with, of course, was that with
prong horns, we're getting to witness and it's really kind
of the only animal that we're getting to see do
this we're getting to witness applies to seeing animal that's
still through its natural selection ten thousand years ago. It's
still doing the kinds of things that would have enabled
it to succeed when there were fast running cheetahs and
(40:28):
aenas and things chasing them. And so it's a you know,
it's an animal that's kind of living in its head
in a world of ghosts.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
And I think one thing when I look, especially having
grown up in the East, when I look at pronghorn,
I think to myself, that doesn't look like it belongs here.
It doesn't look like anything else. It looks like it
should be in Africa, when in fact it is the
the animal of all the ones that I know.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Today that has the deepest roots.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Yeah, I mean, I think it is. It's twenty five
million years back, as you know, and of course we
still have them. I mean, passenger pigeons go back fifteen
million years here, but we don't have them anymore. But
this is a creature that goes back a long way,
and so it's really kind of it's as America. And
this is another kind of mind bender about all this
(41:18):
deep time evolution. It's as American almost as horses, which
evolved here fifty six million years ago, you know. And
so in the case of prong horns, they managed to
get through the plastaink sanctions and survive, and horses, obviously,
while they survived elsewhere around the world, they didn't survive here.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
But those are the two to me that have the
deepest time.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
The other really deep time animals like camels, they were
about forty five million years old, and of course they
didn't they didn't make it.
Speaker 5 (41:52):
Speaking of deep antiquity, you had to comment and you
just touched on it again a second ago. You had
to comment in your in your show and mention it
now where you said, like us, they're the only one left.
And it was fighting that really struck me. It hadn't
occurred to me, But I'm often find myself explaining to
visitors who come out. We're driving around looking at wildlife.
(42:12):
I'll explain to him, I kind of get into like
what it means that they're the only to be the
only member like of your genus, and to have me
you came like it's hard to even find a relative right.
And I never thought I'm gonna start saying when I
do that little spiel, I'm gonna start saying, like us
(42:33):
like this, you can go like, there's this thing, there's
a chimpanzee.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
Oh, that's probably Bob. As close as close as we're
gonna get.
Speaker 5 (42:43):
But I made the comment in our we did an
outdoor cookbook, and in the introduction of the outdoor cookbook
I made I made a comment that at the right
place and time, you know, in the Middle East, southern Spain, whatever,
at the right place and time, it would have been
possible for a human to have to see a fire
(43:05):
and the need to also and see figures sitting around
a fire at night, and you would need to wonder,
I wonder what species of human that is, which one
of us that is?
Speaker 2 (43:18):
It was just like so hard to picture, I know.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
I mean, there's I read somewhere several years ago that
at one point in time, there may have been as
many as eight different human species coexisting in Africa, and
I think it was Africa. I don't think that many
made it to the Middle East or further north, but
as many as eight different ones, So I mean, wow,
(43:42):
you know, you really there's actually I saw a movie
on I think it was on Netflix. It was on HBO,
I think, and I don't remember the name of it,
but it's basically was a movie about this group of
anatomically modern humans Homo sapiens, who are traveling across the
landscape and they camp out in woods one night and
(44:04):
some group attacks them and steals one of their you know,
one of their children. And so the father and a
couple of other guys of this group and I think
of female, maybe the mother of the child too, they
track this other band and when they find them, they're
not Homo sapiens. They are some other species, you know,
(44:25):
and they're standing looking in the cave and what in
the hell? Yeah, So that was that was possible in
our past. It obviously was possible in the programing past,
but not.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
For either one of us anymore. You know.
Speaker 5 (44:40):
One time, when I was working on a book project,
I spent some time with an organization that was then
called the Buffalo Field Campaign. I remember you remember because
we had a mutual friend when I was a student
of yours.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
Dan.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Yeah, there was kid in our class that.
Speaker 5 (44:56):
Was was involved with Buffalo Field Campaign. And of course
that is a buffalo being a term that has fallen
out of favor and it's sort of taken the back
seat to the term bison, right, people explaining that it's
not actually a buffalo, it's it's a bison, and you're
confusing everybody by calling it a buffalo.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Away.
Speaker 5 (45:18):
I was sitting there with a kid from the Buffalo
Field Campaigment. I was doing my reporting and I see
off in the distance an analope. Okay, so I say, oh,
there's an aneloe. He says, well, actually that's a prong horn.
I was kind of like, well, don't get me started,
because your whole organization is called buffalo.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
And actually you're protecting.
Speaker 5 (45:38):
So so with that said, I like, I'd like to
hear your thoughts on what terms you use.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
I have I stick with buffalo.
Speaker 5 (45:51):
I noticed that Ken Burns has my back, but I
have switched and I now even will crack my kids.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
I make them say pronghorn.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Instead of antelope. Huh, well, I would admit I kind
of us both for both animals I use and I
know I've got buffalo several times and written stuff, and
I think probably in this podcast in an episode or two,
I use the term buffalo. It's a good interchangeable word
with bison, you know. And as a writer, you're always
trying to Okay, I don't want to use the same
(46:21):
damn word over and over and over again. So here's
a good interchangement word. And everybody knows exactly what it is. Yeah, pronghorn.
I tend to stick pretty closely with pronghorn. But in
the nineteenth century, almost anybody you quote, like Josiah Gregg,
you know, it's an antelope. I mean, and that's how
they all describe it. It's an antelope.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
When we were I got really in the habit of
only using bison sort of in the academic context. And
then when we were working in the Long Hunter book,
Steve pointed out that none of these guys ever saw
a bison.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
They saw buffalo. So we went through and changed that
for consistency.
Speaker 5 (47:03):
I just haven't encountered a ton of confusion. If I'm
talking to someone and I'm saying like, hey, you know,
we can go down that way and you might see
some buffalo. They're never picturing an asiatic water buffalo.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
They're just not.
Speaker 5 (47:16):
Yeah, I just never. It's like, I never have problems
with it. But you know, I like pronghorn. I guess
you know, I accept the interchangeability. And then I also
kind of as much as I like to word police
other people, when people word police me, I get prickly.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
So Steve and I have been going around to different
universities talking about the Mountain Men project that we worked on,
and in the course of that talk, I described some
of the primary sources that we use, and one of
them I describe as Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper.
And I make the point though, I make the point
(47:58):
that in I said, it's it's just this wonderful source
and it can go from this very mundane we went
three miles north, no Beaver, we went three miles west,
no Beaver, we went you know, and then he has
these long, sort of flourishes of description and he includes
his own thoughts and reflections, and one of the points
that I've been highlighting as sort of a joke is
(48:23):
that when he describes the pronghorn, he says that he
thinks they can be easily domesticated. And I sort of
share that with the crowd for a cheap laugh. And
then here I am and going through your episode and
you make the same point, and it makes me pause
and reflect on whether I've just embarrassed myself before several crowds.
Speaker 5 (48:45):
According to the physiologist Jared Diamond, what does he say, well,
the whole have you read guns, germs and steel?
Speaker 4 (48:54):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (48:54):
Yeah, But he lays out this.
Speaker 5 (48:56):
Theory that he starts with this foundational question, why did
who's a guy that came and attacked the Incas?
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Bisarrow?
Speaker 5 (49:08):
Why did Pizarro cross from Europe to attack the Incas?
Why didn't the Incas come from the east to attack Bizarrow?
Speaker 2 (49:23):
Right?
Speaker 5 (49:24):
And then part of it gets into this this cocktail
of things. One thing is how many people live along
the same latitude so that they can develop certain agricultural
crops and technologies and it winds up being transferable. Are
you oriented north south or east west? And then he
gets into how many beasts did you have that could
(49:49):
be domesticated? And he says that here none.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
None, So I mean the turkey.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
So the two animals that I think would have been
fairly easy to domesticate would have been prong horns and
bighorn sheep.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
And the reason I say that Dan Osborne and Russell's.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
The reason I say that about bighorn sheep is because
I've read these sheep eater accounts around Yellowstone where some
of the archaeologist supposed his name whole Krantz or something,
who did that big sheep eater study, and he said
the sheep eaters told him the sheep eaters has shown.
(50:31):
He told him that big oorn sheep were really easy
to catch. He's just kind of lurked by one of
their trails and you had yourself a net, and especially
if you had a little depression or some kind of
little pit, you just threw the net over the top
of them, and they just kind of did this. Now,
(50:52):
of course, there's another step you have to make from
catching one to domesticating it. I mean you have to obviously,
you have to be able to train in some way.
Speaker 5 (51:01):
The snakes are easy to catch, but that's uh.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
And I can't say that I've seen anybody specifically, and
you know, maybe I have, but I don't recall anybody
specifically running with that as a possibility, but I have
a sneaking suspicion that for a lot of these hunter
gatherer groups like that, they weren't interested in having domesticate
animals because they hadn't reached the stage that old worlders
(51:30):
had where Okay, man, there's kind of nothing left here.
We got to come up with We've got to come
up with some way to keep all this going. So
let's take those those goats right there. Let's see if
we can't tame them and get them to start following
us around and stuff. But a lot of the people
in the West, particularly outside the agricultural region of the
(51:52):
of the Southwest, with the pueblos, I mean, they're hunters
and gatherers, and they kind of don't have any need
or interest in domesticating anything.
Speaker 5 (52:00):
You know what backs you up on this, As you said,
this is a great point you're making. Think about the
end of the near end of the buffalo. What winds
up happening when there aren't andy left. People start feeding
them with bottles, hitching them up, keeping the pastures, putting
them in barns. So it's like when there was yeah,
(52:21):
like you're saying, like if they had if people had
got pushed and pushed and pushed to where the only
way you were going to have protein reserves was if
you had it in your yard and took with.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
You, and you would take the step because I mean,
think of this, you know. I mean, camels are nasty,
you know, I mean they would be nasty to try
to mistigate.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
And horses.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
I mean, if you ever spent a whole lot of
time around horses, and I have had horses for some
of my life, I.
Speaker 3 (52:46):
Mean, damnation.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
The first people who domesticated a horse must have been
pretty hard up. I mean those things, you know. The
reason they buck, of course, is that because cats had
always jumped on their backs, and of course they can
kick and bite it and they strike with their fore feet,
and I mean that would not have been an easy
animal to domesticate. So I think anybody who decides we're
(53:08):
going to domesticate a horse or a camel's backs against
the wall.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
And they never got there with prong worn.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
I don't think they needed to. Yeah, I think that's it.
They didn't need to
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