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