Pod Insights Gunfighters Ep. 06: Survivors From A Lost World | The American West About this episode 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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1:04 Speaker 02 Since Americans encountered the beautiful western pronghorn, we've struggled to understand an animal that looked like a gazelle but couldn't jump, could outrun all its predators by 20 miles per hour, yet like bison, was on the cliff of extinction by 1900. I'm Dan Florries 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.
1:57 Speaker 02 Survivors from a Lost World.
2:03 Speaker 02 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 Virginian named Peter Custis, who from Louisiana was taking a wistful look up the Red River of the South in the year 1806. 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 19th century. But the Louisiana Purchase had just doubled the size of the United States, and Custis's wonderment about a likely African-type antelope roaming the horizontal yellow prairies
2:47 Speaker 02 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, the antelopes that Custis heard about were very real.
3:15 Speaker 02 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 50 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 the strands. The impact of thwanging explosion of white hairs
4:00 Speaker 02 drifting in the wind as he trotted off, daydreaming of... Well, what do pronghorns daydream about?
4:09 Speaker 02 As my panic for him subsided, I decided I ought to try to find out.
4:24 Speaker 02 When Americans finally made it to the Great Plains at the beginning of the 19th 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 pronghorns are not true antelopes. The Antelopecapridae, antelope goats, emerged as a distinctly American family of animals roughly 25 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
5:07 Speaker 02 biologists who think pronghorn's closest living relatives are in the family Giraffeidae, the giraffes, whose legs resemble pronghorn legs. Whatever their origins in ancient America, modern pronghorns are actually just like us. They're a 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 Antelopecapridae actually consisted of two major big subfamilies. The earlier of these subfamilies included several species of graceful, dainty ungulates
5:51 Speaker 02 possessed of permanent, multi-branched antler-like horns. This group of creatures was extinct by the end of the Maya scene, around 5.3 million years ago, but they gave rise to the other subfamily, which soon replaced them on 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, not much larger than a jackrabbit.
6:32 Speaker 02 So this quite real version of a jackalope still sprinted across the Great Plains as late as 10,000 years ago.
6:42 Speaker 02 Occasionally, four-horned fawns are still born to pronghorns as one genetic reminder among a great number, as we're about to see, of the pronghorn's deep and varied past. Antilocapra americana, our present-day pronghorn from this evolutionary family dating back 25 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 1997, a biologist named John Byers, who had spent years studying pronghorn behavior
7:25 Speaker 02 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. Byers's provocative argument finally made clear much about an animal that had seemed inexplicable to 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 Byers agreed, a grasslands
8:09 Speaker 02 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 critical role in pronghorn history over the past 150 years.
8:37 Speaker 02 Pronghorns are one of only a handful of great plains species that managed to survive the epic extinction crash that ended the Pleistocene 10,000 years ago. A bestiary simplification that still stands as the most profound ecological alteration in America since the extinction of the dinosaurs. In the biography of a species like us—or pronghorns, however—the Pleistocene was only a few heartbeats in the past. So what if much about the behavior of modern pronghorns has little to do with their present circumstances as we find them?
9:17 Speaker 02 The primary predators of pronghorns for the past 10,000 years, we know, have been wolves and coyotes, neither of which is capable flat-out of running much more than about 40 to 45 miles an hour. Pronghorns, on the other hand, are the Ferraris of the American natural world. Their delicate bones and frames and remarkably low body fat keep them light, while broad nostrils and a huge windpipe deliver turbocharged oxygen to their outsized lungs and heart. Pedal-to-the-metal, they top 85 kilometers per hour at a dead run. Some 55 miles an hour for the 120-pound males, and as high as 65 to 70 miles per hour for
10:02 Speaker 02 the lighter females. That's as fast as an African cheetah. Pronghorns can also run at 90% of top end for more than two miles. Like horses, to detect predators at great distances, they too evolved gigantic eyes. Pronghorn behavior features other oddities. Like Thompson's gazelles and other African ungulates pursued by big cats, pronghorns 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.
10:45 Speaker 02 The lower-ranking, less dominant animals get pushed to the outer margins where, if pronghorns were on the African veld, the low-ranking members would be in much greater danger from predatory attacks. But as adults, American pronghorns have no predators at all.
11:02 Speaker 02 Because of their impossible speed, once they're grown, pronghorns are subject to predation only as fawns. If a pronghorn fawn survives to six or eight months of age, it will join all other surviving fawns and living to the ripe old age of 11 or 12 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, in a world where gray wolves and coyotes, and maybe occasionally a mountain lion are their threats, do pronghorns express so much protective excess? The question John Byers posed then was this:
11:47 Speaker 02 What if most of their physical characteristics and behavior are actually adaptations to a lost world that winked out around them 10,000 years ago? Leaving pronghorns still living out their existence among us, reacting to a world of ghosts?
12:07 Speaker 02 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 of the Pleistocene Great Plains. Pronghorns emerged in their modern form at a time when the American plains was the scene of one of the great assemblages of savannah-stepped creatures anywhere on Earth. A more diverse collection of animals than present today in the Serengeti or the Maasai Mara. Along with the elephants and long-horned bison and enormous herds of horses, along with bands of numerous types of camels and deer, and of course elk and pronghorns, the Pleistocene plains featured an array of truly formidable predators
12:50 Speaker 02 that hunted and scavaged among all those millions of ungulates. Pronghorns then spent the better part of four million years perfecting their ability to survive where large and fast predators looked hungrily at them over bright teeth.
13:07 Speaker 02 There were grassile, active, and aggressive, short-faced bears. The Smilodon's are saber-toothed cats that attacked mammoth calves. A steadily changing lineup of wolf and coyote packs. There were jaguars and cougars, along with the steppe lion, a far larger version of the African lion. As predators of the fastest grazers, the horses and pronghorns, there was a slender-limbed, lion-sized, running cat known as the scimitar cat, along with a particularly rapid and legging American hunting hyena. And there were two species of large American false cheetahs, cats from the same evolutionary
13:51 Speaker 02 line that produced cougars, but with elongated curved spines, long legs, and wide nostrils for gulping air in open-country pursuit or in rockslide ambushes. These vanished creatures of the ancient plains, at least so biologists like Byers now argue, however long ago they passed the veil of extinction, are 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 once breathtakingly beautiful, yet outrageously overbuilt relics that have
14:35 Speaker 02 outlasted the conditions that created them. They offer almost our only remaining glimpse of the American Pleistocene.
14:51 Speaker 02 Like most wild ungulates then or 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 join 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 Teton National Park, but still migrates more
15:34 Speaker 02 than 200 miles south to near Green River, Wyoming in winter. This inclination to migrate before severe winter storms was adaptive in the wild, but coupled with their inclination not to jump obstacles, ultimately would produce tragedy in the late 19th century, when legendary winters in the 1880s sent pronghorns southward by the thousands into a new world of barbed wire. In the spring, 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.
16:14 Speaker 02 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 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 150 acres, whose perimeter they scent-mark and will use to cloister a harem of females to hide from other males during the rut. In other circumstances, male pronghorns protect harems of females but without defending a territory. Rather than a prime resource location, pronghorn territories actually seem to be merely tactical
16:58 Speaker 02 space for defending females. Pronghorn bucks fight over females, too, in violent, quick, and quite often mortal, as high as 15% of the encounters, fights. Reproduction success is the prime directive, and some pronghorn bucks win the lottery. Others spend their entire lives without ever siring any offspring at all.
17:23 Speaker 02 Then there is female selective behavior. Female pronghorns, which reach sexual maturity at 18 months 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 compete for them. What exactly are they looking for? Apparently, they're setting up contests of stamina, speed, and resolve between various
18:03 Speaker 02 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 20 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 gonna show up on the plains again. Pronghorn females have evolved another strategy that's interesting with respect to what it
18:47 Speaker 02 says about both past and present. After a remarkably long gestation period of some 252 days, they give birth not to single offspring, but to litters, specifically litters of two fawns every spring, and they do this throughout their reproductive lives. Twinning, as well as the weeks-long hiding of fawns, which lie motionless and silent for most of a day, are clearly responses to serious predation. They too probably emerged as adaptations to the distant past, when pronghorns lived in a world where they were prey for three or four different predators.
19:31 Speaker 02 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 50% of a pronghorn fawn crop without appreciably affecting pronghorn populations. With litters and with their extremely high adult survivability rates, pronghorns were anciently prepared to survive the culling of even so efficient a predator of fawns as coyotes. While a mother pronghorn will attack and fight a coyote to keep it from her fawns, pronghorn bucks don't defend fawns. Some biologists argue that this is another leftover behavior from the Pleistocene when
20:15 Speaker 02 fast predators 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 cud-shooting ruminants capable of processing forbs and shrubs, pronghorns demonstrate yet another adaptation to the ancient savanna ecology of Western America. For maybe 400,000 years, pronghorns had been evolving a mutualistic relationship with the bison herds. Bison, too, had survived the Pleistocene extinctions and had increased dramatically in their wake, in numbers that likely ranged somewhere between 20 and 30 million animals,
20:59 Speaker 02 depending 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 loco weed, rabbit brush, and sagebrush, bison grazing encouraged forbs and shrubs 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.
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24:46 Speaker 02 So, deep time history created 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 forbs they ate, they spread everywhere, there were vast horizontal plains, and they increased into the millions. The writer Ernest Thompson Seaton famously estimated that in 1800, the moment in time when pronghorns were on the verge of discovery by formal Western science, there were as many as 40 million of them in the West. More recent estimates have advanced original figures of something like 15 million.
25:29 Speaker 02 What we can probably say is that on the Great Plains, where their ranges overlap most precisely, pronghorn numbers very likely matched those of buffalo. We've long thought of the historic era Great Plains as the Great Bison Belt. In truth, it was just as much the Great Pronghorn Savannah.
25:50 Speaker 02 Their range doesn't appear to advance eastward beyond the 97th meridian, though, at least in places like Texas and Mexico, and it doesn't seem to have gone beyond the 93rd meridian farther north in Iowa and Minnesota. But they were found westward, all the way to Baja California and into eastern Oregon and Washington. Southward on the continent, pronghorns were able to colonize the desert grasslands of Mexico, all the way down to the vicinity of Mexico City at 20 degrees latitude, considerably south of where bison ever ventured. Although pronghorns can derive adequate water from the plants they browse in optimal wet
26:33 Speaker 02 years, they do need to drink about 3 1/2 quarts of water a day during hot weather, which limited their numbers in the Great Basin, the Mojave, Chihuahua, and Sonoran deserts. Abundant and widespread as they were, pronghorns attracted the attention of Indian hunters from the very beginning of human arrival. There are butchered pronghorn remains in some of the Clovis and Folsom archaeological sites, so at least some paleo hunters did take the occasional pronghorn to vary a diet of mammoth and bison cuts. But it took 15 or 20 pronghorns to equal the caloric possibilities of a single giant bison.
27:17 Speaker 02 And since pronghorn flesh was so very lean, pronghorns commonly ranked well down the list of pursued prey. Among southwestern peoples, in fact, pronghorns ranked lower than rabbits, even though it took 16 jackrabbits to match the edible flesh of a pronghorn. Native people from hundreds of generations of experience with pronghorns knew how to exploit their weaknesses and utilized pronghorn leather, horns, and hooves for a variety of purposes. One aspect of pronghorn natural history that made them vulnerable to Indian hunters was their disinclination to leave their home ranges. Parts of the West yet show fading evidence of ancient pronghorn corrals, such as the
28:02 Speaker 02 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 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 Plains Indians engaging in the kind of pronghorn surround they often used for bison, again with the goal of getting a pronghorn band to run in circles until the spent and stumbling animals could be ridden down on horseback.
28:48 Speaker 02 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 if pursued by predators, the antelope crowded together in their fright," Dodge wrote, "and thus were easily shot down." When bison were scarce, Plains hunters preferred antelope to deer because you could take an entire herd of pronghorns at once. Because local herds could be completely extirpated by mass techniques like these, Indian hunters often spared some animals in order to preserve the herd stock. Whatever the technique, unlike bison or elk,
29:31 Speaker 02 pronghorns butchered out as all protein and very little precious fat. Their lean body mass may be the reason no tribe ever bothered to domesticate pronghorns, which are actually easier to tame than any African antelope.
29:51 Speaker 02 Among Europeans, pronghorns were first encountered by numerous Spanish travelers on the southern plains and in California, where they were known as "barindos" and by French travelers to the Great Plains, who called them "coules de blanc." Francisco Hernandez's 1651 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 not come to the official notice of Enlightenment-age science until the time of the Jeffersonian expeditions into the New Louisiana Purchase.
30:33 Speaker 02 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark collected the typed specimen of the species for Western science in 1805. Lewis and Clark made more than 200 pronghorn entries in their journals, although they found the animals, like elk and deer, far less numerous west of the Continental Divide. Back east, George Ord, a Philadelphia naturalist and ornithologist who was working up many of the Lewis and Clark specimens, published a scientific description and the Linnaean name for the pronghorn in 1818. Ord recognized that despite their similarities to African antelopes and gazelles, pronghorns
31:13 Speaker 02 were actually unrelated to any existing family of animals that he could find. So Antilocapridae, the family name he devised, and Antilocapra, the genus Ord fashioned for an animal that seemed to combine the traits of both antelopes and goats, have stood ever since. One of the best-selling books of the West in the 19th century was the trader naturalist Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies, first published in 1846. This is what Gregg had to say about the pronghorn. "That species of gazelle, known as the antelope, is very numerous upon the high plains.
31:57 Speaker 02 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 wild as fleet, the hunting of them is very difficult as well."
32:22 Speaker 02 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 1820s. But so long as beaver lasted, or bison roamed in numbers enough to produce robes, hides, and tongues, and as long as wolves and coyotes remained targets of traps and poisoned bait, the market hunt left pronghorns largely alone. Pronghorns had already reaped the whirlwind in mining areas like California, where they were corralled and killed to feed miners. But it was not until bison numbers began to drop that pronghorns finally started to
33:03 Speaker 02 attract attention in the slaughter of Western animals for profit. With more than 5,000 professional hunters in the West in the 1870s and 1880s, 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. Bighorn sheep in the Badlands lasted only a handful of years, and those in the mountains only a handful more. Elk and even deer had mostly fled the open country by that time to the safety of the mountains. In the 1880s, only two primary charismatic animals remained on the Great Plains: wild
33:48 Speaker 02 horses and pronghorns. The horses would get caught and sold to overseas buyers whenever Europeans were involved in wars, or by the 1920s 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 pronghorns had evolved on the Great Plains. They had survived fearsome predators, they'd lived through the Pleistocene extinctions. Erasing them from America was going to require some effort. Naturally, the market hunt, though, was up to the task. There were multiple causes for what began to happen to pronghorns. Homesteading steadily tore up the prairie and pronghorn habitat.
34:32 Speaker 02 Ranchers overstocked the plains with cattle and sheep that undermined vegetation pronghorns depended on. The new barbed wire fences demarcating a west that was fast becoming private property went straight to the pronghorn's evolutionary weakness. Fences preventing the herds from migrating and from escaping winter blizzards. Without bison to trump down the snow, pronghorns couldn't get at the plants they ate anymore. Add fences to block their migrations, and the horrific western winters of the 1880s devastated them. In an event that became all too common, homesteaders in the Texas Panhandle in the winter of 1882
35:15 Speaker 02 discovered more than 1,500 pronghorns, blown like a deck of cards against a curb, trapped and piled many feet high against a barbed wire fence. Even hard-bitten homesteaders were horrified by that. Then, there was the market hunt. The generally poor opinion of pronghorn leather and meat had long kept pronghorns 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 pronghorns, and the story became all too familiar.
35:56 Speaker 02 What had once been millions of wild creatures fell for a pittance in returns. Winter concentrations of pronghorns around the Black Hills got slaughtered in two or three seasons. A hunter in California killed 5,000 of them for their hides when a drought drove almost all the pronghorns in the area to a few remaining water holes. Hunters desperate to keep their market lifestyle going sold pronghorn meat to butchers in Kansas for 2 to 3 cents a pound. In 1873, an Iowa firm shipped some 32,000 pronghorn and deer skins via railroad from
36:37 Speaker 02 the plains, barely making a dollar apiece for all the effort of hunting, skinning, and shipping. When George Bird Grinnell, the great conservationist, alerted future President Teddy Roosevelt to the impact of market hunting, a step that led to the formation of the Boone and Crockett Club to protect American game animals, one of the victims Grinnell mentioned was the pronghorn. That put pronghorns before an influential group. But by the time Roosevelt was president, pronghorn numbers had dropped frighteningly low. In 1800, there may have been 15 million pronghorns in the West, as I mentioned.
37:19 Speaker 02 But in 1899, biologist Vernon Bailey, crossing 100 miles of the Texas Panhandle, counted a mere 32 in what had once lay near the center of their range. A decade later, the New York Zoological Society estimated that fewer than 5,000 of these 25 million-year-old natives of America were left. Rescuing them from almost certain extinction required cooperation between the states in the West, which Roosevelt facilitated, along with pronghorn stalking in Yellowstone and on the national wildlife refuges that Teddy Roosevelt was creating.
38:04 Speaker 02 Two lucky breaks helped the pronghorns, though, and one was the refuges, which the Boone and Crockett 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 for, rather than grass eaters, pronghorns didn't compete with cattle, and only marginally with sheep. So Western livestock associations, if grudgingly, became tolerant of them. Today, the United States and Canadian population of pronghorns hovers around 700,000 animals,
38:44 Speaker 02 half of them in the state of Wyoming, with another 1,200 in Mexico. A series of highway overpasses now allows some of them to 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.
39:06 Speaker 02 I'm still transfixed, though, by a moment in Western history I once came across. When among all Western animals, three ancient Americans, wild horses, coyotes, and pronghorns, were the last holdouts remaining. This was in April of 1884, and it appeared in a letter written by a cowboy named George Woolforth, who was riding his horse up over the rim of West Texas Yellow House Canyon about where the city of Lubbock now stands. Woolforth described a scene that seared itself into his memory and into mine, too.
39:49 Speaker 02 "As far as we could see," he wrote, "there were only antelopes and mustangs grazing in the waving sea of grass. 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 had been driven into the mountains across the previous 30 years. But even this moment was brief. Merely a romantic thing to hold on to in the mind. Truly a mirage.
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43:46 Speaker 04 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.
44:05 Speaker 00 Like grizzlies in South Dakota.
44:06 Speaker 04 Grizzlies out on the plains, bighorns 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 a 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 general rule. And here I think you-
44:33 Speaker 00 Like they stay right where they belong?
44:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, a pronghorn is a pronghorn is a pronghorn. And I guess it's striking to me, but you make a strong case why it's deeply rooted in their genetics and in their evolutionary history.
44:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is. I mean, these are animals that come from, specifically from North American evolution for 25 million years. And so, you know, and pronghorns are like us. They're the sole remaining representative of what was at one time a really big, in their case, a couple of different subfamilies of animals, 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 pronghorn story
45:35 Speaker 02 is how long we tried to figure them out. You know, I mean, we just couldn't quite, and everybody knew, okay, they won't jump fences. And that's probably because they evolved on the plains. But, you know, on the other hand, Thompson's gazelles, you know, jump like crazy in Africa, showing, I think what they're doing is stodding to show their fitness so that the cheetah that's after the band goes after one that's stumbling along or something. But pronghorns never, they never developed that ability. And- The inability or disinclination to jump over things really kind of set them in a
46:16 Speaker 02 bad situation when the West started being basically covered with barbed wire fences. Because a lot of them ended up, you know, because they migrate 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 Byers, who about 25 years ago was working on pronghorns in the Montana National Bison Refuge, I mean, he's the one who kind of figured all this out, all these inexplicable parts of their natural history, you know, starting with, why are the damn things, why are they capable of running 65 miles an hour
46:57 Speaker 02 when anything that's chasing them can't run more than about 40 or 45? I mean, what's the explanation for the excessive speed? And what he came up with, of course, was that with pronghorns, 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 a Pleistocene animal that's still, through its natural selection 10,000 years ago, is still doing the kinds of things that would have enabled it to succeed when there were fast-running cheetahs and hyenas 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.
47:36 Speaker 04 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, it looks like it should be in Africa, when in fact, it is the, the animal of all the ones that I know today that has the deepest roots.
47:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I think it is. It's... 25 million years back as a, you know, and of course, we still have them. I mean, passenger pigeons go back 15 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 American, and this is another kind of mind bender about all this deep time evolution. It's as American almost as horses, which evolved here 56 million years ago. You know, and so in the case of pronghorns, they managed to get through the Pleistocene extinctions and survive. And horses, obviously, while they survived elsewhere around the world, they didn't survive here.
48:38 Speaker 02 But those are the two, to me, that are have the deepest time. The other really deep time animals like camels, they were about 45 million years old. And of course, they didn't, they didn't make it.
48:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, speaking of deep antiquity, you had a comment, and you just touched on it again a second ago, you had a comment in your, in your show and then mentioned it now, where you said, like us, they're the only one left. It was funny, 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. I'll explain to them, 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 be, you can't even like, it's hard to even find a relative.
49:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
49:25 Speaker 00 Right? And I never thought, I'm gonna start saying, when I do that little spiel, I'm gonna start saying, like us.
49:33 Speaker 02 Like us.
49:34 Speaker 00 You can go like, there's this thing, there's a chimpanzee, that's probably about as close, as close as we're gonna get. But I made the comment in our, we did a outdoor cookbook. And in the introduction of the outdoor cookbook, I made, I made a comment that at the right place in time, you know, in the Middle East, Southern Spain, whatever, at the right place in time, it would have been possible for a human to have, to see a fire.
50:05 Speaker 00 And the need to also and see figures sitting around a fire at night.
50:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:10 Speaker 00 And you would need to wonder, I wonder what um species of human that is.
50:16 Speaker 02 Which, which one of us that is?
50:18 Speaker 00 Which is like so hard to picture.
50:21 Speaker 02 I know. 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, you know, you really, there's actually, I saw a, 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 basically was a movie about this group of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, who are traveling across the landscape and they camp out in, in woods one night
51:03 Speaker 02 and 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, 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, and they're standing, looking in the cave and what in the hell?
51:29 Speaker 00 Yeah.
51:30 Speaker 02 Yeah. So that was, uh, that was possible in our past. It obviously was possible in the pronghorn past, but not for either one of us anymore.
51:39 Speaker 00 You know, 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.
51:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:51 Speaker 00 When, when I was a student of yours.
51:53 Speaker 02 Yeah. Dan.
51:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, there was a kid in our class that was, that, uh, was involved with Buffalo Field Campaign. And of course, that is a buffalo being a term that has fallen out of favor. Um, and it's sort of taken a backseat to the term bison, right? People explaining that, um, it's not actually a buffalo. It's, it's a bison and you're confusing everybody by calling it a buffalo. Anyways, I was sitting there with a kid from the Buffalo Field Campaign and I was doing my reporting. And I see off in the distance, an antelope. Okay. So I say, oh, there's an antelope. He says, well, actually, that's a pronghorn. I was kind of like, well, don't get me started because your whole organization is called buffalo.
52:36 Speaker 02 But actually, you're protecting bison.
52:38 Speaker 00 So, so with that said, I like, I don't, I'd like to hear your thoughts on what terms you use. I have, I, I stick with buffalo.
52:51 Speaker 00 I noticed that Ken Burns has my back.
52:53 Speaker 02 Yes, he does.
52:53 Speaker 00 But I have switched and I now even will correct my kids, I make them say pronghorn.
52:59 Speaker 02 You make them say pronghorn instead of antelope, huh? Well, I will admit, I kind of use both for, for both animals. I use, and I know I've got buffalo several times in 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 damn word over and over and over again. So here's a good interchangeable word and everybody knows exactly what it is.
53:26 Speaker 00 Yeah.
53:27 Speaker 02 Pronghorn, I tend to stick pretty closely with pronghorn. But in the 19th century, almost anybody you quote, like Josiah Greg, you know, it's an antelope. I mean, and that's how they all describe it. It's an antelope.
53:41 Speaker 04 When we were, I got really in the habit of only using bison, sort of in, in the academic context. And then when we were working on the long hunter book,
53:54 Speaker 04 Steve pointed out that none of these guys ever saw a bison, they saw buffalo.
53:58 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
53:58 Speaker 04 So we went through and changed that for consistency.
54:03 Speaker 00 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.
54:15 Speaker 02 No.
54:15 Speaker 00 They're just not.
54:16 Speaker 02 Yeah.
54:17 Speaker 00 I just never, it's like, I never have problems with it. But you know, I like, 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.
54:36 Speaker 04 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 is Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper.
54:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
54:55 Speaker 04 And I make the point that
54:56 Speaker 00 I know where this is going.
54:57 Speaker 04 I make the point 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.
55:16 Speaker 00 Yeah.
55:17 Speaker 04 And one of the points that I've been highlighting as sort of a joke, is 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.
55:44 Speaker 00 Not according to the, to the physiologist Jared Diamond. What does he say? Well, the whole, have you read Guns, Germs and Steel? Oh, yeah, but He lays out this theory that, that he starts with this foundational question. Why did, who's the guy that came and attacked the Incas? Pizarro? Pizarro. Yeah. Why did Pizarro cross from Europe to attack the Incas? Why didn't the Incas come from the east to attack Pizarro? Right? And then part of it gets into this, this cocktail of things. One thing is, how
56:29 Speaker 00 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? Yeah. And then he gets into, um, how many beasts did you have that could be domesticated?
56:51 Speaker 00 And he says that here, none.
56:54 Speaker 02 None.
56:55 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, the turkey, but I mean, no beasts of burden.
56:58 Speaker 02 So the two animals that I think would have been fairly easy to domesticate would have been pronghorns and bighorn sheep. And the reason I say that-
57:08 Speaker 00 I think Dan Ghost wrote Osborne Russel's-
57:11 Speaker 02 The reason I say that about bighorn sheep is because I've read these, these sheep eater accounts around Yellowstone, where some of the archaeologists, what was his name, Holcrance or something, who did that big sheep eater study. And he said, the sheep eaters told him, the sheep eaters he's shown, he's told him that bighorn sheep were really easy to catch. You just kinda 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 kinda did this. Now, of course, there's another step you have to make from catching one to domesticating
57:56 Speaker 02 it. I mean, you have to, obviously, you have to be able to train it in some way.
58:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, snakes are easy to catch.
58:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, but that's, and I can't say that I've seen anybody specifically, 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 domesticated animals because they hadn't reached the stage that old worlders had where, okay, man, there's kinda nothing left here. We gotta come up with, we gotta come up with some way to keep all this going. So let's take those goats right there. Let's see if we can't tame them and get them to start following us around and stuff.
58:44 Speaker 02 But a lot of the people in the West, particularly outside the agricultural region of the, of the Southwest with the pueblos, I mean, they're hunters and gatherers and they kinda don't have any need or interest in domesticating anything.
58:59 Speaker 00 You know what backs you up on this? As you say, this is a great point you're making.
59:04 Speaker 00 Think about the end of the, the near end of the buffalo. What winds up happening? When there aren't any left?
59:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
59:12 Speaker 00 People start feeding them with bottles. Training them.
59:16 Speaker 02 Hitching them up.
59:17 Speaker 00 Keeping them in pastures, putting them in barns. So it's like, when there was, yeah, 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 it with you when you left.
59:32 Speaker 02 Then you would take the step. Because, I mean, think of this, you know, I mean, camels are nasty. You know, I mean, that would be nasty to try to domesticate. And horses, I mean, if you've ever spent a whole lot of time around horses, and I have had horses for some of my life, I mean, damnation. The first people who domesticated a horse.
59:50 Speaker 00 Must have been pretty hard up.
59:52 Speaker 02 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 and they strike with their forefeet. And, I mean, that would not have been an easy animal to domesticate. So I think anybody who decides, we're going to domesticate a horse or a camel.
1:00:10 Speaker 00 His back's against the wall.
1:00:15 Speaker 00 And they never got there with pronghorn.
1:00:17 Speaker 02 I don't think they needed to. Yeah, I think that's it. They didn't need to.
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