Pod Insights Gunfighters Ep. 05: The Wild New World of the American Serengeti | The American West About this episode In the early 1800s, when American and European scientific explorers first began to probe the unfamiliar West with its landscapes and animals so remarkably different from those of the East, the Great Plains and its wildlife seemed the most fascinating part of the West, an “American Serengeti.” Commencing with Lewis and Clark’s adventures and their attempts to catalog western wildlife, it took the entire 19th century for American explorers to introduce to science the staggering biological diversity Native America had bequeathed the United States. Accounts from Lewis and Clark to Stephen Long to C. Hart Merriam give us inspiring descriptions of what the Natural West was only two centuries ago.
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1:04 Speaker 02 When American explorers first entered the West, they found an unfamiliar world of landscapes and animals their journals and accounts preserve as an ecological baseline for what the West was only 200 years ago. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still 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.
1:52 Speaker 02 The wild new world of the American Serengeti.
1:58 Speaker 02 Once, for twenty years, I lived on the Great Plains of the West. I've never been so impressed with a landscape. If you can suspend disbelief over that sentence for a moment. I grew up in forests, have lived for the past three decades in or near the Rocky Mountains, and I'm passionately in love with deserts. And I travel to oceans, since, like most of us, I find something hypnotic and satisfying in an ocean beach. But here's the thing: the sea, the woods, the mountains, all suffer in comparison with the prairie. What Romantic Age landscape painters used to call "the sublime," by which they meant
2:42 Speaker 02 "an awe capable of stealing the dialogue in your head," is reachable more easily in vast horizontal plains than in any other kind of setting. That sublimity arises from the plains' unfathomable boundaries and a self-confident grandness of scale combined with an echoless calm, almost monotony of sensory effect. In the years I lived there, I found the Great Plains endlessly stunning me. The place is a sensual feast of the minimal. But I do understand that there's something larger going on here.
3:22 Speaker 02 For at least the past 50,000 years, since we humans left Africa and began to explore the planet, taking the measure of one landscape after another, we seem to have been searching. This may be a simple impulse, for in the literature of exploration, the places that aroused our strongest passions always resembled our original African home. Yellow savannas speckled to the limits of our sight with herds and packs of wild animals. Think of the Maasai Mara and the Serengeti as our temples, the sites of our earliest rememberings of whence we'd come.
4:05 Speaker 02 Two hundred years ago, except for East Africa itself, no part of the globe thrilled us in the same primeval way as the American plains. Today, the plains is a drought and dust-plagued habitat of big farm machinery and hog farms or fracking wells, often ignored or laughed about, flyover country. But once, it was not yet de-buffalowed, de-wolved, de-grassed. Then the Great Plains was one of the marvels of the world. With its amazing ecology of big charismatic animals, the plains enabled Americans and Europeans of all backgrounds to experience home base one last time.
4:50 Speaker 02 Because of that, the plains once was a destination for adventurers, for scientists, and for literary types from around the globe. Out on these vast, horizontal yellow sweeps, in the midst of grassland bison herds and packs of various kinds of wolves and flapping, hooting, scavenging birds, was where American and European scientific and literary travelers rediscovering their home base recorded our first impressions of the American West. It was the early fall in 1804, and for four months, 28-year-old Meriwether Lewis and
5:34 Speaker 02 32-year-old William Clark had been leading their Corps of Discovery up the Missouri through a setting and among animals similar to those of Virginia, where they had both grown up. They had found whitetail deer, black bears, and elk numerous on the Lower River. But late that summer, and geographically they were roughly where today's Nebraska, South Dakota, and Iowa now meet, the country began to change. Trees were shorter, horizons were farther away, and on the hills above the river, they no longer had views of continuous forests. What their French hunters called "prairies" were replacing views of trees.
6:18 Speaker 02 The air was growing drier, and the splines and pegs on their keel boats started falling out of their fittings.
6:26 Speaker 02 In the next three weeks, Lewis and Clark passed into the American version of Asia, from which so many of the West's animals had come, or Africa, whose plains these horizontal grasslands resembled. The transformation happened between about 97 and 99 degrees of West longitude, some 200 miles due west of the Mississippi River. If our modern cities had existed then, the zone of change demarcating a kind of an Appalachian America from a Rocky Mountain America would have run roughly through Austin, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Wichita, and Fargo.
7:09 Speaker 02 Today, some of those towns are more intriguing than others, but one of the things they all share is a sense of being on an edge. I grew up a little farther east, but I still recall the powerful feeling of some undefined but profound alteration looming just beyond the Western horizon. The feeling was always there, and it excited me enough that as soon as I could drive a car, I at once went west to see. Lewis and Clark got to experience the change entire. Instructed by Jefferson to seek out any and all new life forms, on August 23, the party killed and dined on the first bison most of them had ever seen.
7:54 Speaker 02 By September 7, they were among their first prairie dogs, colony squirrels that made nests in burrows in the ground rather than in trees. A week later, there was an even more remarkable encounter, what they called a buck goat of this country, more like the antelope or gazella of Africa than any other species of goat.
8:16 Speaker 02 The pronghorn was one of America's original contributions to evolution, the striped thoroughbred of the West. Three days later, the explorers encountered a curious kind of a deer of a dark gray color, the ears large and long, and with a strange pogo stick gait. They'd seen a mule deer, familiar to Spanish settlers in New Mexico and California, but unlike any deer seen by Americans from east of the Big River. This came on the same day they saw a remarkable bird of the species of Corvus. It was their first sighting of a black-billed magpie. "A beautiful thing," Clark wrote.
8:58 Speaker 02 The day after that, in the vicinity of present-day Chamberlain, South Dakota, the explorers encountered another American original. All that September, they'd been seeing what they assumed was some new kind of fox, and on the 18th, William Clark finally shot one. The sleek canid was no fox, though, but it wasn't the eastern wolf the Americans knew either. They decided to call it a prairie wolf. Decades later, nationalists would discover that this was the same animal many native people and Spanish settlers knew as the coyote, the avatar of the Western Indian deity, coyote, and another special contribution from North American evolution.
9:43 Speaker 02 Lewis and Clark had passed through the portal into North America's version of the Serengeti. That analog isn't specious either. Despite Jefferson's hopes, mastodons, mammoths, and camels no longer roam the West, but its historic bestiary preserved poetry and spectacle, with thronging masses of bison playing a role similar to that of East Africa's migrating wildebeests, pronghorns resembling nothing less than antelopes or gazelles, gray wolves filling the niche of wild dogs in Africa, coyotes doing an almost exact impression of jackals, and an ancient American
10:23 Speaker 02 animal that was now fast-returning, escaped wild horses functioning like zebra herds. Africa had retained its lions and its elephants, of course, and its hyenas and cheetahs while America had not, but America's Serengeti had another king of beasts: the grizzly bear.
10:43 Speaker 02 As Lewis and Clark were about to discover, this formidable bear played a lion-like, almost a god-like role in the West. The open country was filled with a cacophony of sound. Pray dog towns loaded the oral space with chirping and trilling. Red-tailed hawks screamed overhead. Bull elk with racks heavy enough to affect how they moved whistled haunting challenges. Bison muttered and bellowed with a sound that resembled faraway continuous thunder. Coyotes yipped and wolves howled the continent's original national anthem, morning and evening and throughout the nights.
11:26 Speaker 02 And grizzly bears, well, grizzly bears had a repertoire of sounds, some hair-raising beyond all experience. These Americans hadn't heard them yet. When they did, they would never forget. They got their first intimation they were in grizzly country on October 7, 1804, when they saw bear tracks three times the size of their footprints. But the fascinating animal of the moment, in part because it was so unprecedented, was the pronghorn. It struck them as an almost inexplicable creature. Having already shot a buck, and now hoping to collect a female for science, Lewis stalked
12:08 Speaker 02 a harem of seven, only to have them whirl away and disappear. In another few minutes, he saw the same band three miles distant. "I had this day an opportunity of witnessing the agility and superior fleetness of this animal, which was to me really astonishing," he wrote in his journal. "When I beheld the rapidity of their flight along the ridge before me, it appeared rather the rapid flight of birds than the motions of quadrupeds."
12:39 Speaker 02 The Americans had no way of knowing that in pronghorns, they were seeing one of the best extant expressions of deep continental evolution. When Mary with the Lewis stood amazed at pronghorn speed, their predators were gray wolves and coyotes, neither of which can run much more than 40 miles an hour. Yet with their light bones, broad nostrils, and windpipes delivering turbocharged oxygen to outsized lungs and hearts, 120-pound buck pronghorns can top 55 miles an hour, and slider does can hit 65 to 70. Female pronghorns, Lewis and Clark ultimately discovered, consistently bore twin fawns. But why?
13:24 Speaker 02 In the manner of gazelles in Africa, pronghorns formed herds that crowded younger animals to the outside. But again, why would they do that? Pronghorns possessed gigantic eyes, as if they were searching for danger at some great distance. The American naturalists were dazzled, but endlessly puzzled at these antelope goats. On October 20th, a week shy of the Mandan villages, where they planned to spend the winter, and in the midst of what they said were great numbers of buffalo, elk, deer, and goats, the Americans got their first look at a white bear, by which they meant a grizzly.
14:07 Speaker 02 In a premonition of the relationship they would soon forge with grizzlies, they shot it. But the bear seemed to shrug off the hit and escaped. That winter of 1804-5, they heard many grizzly stories from their Mandan hosts, whose awe of and respect for the giant bears actually had the Americans snickering in private.
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17:33 Speaker 02 Heading up the Missouri in the spring of 1805, the Americans got their first sense of grizzly natural history in what is now North Dakota, about halfway between today's Minot and Williston. Notice, first, that these cities are far out on the Great Plains, which in fact was a primary grizzly range in the West. The party found drowned bison washed up on the riverbanks, as well as many tracks of the white bear of enormous size, as they put it. They were seeing proof that grizzlies scavenged buffalo casualties. Over the next two weeks, as the expedition pushed upriver towards the present Montana border,
18:17 Speaker 02 bear tracks in the river mud increased, but the only bears they glimpsed, as they put it, are at a great distance and generally running from us. The Indian account of them does not correspond with our experience so far, Lewis confided to his journal. That was about to change. On the morning of April the 29th, walking along the shore, Lewis encountered two grizzlies and shot both of them. One escaped, but the other, a young male, at once came after the explorer, pursuing Lewis until more shots downed him. This young animal was the first grizzly bear Lewis was able to examine close up. The legs of this bear are somewhat longer than those of the black,
19:02 Speaker 02 as are its talons and tusks, incomparably larger and longer. Its color is yellowish-brown, the eyes small, black and piercing. The fur is finger-thicker and deeper than that of the black bear. While he contended that it is a much more ferocious and formidable animal, and will frequently pursue the hunter when wounded, Lewis also concluded that, against their heavy rifles, grizzlies were by no means as formidable or dangerous as they have been presented. That was a foolhardy arrogance about American technology. And a few days later, on May the 5th,
19:42 Speaker 02 an encounter with a fully grown bear would sow the first seeds of doubt. This time, they came up against a most tremendous-looking animal, and extremely hard to kill, notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs, and five others in various parts. They also began to perceive the individuality of grizzly personalities. This bear did not attack, but instead made the most tremendous roaring from the moment he was shot, then swam to a sandbar and took 20 minutes to die. Doing a kind of field autopsy, Lewis found the bear's heart to be the size of that of a large ox. The maw, ten times the size of a black bear's,
20:27 Speaker 02 was filled with flesh and the fish the bear had been catching when he had been unfortunate enough to fall under the gaze of the American travelers. In his journal, William Clark wrote that this bear "was the largest of the carnivorous kind I ever saw." Around the campfire that night, several members of the party decided their curiosity about grizzly bears is pretty well satisfied.
20:54 Speaker 02 But this was a group of men straight out of the colonial experience. They were used to shooting virtually every animal they saw. With grizzlies, in almost every case, they were firing on an unsuspecting animal, minding its own business. Unless they're guarding a carcass, surprised at close range, or are females protecting their young, grizzly bears don't normally charge people. But they don't react well to being attacked. As this rodeo repeated again and again, the bears increasingly assumed the role, in the explorer's journal accounts, of monsters. In Lewis's almost classic line, "These bear being so hard to die rather intimidates us
21:38 Speaker 02 all." And there was an obvious solution to that. He could have just told his men to stop shooting every grizzly they encountered. But of course, that was not the American way. I know what it's like to be charged by a grizzly bear. In 20 years of living in Montana with grizzly bears in the mountains, I never had a bad bear encounter. But I have had the experience of seeing a grizzly come on at full gallop, so I struggle to understand intentionally provoking a grizzly bear, like some frat party dare, by shooting it in the ribs with a muzzleloader. My own 30 or so seconds with a charging grizzly was in Alaska.
22:22 Speaker 02 Our group saw a grizzly up ahead, climbing a riverbank. As we approached the spot, my companions and I were suddenly presented with the heart-stopping vision of a chestnut-blond grizzly, launching at full speed directly at us. All the eye could register were detached details: rippling fur in the sunlight, tiny and focused eyes, glimpses of curved white fangs, and an irresistible onward motion, closing the distance too fast to register. Then our guide loosed a piercing whistle that skidded the bear to a stop barely sixty feet away. Handsome, symmetrical face and upright ears scanning, the bear's black eyes suddenly locked.
23:07 Speaker 02 A split second "what the fuck" crossed his face, followed by a studied, almost nonchalant turn to his right, and then like a quarter horse under quirk, he was bounding and crashing through the dwarf willows as hard as he could run, away from us. After a few minutes of "the gods were still alive" confusion, we realized what had happened. The bear had heard our voices bouncing off a distant cut bank, thought that's where we were, and had fled in exactly the wrong direction. The charge we just experienced was actually a grizzly bear, running for its life to escape us.
23:51 Speaker 02 Meriwether Lewis didn't tell his men that science had been satisfied, though, so they just kept tempting fate. At one point, six of them approached to within forty yards of a grizzly grazing quietly on spring grass in the open prairie. Four men shot him while two reserved their fire. In an instant, this monster ran at them with "open mouth," Lewis scribbled that night. They finally perforated the bear with eight balls, each hit only serving to direct the furious animal to the shooter, until several of them had to dive off a twenty-foot cliff into the river. In a rage, the bear plunged off the bank right after them, before finally expiring.
24:34 Speaker 02 The stories of these needless assaults on grizzly bears raised no eyebrows back east when the Lewis and Clark journals went into print, but they did manage to lay the blame on the bears, giving the grizzly its Linnaean name, Ursus hauribulus.
24:51 Speaker 02 Lewis and Clark ended up encountering, usually confronting, 37 grizzly bears during the course of their expedition. By following rivers, they were conducting what field biology calls line transect sampling. Bear ecologists believe Lewis and Clark's experiences on the Missouri in 1804, 1806, give us a good feel for how many grizzly bears were in the West when Americans first arrived. The Americans saw all their grizzlies in a thousand mile stretch in the high plains east of the main chain of the Rockies. They saw no grizzlies at all in the depths of the mountains or in the Pacific Northwest,
25:32 Speaker 02 and their line transect obviously missed grizzlies farther south, in California, for example, or in Colorado, the desert southwest. Nonetheless, 37 bears in roughly a thousand miles means they were seeing a bear roughly every 25 miles. As ecology infers population demographics, that translates to nearly four grizzly bears in every block of ground 10 miles by 10 miles. In the 1.5 million square miles of the grizzly bears range in the Lower 48, from California to the western edges of Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Iowa, bear ecologists estimate
26:14 Speaker 02 that in the early 1800s, some 56,000 grizzly bears ranged across the West. The Americans' line transect missed a great deal of the bird and animal riches of the West, which is why Jefferson planned other scientific explorations, and why the rest of the 19th century featured new US expeditions into the West every subsequent decade. Though tragically depressive, Meriwether Lewis was a kind of self-taught American Humboldt, a brilliant field naturalist for whom evidence-based science appealed more than religion or supernatural explanations.
26:56 Speaker 02 So it wasn't just grizzly bears or pronghorns, coyotes or magpies the party introduced to the new scientific understanding of nature in the West. Among their many other discoveries were bighorn sheep. These animals bound from rock to rock and stand apparently in the most careless manner on the sides of precipices of many hundreds of feet. They are very shy and are quick of both scent and sight. The horns occupy the crown of the head almost entirely, is how they put it. They also saw Plains' gray wolves, the shepherds of the buffalo herds, they said. Black-tailed deer, a version of mule deer. Roosevelt's elk, like blacktails, a Pacific Northwest variation.
27:41 Speaker 02 Mountain goats, whitetail jackrabbits, swift foxes, western badgers, numerous species of ground squirrels. And beyond the mammals, all of these: cutthroat and steelhead trout, white sturgeon, two new species of rattlesnakes, horned toads. As for birds, prairie chickens, four new corvids including western ravens, sage grouse and five other new species of grouse, three new geese including the lesser Canadian, five new species of woodpeckers among them a western piliated woodpecker and a woodpecker named after Meriwether Lewis. Three new jays including the pinion jay, a new nighthawk and a new poorwill, the western
28:26 Speaker 02 meadowlark, the western tanager, the western mourning dove, the long-billed curlew, three new gulls and two new terns, more prairie birds, the prairie horned lark and McCown's longspur, and among several other birds, the whistling swan. When they return with their specimens and their voluminous notes, and despite their having seen wild horses fat as seals grazing the Colombian gorge, all hope that the West might hold living mastodons or camels faded. The West offered up a completely different America than the East, which now seem to
29:06 Speaker 02 many partly tropical and partly European, but with no elephants anywhere, extinction appeared to be final, even in the West.
29:19 Speaker 02 In the West, the world still seemed dewy, fresh, an American Eden. The naturalists who went there were ecstatic. In Lewis and Clark's time, American universities were only barely starting to turn out "trained field naturalists." It's why no real naturalist accompanied Lewis and Clark. Trained naturalists weren't long in coming, but most were Europeans. Thomas Nuttall, for example, arrived from Yorkshire in 1808 at the age of 22, and at once came to the attention of a prominent American professor of the natural sciences, Benjamin Smith Barton of the University of Pennsylvania.
30:01 Speaker 02 Barton had been Jefferson's advisor on natural sciences for the president's Western expeditions. One of his students, Dr. Peter Custis, as I'll relate in another podcast, became the first American-trained scientist to explore the West. Barton became a Nuttall advocate, though, introducing him to William McClure of the American Philosophical Society, who nominated Nuttall for membership in the Society. With patrons like these, Nuttall got to explore across the West for the next three decades. In 1818 and 1819, Nuttall embarked on a natural history expedition to the edge of the southern prairies.
30:42 Speaker 02 Nuttall's route took him diagonally, southeast to northwest, across the Arkansas Territory, then westward as far as central Oklahoma, and on south to the Red River and the border of Spanish Texas. If you read Nuttall's Southwestern Journal today, it's clear he was naturalizing along the edge of that great ecological change from east to west. The change made a huge impression on almost everyone.
31:13 Speaker 02 Every traveler who entered the Great Plains from the east had an experience like Nuttall's. The ecotone that marked this ecological boundary sometimes changed the country from east to west in no more than 20 or 30 miles. In 1819, Nuttall traveled right down that seam from the present Tulsa area, southward along the western stretches of the Wasatchtaw Mountains to the Red River, moving in and out of prairie country like an immense meadow covered with luxuriant herbage and beautifully decorated flowers, he said. And he encountered there bison, of course, which were the commonest mammal marker of the edge of the prairie.
31:54 Speaker 02 Then in 1819 and 1820, a government expedition led by Stephen Long explored the Colorado Front Range and returned across the plains, thinking that they were examining one of President Jefferson's targeted rivers in the west, the Red River of the South. Long's naturalists included Edwin James, Thomas Say, and Say was the grandson of the famed 18th-century American naturalist John Bartram, and painters Samuel Seymour and Titian Peel. Crossing today's Texas and Oklahoma plains, and they were actually on the Canadian River rather than the Red, they traveled through what they called inconceivable numbers of
32:38 Speaker 02 herbivorous animals and innumerable birds and beasts of prey. Herds of wild horses 500 strong surrounded them, and with disease epidemics still suppressing Native American populations, the animals were all so tame that they appeared wholly unaccustomed to the sight of men. "The bison's and the wolves moved slowly off to the right and left, leaving a lane for the party to pass through," Long wrote. Long's official report claimed that the western plains seemed peculiarly adapted as a range for buffaloes, wild goats, and other wild game, and he concluded that country was best left just as they had found it.
33:24 Speaker 02 Seymour's and Peel's paintings portraying the west as a paradise of animals and landscapes were the first visual representations of the inland west the world ever saw.
33:37 Speaker 02 The accolades kept coming, too. Englishman John Bradbury, a romantic nature lover who accompanied fur trade parties for safety, had never seen the like. The buffaloes, elks, and antelopes had made paths which were covered with grass and flowers. I have never seen a place, however embellished by art, equal to this in beauty. American John Kirk Townsend, who accompanied Nutall with a fur trading party up the Platte River in 1834, thought the pronghorn in particular “one of the most beautiful animals I ever saw.” As it bounds over the plain, it seems scarcely to touch the ground, so exceedingly light and agile are its motions.
34:21 Speaker 02 On crossing South Pass over the Rockies, Townsend wrote, “I never before saw so great a variety of birds in the same space. All were beautiful and many were new to me.” He sent his collections of western birds, like the Townsend Solitaire, for example, and his animal scans to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. As travelers moved from the east and began to enter the west, bison, elk, pronghorns, coyotes, and prairie dogs were always the new animals whose presence coincided with the first appearances of a grassland-dominated landscape.
35:02 Speaker 02 Americans in the 19th century were fascinated sensory observers of these changes, and repeatedly recorded a predictable progression. Explorer John C. Fremont’s journey westward from Chateau’s Landing on the Missouri in the year 1842 captured it. “A months’ travel up the Kansas River, as the woodlands opened into sweeping grassy prairies, Fremont began to report pronghorns running over the hills.” The next day, he noticed that artemisia, or sagebrush, had become common. The day after that, elk began to appear on the river. Within a week after that, they were among the buffalo herds, and at that point, wolves
35:46 Speaker 02 in great numbers surrounded us during the night, howling and trotting about.
35:52 Speaker 02 It had become clear that the task of a close examination of the West and describing all these brand-new species to Western science was going to take decades. And indeed, with explorations by topographical engineers like Fremont in the 1840s, William Emery marveling at the desert southwest on the Mexican Boundary Survey in the 1850s, John Wesley Powell's descents of the Grand Canyon for the U.S. Geological Survey in the 1870s, and the work of C. Hart Merriam's Biological Survey in the 1890s, this was a scientific task that took up the whole of the 19th century.
36:36 Speaker 02 By its end, though, science and the American government had laid out for the world not just the Great Plains, but the landscapes and animal life of the whole of the American West. The American public and just about everyone else was bewitched. Despite all the change and all the loss, that magical sense of the West has never yet gone away. In Wallace Stegner's timeless phrase, "The region remains today a geography of hope."
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40:38 Speaker 04 In this episode, a lot of what you talk about is Euro-Americans crossing this ecological gradient in the continent. Sort of the revelation of all these new species and this unfamiliar bestiary and, you know, the plains, right? And I'm just curious, what strikes me about that is I had my own, I mean, obviously, it's like a very different experience in 2008, but I remember when I was 21, getting in my truck and driving west and having this sort of immersive experience and watching
41:22 Speaker 04 the land change underneath your feet. I know you grew up in Louisiana. And I sort of, I wonder what your, what your personal journey was like for the first time crossing into the west?
41:38 Speaker 02 Well, I, I had an absolute fascination with what was immediately to the west of me, because I grew up in northwestern Louisiana, in Caddo Parish, which is near Shreveport, is in Caddo Parish. And my family had been in Louisiana for 300 years. And I knew that we had, in our background, we had stories still. And when I was in graduate school, I got to read about, read actual accounts of some of these people who were traders to the tribes up the Red River.
42:23 Speaker 02 And so I kind of had this sense of I had ancestors who had gone up the Red River and gone into the West. And so I was really fascinated with it. And as soon as my parents would, and I got a driver's license, and my parents thought that I could be trusted to go overnight or for a couple of nights, the first thing I did in a car was to drive straight west. And I only drove to, I drove past Dallas and Fort Worth, where the country really, Fort Worth, it really begins to change. You're in what's called the Grand Prairie. And so it really opens up.
43:05 Speaker 02 And I drove about as far west, I think, as Wichita Falls or something, and then turned up north into Oklahoma and drove through some of southern Oklahoma up to Lawton, which is where the Comanches and the Kiows and the Southern Cheyennes ended up. And also the Caddo's who had come out of the country where I grew up. And then drove back to Louisiana. But I've never gotten over the experience of that. And one of the things that I've always remembered about it, two things I really remember about it at night was that when the night fell, I was used to living in a country where you couldn't see 100 yards because of the density of the forest.
43:47 Speaker 02 And when night fell, I began to see the lights of towns that appeared to be 20, 30 miles away. And I thought that was tremendously exciting. And then the other thing that I got to see at night was it looked like the stars were Bigger, polished, the night skies looked far more vibrant than I was ever used to in, in Louisiana. So, in, in those ways, I mean, I didn't see many animals, you know, and I was hoping to see pronghorns and prairie dogs and I don't remember seeing very many animals, but I, I got at least to see that change, that ecological change. And I think that's been
44:32 Speaker 02 something magical for people coming out of the east for a long time. I think, you know, the Spaniards coming up from, say, Mexico through the Chihuahua Desert to Santa Fe or to California, they didn't experience that kind of transformation. But going from the east and entering the west for the first time, I think was really moving. That's, that's one of the things I was trying to kind of describe in, in this episode.
44:59 Speaker 00 I met this kid one time that had moved from Florida. He was living down by Fort Myers, Florida. And he moved to Bozeman, Montana. And he was telling me he didn't like it because it was such a big town. And I said, well, this town's not a fraction in size of Fort Myers. He goes, but yeah, but you can see it all. In Fort Myers, you don't know how big it is.
45:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's, that's exactly it. Yeah, you can see it. And, you know, the ability to see the world is, to me, a really powerful thing. I mean, and I, you know, as I kind of argued in this episode, and a lot of this comes from my book, American Serengeti. I mean, I think this is kind of a genetic memory because I think this, humans, we sort of emerged into who we were in the open country of Africa. And I think we were there for a very long time. I mean, you know, I've even, I'm convinced that this is true. I've never really seen any scientific corroboration for it, but I think the reason
46:09 Speaker 02 we, everybody sets the thermostat at 72 degrees or somewhere around 72 degrees, whether you're in Edmonton or you're down in Mexico City is because we grew, we come in a evolutionary sense from a place where that was what we evolved to.
46:25 Speaker 00 The mean, the mean temperature.
46:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, that was the mean temperature. That was what was comfortable to humans. And so one of the things that enabled us to go around the world was the invention of fire because we could go to much colder places and keep it 72 degrees around the campfire. So yeah, I think that there's a, you know, beyond just staying warm or cooler or whatever, there's a genetic memory of that kind of open landscape that is pretty deep in us. And it certainly has, it moves me.
46:56 Speaker 00 What do you think of when you, when you imagine a, a sort of baseline for North American ecology? You know, there are people, we've had some, you know, you and I have some exposure to folks at colossal biosciences who are looking at like an ecological baseline being pre-human for North America, meaning that the interest in like bringing back woolly mammoths and other things. I tend to, when I picture in my mind, like what it ought to look like, I always go to
47:41 Speaker 00 it ought to look like what Lewis and Clark saw.
47:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:46 Speaker 00 Do you know what I mean? Like, like it's, it seems achievable in some ways and some places it's achievable. It just seems like that. If we're talking about what was it like? It was that day.
47:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:59 Speaker 04 Do you know what I mean? It was that day.
48:00 Speaker 02 No, I'm, I'm there too.
48:02 Speaker 04 Where do you, where do you sit on that?
48:03 Speaker 02 No, that's, that's, that's where I am too. When I, when I imagine, you know, the West as I ideally want it to be, it's that world. And I think that's one of the great things that the Lewis and Clark expedition did for us is it gave us a mental image of what the West was like before it really was being degraded. And, and, you know, just kind of eaten away at the edges. And Lewis and Clark, I think they saw it at a moment when it still was the country
48:45 Speaker 02 that, you know, native people had been living in and had managed. And that all those populations of wild creatures were still there and still healthy. And so they give us an image of what that was. I think that's part of the fascination with Lewis and Clark. And it's only about three decades later that it really starts coming unraveled. Uh, but man, their image of it is, is a really powerful thing. Yeah, that's the one for me. And I, you know, so Steve and I are both involved with colossal biosciences and they kind of have a Pleistocene idea of, of how they would like the world to look. And I would love to see that, but you can kind of go to Africa, you know, and see the
49:30 Speaker 02 Pleistocene. It still exists in places like Kenya and Tanzania and South Africa. But, uh, this particular world, it's the, the Lewis and Clark world is really a special one.
49:45 Speaker 04 In this episode, you draw a lot on the descriptions of naturalists who are experiencing this world for the first time.
49:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
49:57 Speaker 04 And it strikes like, obviously Lewis wasn't a trained naturalist, but his description of pronghorn moving, I think is probably better than anything that I could imagine. I mean, that sort of makes the hair on my neck stand up, but. I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about this whole genre of travel writing and sort of where it's strongest in terms of capturing what the world looked like and where there are omissions or blind spots in these naturalists that are headed west.
50:30 Speaker 02 Well, I think that this kind of natural history travel writing is one of the foundations of American literature. I mean, I think, you know, you can certainly, you can trace it back to people like William Bartram, for example, who with his book Travels, which he wrote in 1791, was the first book written by an American that really attracted the attention of, you know, the European intellectual and literary community. And they finally decided, well, these Americans, you know, they may turn out to amount to something after all. And I think that established a tradition and you can track it through time, right
51:10 Speaker 02 into Edward Abbey or somebody like that. I mean, it's, and it appears in every decade through most of American history. I mean, from Thoreau to Abbey and then back to William Bartram in the 1790s, there's just a continuous thread of this. I think what is distinctive a little bit about the American situation in writing about the West, traveling to the West, writing about all these animals they're seeing, adding them all to science, to Western science, to Linnaean science, giving, placing everything into a family and a genus and
51:52 Speaker 02 creating a species, is that it doesn't ever quite rise to the point of doing what, say, physics was doing, which was coming up with a big explanatory theory to sort of cover everything from an apple falling on Newton's head to, you know, the Earth revolving around the sun and Jupiter's moons revolving around Jupiter and...
52:32 Speaker 02 What they kept doing was just kind of adding more pebbles to the pile, stacking the pebbles higher and higher and higher. And then along comes somebody like Charles Darwin, who is 25 years old, is actually in college in order to become an ordained minister, and happens to get a gig on the USS Beagle, and travels around a lot of the world and comes back, and has an epiphany that no human being in history has ever had. I suddenly understand, he realizes at the age of about 26 or 27, why there is such a diversity of life on the planet. I understand how it works.
53:17 Speaker 02 And that was always been to me when I've studied American naturalists and all these people going west and writing all these wonderful accounts, like the Long Expedition account of traveling through huge herds of bison and wild horses, and the wolves and the bison just sort of move out of the way and lets you go through. I mean, I love those descriptions, but they never, none of the Americans ever got to the point of understanding the big picture. And, you know, once Darwin publishes on the Origin of Species in 1859, then certainly we began to have, whether you're an American or not, you begin to have plenty of opportunity to start plugging your work into this theory.
54:00 Speaker 00 So far, he's that age, because he looks like he was, you see, he looks like he was born old. It's hard to picture Darwin.
54:08 Speaker 02 It's hard to picture him at 25. Well, you know, I mean, we, right, he does kind of, we always see him, you know, as this scraggly haired old guy.
54:16 Speaker 00 And like the black wool, he just looks like, he looks like he was born ancient.
54:20 Speaker 02 But I mean, part of it is that he waits for 35 years before he ever writes the damn book. And he knows this all through the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s. He knows how it all works, but he says, you know, at one point, he said, If I wrote about this, it would be like committing murder.
54:39 Speaker 00 Hmm.
54:39 Speaker 02 You know, it would, I just, and then of course Wallace writes him a letter and says, you know, I could sort of come up with something. I'm not sure what to call it, you know, Darwin had already resolved on the idea of natural selection. I'm not sure what to call it, but it looks like to me, this is how nature works. And that's when Darwin decided, okay, I've got to, I've got to publish. Can't keep sitting on this.
55:03 Speaker 00 In your, in your episode, you, you talk about Lewis and Clark, um, coming out and just they're like, they can't help themselves, but try to mix it up with grizzlies.
55:14 Speaker 02 I can't help.
55:15 Speaker 00 Like they see it and they're like, it just, we're just going to have to go over and shoot it.
55:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:22 Speaker 00 There's a, there was a Nez Perce man named Yellow Wolf. I told you I was going to ask you about Yellow Wolf. There's a Nez Perce man named Yellow Wolf, who after the Nez Perce War, uh, 1877, he goes into Canada with Sitting Bull. And they go in, I don't know what, what we'd call it. They're like, uh, how would you describe when they go into Canada?
55:44 Speaker 02 Well, they're refugees.
55:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, they become refugees and trying to escape the US military.
55:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:50 Speaker 00 But some of these, of these hundreds of people that are up there, young guys, kind of trickle back down just to go see what's going on, you know, back where they used to live. And in this, in this character, Yellow Wolf and a couple of the young men just start filtering the way back down, down through the Great Plains and into the Rockies, um, around the Bitterroot Mountains. But Yellow Wolf would describe that
56:16 Speaker 00 he had that same problem Lewis and Clark had. Like when he ran into a grizzly, he had to confront it, but it was like a personal calling of his. He just, he knew it was unusual, that he had to confront it. He had to go after it. It was like part of his identity. Um, that seems to be like, like, that would be anomalous, right? I mean, doesn't it seem like most of the tribes in the Great Plains and inner Mountain West, you know, avoided the animals?
56:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
56:45 Speaker 00 Is that like, is there a fair way to, is there like a fair way to sort of encapsulate what the attitude was toward grizzly bears?
56:51 Speaker 02 Well, I think the attitude, you know, it was in some ways individualistic as Yellow Wolf's experiences kind of imply.
57:01 Speaker 02 There were some people who I think believe that in order to establish your credentials as a warrior or a potential leader of your people, I mean, a grizzly, taking on a grizzly bear was equivalent to taking on someone else in battle.
57:16 Speaker 00 Okay.
57:16 Speaker 02 Because this was an animal that was equally dangerous.
57:20 Speaker 00 Oh, so you do encounter tails like that?
57:23 Speaker 02 You do encounter, yeah, you do encounter some tails like that. You know, and even in, and I'll talk about this in a, in a later episode, when I talk about the, the safaris that, you know, all these European elites began to take in the West from the 1830s on, they were doing it in Africa at the same time, too. And they were going out on, they called it prairie fever, they would go out on the Great Plains and, and.
57:54 Speaker 00 Me and Randall felt that.
57:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:55 Speaker 04 Yeah. Every now and then.
57:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, prairie fever. So, one of the things that they, that some of the people who had experiences in Africa prior to coming to North America would do was they would equate a battle with a grizzly bear as the same thing as shooting a lion in Africa. And so, if you took on a lion in Africa and you won that contest, then this was something in North America that was the, the equivalent. So, people actually did that, and I've got, I'll tell in a later podcast, a really kind of funny story about a guy who was determined to do that, and it didn't turn out quite the way he was hoping that it would, but.
58:36 Speaker 00 Well, let me ask you.
58:39 Speaker 00 I was gonna say the same thing in a different way, but it's a different question.
58:44 Speaker 00 Just like today, just like today in grizzly bear country, you can just go out and walk down a trail, you know, do nothing wrong. There's a bear and it's got a dead moose calf. You stumble into it. It's response is to, you know, to get you away from it.
59:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
59:00 Speaker 00 It hits you, maybe bites you. And if it, and if it goes wrong for you, you're just dead.
59:07 Speaker 02 Yep.
59:08 Speaker 00 Right? And this bear didn't put any thought into it. It took him 10 seconds and he just was simply saying, "Don't take my thing." Right? That had to be happening.
59:19 Speaker 02 Oh, it did happen.
59:19 Speaker 00 Like, you mean, like, it had to be a part of, it had to be a part of native life that you just now and then stumbled into the wrong thing and people got killed by grizzlies.
59:28 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, they did. I mean, so the, you know, the Hugh Glass story is one of the classic ones. That's the one that they made into the Revenant.
59:35 Speaker 00 Hmm.
59:37 Speaker 02 And that's one where it obviously happened to a mountain man.
59:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
59:41 Speaker 02 Where he just happens to, he's at the wrong place at the wrong time and he stumbles into a bear and it becomes one of the epic Western stories. I mean, I tell the story in American Serengeti of one of these kind of events happening in the 1820s, a little earlier than Hugh Glass, down in Colorado, where a bunch of guys out of Arkansas and Louisiana, who I'm convinced have no idea what the hell a grizzly bear is. They make a camp and cops of willows at the base of, pretty close to Pike's Peak. And while they're making camp, somebody lets out a shout, "Bear, bear!" And this one guy, and this seems to be something fairly common
1:00:25 Speaker 02 in these grizzly bear encounters. I mean, this is a group of 25 or 30 people. The bear singles out one guy and goes after this one guy. And this guy cannot get away. He climbs up a tree and the bear drags him out of the tree. And finally, they manage, the other, other guys in the group managed to kill the bear. I mean, he's a big, old male. And the guy that the bear has been going after, you know, I mean, he's still alive. And they all sit around camp and ask, "So are you okay? How are you doing? It looks like you're gonna, you're gonna be okay, man. That was incredible." And the guy says, "Nope. I heard my skull break. I ain't gonna make it."
1:01:09 Speaker 02 And as they sat around that night, they said he got quieter and quieter. And during the night, one of the guys got up and went over to check on him and they could see something running out of the side of his head where the bear had only one canine left, but that one canine had penetrated his skull and by morning he had died. But that kind of thing where you just happen and don't really have any idea what's going on, you know, I mean, Lewis and Clark were saying, damn, there's a bear. Let's, you know, let's get five or six guys and you hold your fire. Yeah. But this was happening to people where they had no, they were just stumbling into the experience.
1:01:53 Speaker 00 And presumably it had to have happened to Native Americans.
1:01:55 Speaker 02 Oh yeah, there's no doubt it did.
1:01:56 Speaker 00 Yeah. Well, Dan, thanks again, man. Look forward to talking about the next show.
1:02:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's been fun. Fun with you guys. Thank you.
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