The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 033

Episode Date: April 14, 2016

Seattle, Washington: Steven Rinella and Janis Putelis talk with environmental historians Dan Flores and Randall Williams. Subjects discussed: what's up with Flores' two upcoming books, American Serengeti and Coyote America; biodiversity during the pleistocene; the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis; George Wolforth's 1884 view of the Llano Estacado; historic elk distribution; how the grey wolf changed the coyote; fission-fusion societies; the nightly vocal census of the coyote; New York City's coyote bar scene; why coyotes kill pets; Flores' influential take on bison population decline; and the myth of General Sheridan and the post-Civil War buffalo slaughter. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is as high as we've ever been. In that, we're in the 19th floor of a hotel right now in Seattle, Washington. The Westin. Yeah, this is as high as we've ever been. Looking out on Puget Sound. And I'm here with a couple folks. But the most important one right now is... Do you still go by Professor?

No. You can't be a professor anymore? I'm not a professor anymore, no. So what are you now? Just a citizen. Writer, I guess. Oh yeah, I can say that. We're here with the writer. Dan. Now, we had this debate earlier because I had always thought

I had always like Flores. Yeah, that's correct. This guy, your former student doesn't know that what were you trying to tell me it was i've always heard flores yeah with an flores yeah flores yeah it's uh it's because it's pronounced uh with a louisiana french, like it's Fleur. Oh, I got you. Yeah. So writer and citizen Dan Flores, who I met when he was Professor Dan Flores years ago, I was in graduate school and I had to, I think it was part of the requirement, you take a seminar or something outside of your discipline. Yeah.

I was a writing student and I took a class. I took your class. I took your class. What was that class called? Do you remember? The one I was in? It was an environmental writing seminar, I think, is what you took. Yeah, and I was just humiliated in it.

Way out of my league, all these guys I knew all about writing about things that they were sure happened instead of things you thought might have happened, which is part of being a historian, I think, that they try to train you in that. I recall you made an A in that class, though. Yeah, but I was outgunned.

There were some good students in there, man. But I met Dan and took that class, and it just had a profound impact on me, the body of literature that we looked at and just like a way of thinking about things. We had your student on who's here, Randall Williams, on talking about his dissertation he did. And you were involved in that as an advisor. Yeah, that's right. But just again, can you hit what, in your own words, like what an environmental historian is and does and looks at?

That term's not a term people are familiar with outside of academics, it seems. Yeah, it's a kind of term that you end up explaining to people in bars quite a bit when they ask you what you do or what you write about? I mean, basically, it's a way of thinking about the relationship between people and the natural world. And doing it using history, which, of course, causes you to examine changes over time. And so environmental history has only been around for about 35 or 40 years now as a field of study. In fact, we're in Seattle right now because the American Society for Environmental History is meeting here. This is its annual conference, and it held its first one in 1976.

So that'll give you an idea of how recent this field has been around. But it's basically a way to look at the history of how people have interacted with nature. And that's a broad enough spectrum of study that you just get to write and think about all kinds of things a role in American culture in the 20th century. And the thing I've been interested in most in the last few years has been animals and the relationship between people and animals. Yeah, and you have two books coming out right now. How many books, how many book-length manuscripts have you published? These two will be the ninth and tenth. And that dates back to about 1984.

My first book came out in 1984. And you've written hundreds of academic papers. Well, not hundreds, but I've written academic papers. They're popular in academic articles. Yeah, a lot of popular things. I probably have published more popular things than academic pieces. But I've done, I don't know, actually I'm just having a hazard of guess, but maybe two or three dozen academic papers and peer-reviewed kind of

journals. And then I often spun off a popular article or two from those kinds of things. Oh, is that how you work generally? Like you'll find stuff through your research that you know would be suitable to a popular audience? Yeah. So, you know, I mean, writing for academic journals is a wonderful thing. It's how you make your reputation in a field

and get a professorship and all that sort of stuff. But they don't pay you any money for those kinds of things. And I always, I mean, I started out as a magazine writer before I ever became an academic. So I always had in my mind when I would do an academic piece, so how can I spin this off somehow as a popular article and reach a bigger audience with it for one thing, make a little bit of change from it as well, but primarily kind of reach more people. people and so yeah a lot of the things i've done is as academic and scholarly things have ended up

as you know either getting absorbed into a book or are published as a as a popular article so what what are the two books you have now and why in the world are you publishing two books at the same time yeah that's an unusual thing um so the the books books are American Serengeti, which is just a day or two away from officially being out. And the subtitle of that book is The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains. And the other book is called Coyote America, Unnatural and Supernatural History. And that book comes out about the middle of May. Were you writing them both at the same time? Well, I wasn't really. And the truth is the books are connected to one another because the Coyote book or a Coyote book was originally contracted to the publisher of the American Serengeti book, which was a university press publisher.

And I retired from the University of Montana two years ago. And as I got close to retirement, I realized that, so there's not really much point in writing books for university presses anymore. I mean, that's really great when you're a professor and you get rewarded by your university for doing that and in the field for doing that. But I knew I was about to retire. And so to reach bigger audiences, I wanted to do a book, start writing books basically for commercial presses. And so I had, I acquired an agent who asked me about three or four years ago, so what are you working on now? I said, well, I've got a coyote book that's contracted to the University of Kansas Press. And he said, well, why don't you write a proposal out of that and let me take it to New York and see if I can sell it. And I did,

and he did. The problem was, so that was all great, but the problem was University of Kansas Press didn't take all that kindly to us sort of taking their book away from them. And so the only way to kind of resolve things with Kansas was to promise them another book, which they agreed to. But they also said, okay, that's fine. We want to keep the same deadline you had with us, however. And so basically this time last year, I had a deadline for the Coyote book in New York of January the 30th. And I had a deadline for the American Serengeti book in Lawrence, Kansas of May the 1st. So I finished up the Coyote book and inhaled a couple of times, took a couple of deep breaths.

And since I was already used to getting up every day and writing four or five or six hours, I just kept on going. And in another four months or so, managed to finish off that American Serengeti book. But in a way, you've been researching that book for your entire career. Indeed I had, and I had written some of it, actually, already. I mean, I ended up revising pretty considerably the things that I'd already written. But yeah, I'd worked on Buffalo years ago, had written a kind of a major scholarly piece about Buffalo that sort of re-imagined, re-conceptualized what happened to him in the 19th century that became a pretty successful academic article.

Yeah. I've had a lot of great luck just telling that story for you. Yeah. I've, I've had a lot of great luck just telling that story for you. Yeah. Being like, you know what I was reading. Yeah. I always credit you though, man. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. And you, uh, you did credit me and I appreciated that in your, in your, uh, Buffalo book. But I, so that story, I kind of, um, you know, I knew pretty well, and that provided me with a starting point for the chapter that's on Buffalo in this American Serengeti book. But lay out the premise of the American Serengeti. When you say the last big ones, you mean the last big ones that are here now, or the last big ones like the ones we lost at the end of the Pleistocene? Yeah, that's an excellent question. I mean, I actually talk about both versions of the American Serengeti. The Pleistocene version doesn't get as much coverage as the historic

version of the American Serengeti, but I spend a good bit of time talking about it because down to 10,000 years ago, I mean, we had an African analog on the American Great Plains with all the charismatic megafauna that were here. I mean, we had elephants in the form of mammoths. We had camels. We had, of course, huge herds of giant bison that were sort of the counterpart to wildebeest herds in Africa. We had a lion, the steppe lion, which was actually a larger lion than the African lion. We had a giant and very gracile short-faced bear that was down to about 12,000 years ago was probably one of the most formidable predators anywhere in the world some people think that humans weren't able to to uh migrate to north america until about 15 000 years ago because these short-faced bears were there at the bering strait and they presented such a formidable barrier uh to humans that that basically they had to become extinct before

humans were able to get to North America. So there was this large bestiary of animals down to 10,000 years ago, a giant hunting, very fast hunting hyena. There were cheetah-like cats that were related to cougars.ene running down the calves of mammoths. But most of that bestiary, with the exception of five or six animals, went extinct about 10,000 years ago. In an extinction scenario, frankly, that we still don't quite understand. Yeah, like we don't understand it temporally. We don't understand it temporally or in terms of cause. Yeah, like we don't understand it temporally. We don't understand it

temporally or in terms of cause. For example, one of the most common creatures of the Pleistocene American Serengeti were bands of wild horses. Some biologists

believe that they comprised as much as 20 to 30 percent of the biomass of grazing animals on the Great Plains, down to about 8,000 or 9,000 years ago. And the thing about horses is they migrated across the Bering Strait, and they ended up in Asia and in Africa, where they became zebras and quaggas and related animals and European horses. And they survived in all those places. But for some reason that we don't grasp, about 8,000 or 9,000 years ago, all those horses became extinct in North America.

And so we lost this giant biomass of grazing animals in the form of wild horses that completely disappeared from the Pleistocene Serengeti. And we don't know exactly why. I mean, some of the speculation is that they contracted diseases. Is the Blitzkrieg hypothesis totally out of fashion now? It is not out of fashion can you explain it yeah and so there's a paleo biologist give all the ideas yeah the so the ideas range from uh the blitzkrieg that you mentioned which was popularized by a paleo biologist saying paul martin yeah paul martin at the university of arizona uh who wrote a bunch of really compelling books. The last one he wrote was called Twilight of the Mammoths.

And his argument was that about 15,000 years or so ago, humans began migrating out of Asia into North America, confronting a bestiary of animals that had never seen human predators before. And these people were very accomplished predators with a very sophisticated toolkit. And the Blitzkrieg model speculates that in a period of less than 300 years, these people expanded from Siberia into the Americas, all the way down to the tip of South America, and wiped out most of these species that were confronting human predators for the first time, and just sort of collapsed in the wake of this assault. It's out, on one hand, it's outlandish. On the other hand, when you look at where things went extinct when,

and when people showed up there, and then you have things like mammoths on Wrangel Island up until 4,000 years ago, and no one ever stepped foot on Wrangel Island. That's exactly right. It just gets weird, man. It does get weird. And it's, Martin argued and other people have argued that as humans spread out of Africa, we actually kind of did this all over the world. You know, some of the really good examples of it are, for example, in the islands of Polynesia, where as soon as humans arrive, for instance, in Hawaii, 30-some species of flightless birds become extinct within a couple of hundred years.

Because they're such easy targets for human hunters. And humans usually arrive with dogs and sometimes with hogs and this suite of animals that we bring along with us as domesticates sort of play a role and and the simplification of the ecologies of all these far-flung places that we get into yeah in europe and i'm not arguing like i don't know enough to argue for it or against it but i'm just talking about the parts that are compelling yeah is that europe had versions of all these things we're talking about in the american what you describe as the American Serengeti, but they went through it 30,000 years ago. That's right.

And we know that humans were like that, you know, that human hunters, like basically us, like people that were alive today could fly an airplane, you know, that they arrived there around those times and you saw the same thing happen again. But on the other hand, it's just like, how in the world could you kill them all? Yeah, it's a real... With atlatls.

It's with atlatls, and that's the primary weapon they had. Atlatls and sometimes just stabbing spears. So lay the other ones out. I kind of hijacked it with them. The blitzkrieg thing is so fascinating. It's not as fun as... It's more fun than the things like the disease. Yeah, it is. And so the best evidence, by the way, for the blitzkrieg is in North America is with mammoths.

I mean, we we've only recently, for instance, actually discovered kill sites of horses in North America from 10,000 years ago. I didn't know there was ever any known kill sites. There have been some discovered in the last seven or eight, ten years. Is that right? Yeah. And those are the first ones. So part of the problem with the Blitzkrieg model is that, okay, so if that's your model, then you expect to go out there and archaeology, paleoarchaeology is going to yield up all these sites with slaughtered animals. Sort of the way it does in Europe with horses in France.

I mean, there's a spot in France where something like 30,000 or 40,000 horse carcasses were killed and butchered by human hunts. Because they were driving them off cliffs. Well, I mean, that was the speculation for a long time. It looks like what they were actually doing was driving them into corrals. Oh, is that right? Oh, okay. Yeah, they were driving them into corrals. I'm good because that's such a horrific vision, horses being driven off a cliff, and I'm glad

it was corrals. Yeah, it's a horrific vision, and there's a wonderful 19th century illustration of horses pouring off a cliff in France. But it looks as if what they actually were doing were building corrals and corralling them and then and killing them some people argue in fact that the reason we have modern horses which most of which spring from european and african sources is because about 6 000 years ago we domesticated them before we could kill them all off oh is that right we finally domesticated, and that's what enabled them to survive.

So that might be why in the mythology of plains tribes, horses sometimes play a role. Or am I wrong? I remember someone pointing out that this idea of the mounted plains hunter was like a brief phenomenon. Oh, yeah. That started 250 years ago. That's right. But right they're like how could it be so ingrained how could the horse become so quickly so ingrained in the mythology it just had such a profound impact on them well i mean some

some tribes i saw an exhibit in in calgary several years ago that was curated by the Blackfoot Confederacy at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. And these Blackfoot elders said in the text of this exhibit that their mythological stories remembered horses from thousands of years ago. And so they argued that they had preserved a memory of horses from back in the Pleistocene. And when in the 1700s they encountered European horses, they were able to draw on some mythology about these animals. Yeah, you hear the term collective memory.

Yeah, and a collective tribal memory is, I mean mean I don't denigrate that at all. It's entirely possible that that was the case. do have kill sites with projectile points like Clovis points embedded in the skeletal material of the recovered animals. And there are a lot of Clovis sites with mammoths. Do you remember that you and I visited one of those sites together? I absolutely do. Well, I wrote about that. That's sort of the – Blackwater draw.

That's how the American Serengeti book opens, in fact, is with that visit that you and I made over to Blackwater Draw. And sort of giving ourselves our own personal tour because I recall we drove all the way over there from Santa Fe and the place was closed. So we just hopped over the fence and gave ourselves a tour. But, yeah, so the Blackwater Draw. I mean, that's the original Clovis site in North America where butchered mammoths were first found with evidence of human hunting. But there's not much evidence for the other animals. I mean, you'd think that there would be all these camel sites out there with butchered remains and points and horse sites.

And so that's been one of the problems more recently, last 10 or 15 years with the Blitzkrieg model is that there's not, there aren't the sites out there. Maybe we just haven't found them, but except for the Mammoth sites, there's not much out there. There was a, I believe at Lindenmeyer, the Lindenmeyer site near Fort Collins, Colorado, there was a foreshaft made from a camel bone. Yeah. Yeah. So there's evidence, obviously, that they were using.

Or picking it up. Yeah, picking it up. They were at least exploiting the remains of camels, whether they were killing them or not. So what is the horse site that turned up? It's one near Boulder, Colorado. Uh-huh. horse site that turned up. It's one near Boulder, Colorado. And I've not read much about it or visited it, but it's one that was unearthed, I don't know, maybe seven, eight years ago. So there is a horse site near Boulder that shows evidence of human butchering and evidently human kills of horses.

The problem with that, of course, is that you'd think if the horse comprised 30% of the biomass of all these grazing animals, there would be scores of sites like that. And we've struggled to try to find any at all. So that's led some people to say, okay, what actually happened to these animals was a changing climate. We know that about the time, so two things happened, of course, at about the time all these animals disappeared. Humans arrived from Asia and the climate started changing. And the climate was cycling into a much warmer and drier regime. And so one of the arguments about what happened to all these original American Serengeti animals is that they basically succumbed to a changing climate. They

were evolved to kind of an ice age climate. And when the climate turned warm and dry, it basically dried up their habitat. And so they disappeared as a result of that. And then one of the more most recent explanations is a disease explanation, which is so far mostly speculative because we don't – other than people saying, okay, we can't figure this out. There's got to be some other reason. And maybe it's disease. The problem is it. Well, it had to be diseases, right?

Because you're talking about herbivores, carnivores. Exactly. And I think people focus on all these large animals, but we lost many, many small animals. Lost a lot of small animals, although at least in Martin's argument, it's mostly the large animals and a lot of the small animals are intact. But Martin even argues that, I mean, so for instance, some of the, I mean, horses specialized in stiper grasses, needle and thread grasses. And those grasses are still all over the West. So it's like the fodder that they were grazing is still there, but the animals disappeared. So the truth is, right now, this is one of the great mysteries of North American environmental history. Do you think I'd give someone's mind to know the answer? I would, too.

I'd love to know. Even if I had to keep it secret. But we have not figured it out yet. we know is that that version, that much African-like version of the Serengeti, disappeared between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago. So what are you calling the Serengeti? Like, lay it off me in terms of- Geography? Yeah.

It's basically the American Great Plains. So the 100th meridian to the Rockies. Yeah, it's the 100th meridian in some instances for some species slightly farther east. But basically about the 100th meridian to the Rockies and from Texas into Alberta and Saskatchewan. So just for people to get a grasp on it,

it would be like the Texas Panhandle, right? Western Oklahoma, Western Kansas. Exactly. Kind of all of the Dakotas. Eastern Colorado. All of the Dakotas. Yeah, all the Dakotas. Eastern Montana, Eastern Colorado.

That's it. Portions of New Mexico. Yeah, Eastern New Mexico. And then up into a handful of Canadian provinces, right? Yeah, up in, basically the plains sort of start grading. As you go farther north, they begin to grade into Aspen Mots at about, oh, I don't know,

maybe the 52nd parallel, 51st or 52nd parallel as you go north. And the Canadian-U.S. border is the 49th parallel. So a couple of degrees north of the Canadian border, you start losing the savannas, the grasslands, and you begin to have that country broken up by copses of trees. So that's basically it. So it's this long north-south stretching province east of the Rocky Mountains that stretches about 1,500 to 1,700 miles north and south.

And from the Rockies eastward, it goes maybe 400 miles. So it's that area for 800,000 years has been one of the marvels of the world in terms of enormous numbers of big animals grazers and all the predators that that preyed on them. And yeah, so that's it. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated.

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Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all so earlier you're talking about i asked you if you meant the ones that used to be here or the ones that are here now. You're taking like the whole dynamic view of it.

What's here, what's here now. Yeah. Do you get into who lived and why they live? I guess because you can't say why they lived if you don't know why the other ones succumbed. I mean, it's, you know, this is one of the things about sort of ecological history or environmental history is that, you know, as John Muir said about things, everything is connected to everything else. And so it becomes kind of impossible to just look at a snapshot, say the 19th century, when we know there were millions of buffalo on the Great Plains, without understanding how they got there. And the reason they were there in our historical account from the 19th century is because of that extinction that happened 10,000 years ago.

Only a small handful of animals survived that extinction. Bison were one of the primary survivors of it. Gray wolves became a primary survivor. Grizzly bears, coyotes, elk, of course, pronghorn antelope, which is really one of the most fascinating animals of the Great Plains because those animals are still completely adapted to the Pleistocene Serengeti. They're able to outrun, pronghorns can outrun today their fastest pursuers by 20 to 25 miles an hour. And the reason they run so much faster than gray wolves do, for instance, is because they evolved to outrun cheetahs and hunting hyenas. And so here they are 10,000 years later, still adapted to outrunning all these animals that disappeared

thousands and thousands of years ago. You know, I was, I touched on this a little bit in something I did recently, and I pointed out their great reluctance to jumping. And it had many, many people come forward with videos and photos of them, in fact, jumping, but a great reluctance to jump. Great reluctance to jump because they evolved on grassland plains without the necessity of jumping. No timber.

Yeah. Very little timber. Very little timber. Very little timber. And that's one of the reasons why when you, if you watch pronghorns, I mean, their technique for going through a barbed wire fence usually is to turn sideways and go through the strands. I mean, they don't do what you would think looking at them. A gazelle would do, which would be to easily bound over it or what a mule deer does. Instead, they'll go at a fence and go through the strands of barbed wire, sometimes in a big cloud of hair. But all those creatures then survived. pronghorns and bison become so numerous is because they inherit a grasslands where most of their grazing competitors have vanished. And so it's possible for bison, for instance,

which 10,000 years ago, probably, I mean, bison were maybe only 5 million strong, but with all the other grazing animals gone, it's possible for bison to expand their populations into the 25 to 30 million animals that were here in the 1900s or the 1800s. And so it's a version of the American Serengeti that sort of is the next step down the historical timeline with a smaller contingent of animals, but nonetheless one that had so much magic and poetry to it that when Europeans began traveling to the Great Plains in the early 19th century, the early 1800s,

I mean, one of the most common literary motifs of the 19th century West are these rhapsodies about the multitudes of animals that people were encountering. So much that, I mean, European sportsman Sir William Drummond Stewart in the 1830s, Sir George Gore in the 1850s. That was the guy Jim Bridger took on a little jaunt, right? That's exactly right. A bloody little jaunt. A bloody little jaunt.

These guys came over and they basically conducted safaris on the Great Plains at almost precisely the same time that the first safaris were happening in Africa when British sportsmen were going into South Africa in the 1830s. That's the same time that William Drummond Stewart was doing these high-end guided safari hunts in the American West out on the Great Plains. And, I mean, the stories of those are pretty remarkable. Give a snapshot of the abundance of some of the animals, besides the ones we hear about.

Like, you know, everyone's heard... Heard bison. Yeah, I mean, just, you know, that looked like clouds moving and took days for the herds to pass. But you never hear someone articulate, like, how many, you know, pronghorn or antelope were on the landscape or how many bighorn sheep were people ever encountering those in a way that would be surprising to us now oh yeah they were i mean one of my favorite descriptions of those animals is

uh john james autobuns in 1843 i mean here you've got a guy who is the most celebrated nature painter in the United States. He had just completed in 1838 the Birds of America that made him a worldwide literary and artistic figure. on a book tour of Europe with his hair cascading down around his shoulders and dressed in buckskins as kind of the classic American noble savage. And he returns to the United States after this very successful book tour and decides he's got to do the same thing for the mammals of America

that he had just done for the birds. He had painted 435 American birds, all life-size on the page. And so he decides he can't obviously paint elk and bison life-size on a page, but he's going to try to do something similar. He's going to try to portray all the great native creatures of North America. In order to do that, he's got to make a trip to the West. So he and his sons and a couple of companions in 1843 go up the Missouri River. And he gets into Western North Dakota, approaching the Montana border, and write some of the most extraordinary descriptions of the multitudes of animals that he's seeing that I've ever read.

I mean, he says that no one could conceive of the numbers of animals, of many different varieties that they were seeing day after day after day from the prow of this steam vessel, the Omega, that was pushing up to Fort Union. And he closed one of my favorite lines of his. He wrote his wife a letter, and he closed it with, he was writing late at night, and he was describing for all these animals he was seeing every day. He said, I've never seen so many wolves in my life. I mean, we're going up the river and there's a wolf lying on the sandbar. There's another one climbing up the bank on the other side. There are some sitting out on sandbars in the middle of the river,

watching us like dogs. There is a picturesque herd of bison at the same time cantering along. And in front of us in the river, a herd of about 30 elk are swimming the river. And the racks of the bulls are projecting out of the water. And the tips are sweeping along the surface. And there are mountain rams. And he just goes on and on. And he finally says to her, I've got to stop writing. I'm not going to be able to go to sleep.

I'm too excited to keep going. I just, I can't write anymore. And he gives you this, you know, this lived sense of what the book is, okay, I've provided what we think, what biologists think were the numbers of these animals. We think there were probably, depending on the climate, between 20 million and 30 million bison. 30 million when the climate was good, there were plenty of rains and the grass was lush. Probably 20 million when there climate was good, there were plenty of rains and the grass was lush. Probably 20 million when there were droughts. And so it's not a static figure.

No, but that's consistent with what we see today with wildlife numbers. I mean, lesser versions, but I mean, it's nothing to have populations increase and decrease like that. Absolutely. I mean, on a pretty short timescale. On a short timescale, and that's exactly how it functioned. It's more an algebraic kind of equation than it is some static figure. But the static figure that we have, and the same thing happened with these animals too, for pronghorns is about 15 million. What do we have now?

We've got at present, let's see, about 600,000. Yeah. So from 15 million, and I mean, one of the stories I tell in the book is that the Llano Estacado Plateau of West Texas, eastern New Mexico, that's the country where you and I went to look at the Blackwater Draw Elephant site. That was one of the best pronghorn ranges in the West. It probably had, during the heyday of pronghorns, as many as 2.5 to 3 million pronghorns. Vernon Bailey of the United States Biological Survey made a trip across the Llano Estacado in 1899. And at that point, he counted 32. Oh, yeah.

32 of them were left in 1899 in that particular part of the Great Plains. So what happened to all those? I mean, you hear, like, we've gone into such excruciating detail about what happened to all the, you know, to all the factors that went into the near extermination of the buffalo or bison and what they were being used for and the commodification of them. You never read about some guy just stacking up a shitload of antelope and sending the hides and tongues off in rail cars. But they did that.

They did exactly that. And the reason they did that was because after the Civil War, I mean, you've got this large contingent of young American men who have fought in the war for both the Union and the Confederacy who know weapons very well. They know how to shoot. And many of them return home, especially the Confederates, to a devastated region where you couldn't really make a living. And one of the things they did, we think probably as many as 20,000 of them probably did this, is they went out onto the Great Plains. And for as long as the animals lasted, they hunted for a living.

They hunted for the market. And once the bison were gone, they turned to each of the other animals in turn. Just supplying meat locally and export. And export. That's right. Hides, dried flesh, whatever you could basically get by shooting these animals down and selling them to the American or the Canadian or the European market. And so once the bison were gone, they turned their hand to pronghorns and began doing exactly what they had done with bison to pronghorns. I mean, they shot them down. One of the things you could do with pronghorns, they were reluctant to leave their ranges, their home ranges. And you could get

a band of them running and they would not exit their home range. And people, these hunters on horses could just work their way around in the center of this running herd of antelope. And after they would make the rounds of about a 10 or 12 or 15 mile home range, three or four times, they were completely exhausted. And at that point, you could almost walk up to them and club them in the head. And so using techniques like that, and also in places like the Black Hills, they would surround pronghorns in the winter when the snow was too deep for them to get away and just kill them by, I mean, like hunters killed harp seals in the 20th century. And just clubbed them down and basically ripped their hides off.

Sometimes they would sell the meat, but mostly they were selling the hides. But it's not a quality hide. It's not a quality hide, but it was what was left. The bison are gone. And so they do this in turn to pronghorns, to elk. And, I mean, by 1905, the bighorn rams of the Great Plains, the mountain sheep are gone too. In places like the Northern Plains, Badlands, they're gone. Yeah, and in that case, you also have, like we mentioned earlier, like there's always this idea that disease may have played a role i think with bighorn sheep as sheep came out you also have

there's no doubt about it you know you have pneumonia yeah which may with that particular animal might have been more devastating i know people like people now and then try to make the case that what happened that you can't explain what happened to the buffalo unless you look at disease i don't know if that i that just seems to be an idea that's sort of always out there no it's definitely there and i think it's it's correct the problem with it and i mean so here's an example of it we know that the last 800 to a thousand bison that were out there that were being rounded up to provide the nucleus of the herds we have today, they almost all had bovine tuberculosis. They were infected with that. Some of the herds ended up getting brucellosis by 1897, 1900. Not all of them did, but some of them ended up with brucellosis, which is

another exotic disease. And one of the diseases that we don't know much about the impact of, but probably did have some impact because there's sure evidence that it was out there, is that sometime after 1800, anthrax probably got

among the western bison herds. And so... And these are all Eurasian livestock herds and so these are all eurasian livestock diseases brought in livestock brought in with brought in with non-native animals yeah and especially when uh when oxen and cattle were being driven over the immigrant trails through the buffalo range from the 1820s possibility of disease transmission yeah there's a possibility of disease transfer and it almost certainly happened. The problem with it is that it's really hard to quantify. We don't really know what kind of effect it had, except that it probably had a pretty

considerable effect. So very obviously, the same thing happened with sheep. So what's the timeframe like there? When you say that you had all these market hunters who were making money and sometimes good money for the buffalo hide market. Yeah. When they had turned their attention to antelope or turned their attention to elk, it still probably took decades, right? I mean, to get things so depleted that we started to take legal action to try to protect animals and regulate hunting. Didn't happen as slowly as you would think. I mean, it was pretty quick because there were a

lot of guys out there and a lot of them had become very skilled in doing this. They knew the weaknesses of the animals. And I mean, I'll give you one example. And there's a cowboy named George Wolforth who is rounding up stray cattle on the Texas Llano Estacado in a canyon where I used to live when I lived in West Texas, Yellow House Canyon. He rides up one morning out of Yellow House Canyon. And of course, there's this gigantic plateau out in front of him that stretches 150 miles east and west and north and south about 300 miles. At a slight pitch. At a slight pitch from west to east. That's right.

And he rides up out of the canyon up on this plateau. And it's a foggy morning. And he's sitting on his horse looking for strays and sees the fog beginning to lift. And as it lifts, and this is 1884, as it lifts, what he sees, he says, as far as the eye could see, and the fog made it this sort of mystical,

unreal kind of image, all he could see on the plane were there were no more buffalo. He saw no more wolves. He saw no bears. He saw no elk. All he could see were bands of pronghorns and bands of wild horses. Those were the last two surviving animals. And when it was only pronghorns left, when the elk had either been killed or driven into the Rockies, because that's what happened to some of these animals, they basically fled to the mountains from this kind of pressure. When it's nothing but wild horses and pronghorns left, the hunters went after the pronghorns and mustangers went after the horses. And I mean, we know, for example-

Why were they after the horses for what? Not meat. No, not meat. They were after them for two things. Basically, they were, especially hired cowboys from the ranches that were then beginning to populate the Great Plains, were shooting them down because they were competition for grass.

Grazing competition. Yeah, for cattle. And so they were, cowboys were hired just to go out and shoot them down. But by about 1915 or so, and you know, you have to, when you think about wild horses now, what you have to realize is that wild horses, remember, had gone extinct in the Pleistocene. But we had reintroduced them. We Europeans had reintroduced them to the Americas in the 1500s.

And one of the remarkable environmental stories in North America is the success of the horse when it's reintroduced to the place where horses had evolved. Because North America is where horses had evolved. 56 million years of horse evolution. Yeah. So what factor drove them to extinction that then went away in time for them to come back? We have no idea. But when they were. It's so bizarre, man.

It's bizarre as hell, but when they were reintroduced, they went feral across the Great Plains, I mean, in an instant. Now, you've written about that. You've written about the routes through trade and theft and wandering. Yeah, primarily the horses got loose in the West

as a result of what's called the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico. It's when the Pueblo Indians drive the Spaniards out of New Mexico for a dozen years and capture all their herds. I mean, they trade, for example, sheep and goats to the Navajos,

which is what creates the modern Navajo economy of herding those animals. And they traded horses up the Rockies. Within about 50 years, horses had gotten from New Mexico all the way into Canada. Traded them up both sides of the Rockies. Both sides of the Rockies, which is what creates the Great Plains horse-riding Indians. But a lot of horses got away and scattered into the plains as a result of the Pueblo Revolt.

And so that's 1680. We think by 1800, wild horse herds on the Great Plains probably numbered as high as between one and two million animals. I mean, they became the basis of a major economy in the West for about a century. How many horses live in the U.S. now? Not wild, just how many horses? Do you know? No, I don't know. I probably knew that figure at some point, but I don't recall.

How many wild horses do we got? Well, we've got about 40,000 to 50,000 wild horses, but one of the interesting things about them. That's a controversial animal. It's a controversial animal, and one of the reasons is because it's not the Great Plains where they are. They're out in the sagebrush deserts of the Great Basin, particularly in Nevada. And so it was the Great Plains where they really went feral when they were returned here. And we think probably by 1900, the number may have been as high as 3 million wild horses on the Great Plains. But about 1915, we discovered that Americans had sort of created a new economy with pet dogs and cats that needed food. And so the Midwest, especially the Kennel Ration Company, began to build pet food

plants. And what happened to most of the wild horses in the West by the late teens and 20s was that they ended up getting caught by Mustangers and shipped by rail to Illinois and turned into cans of dog food. And Illinois kept slaughtering horses up until very recently. Up until very recently, that's right. Now, J.R. Simplot, when you buy a French fry, very likely came off as the result of J.R. Simplot's work. J.R. Simplot got his start. Can you explain that?

I'm sorry. Oh, like Simplot is a major provider of seed potatoes, and I think they do a lot of, they do, am I right? I don't know if they still do, provide like McDonald's, French fries. Oh, yeah, that's the source. Yeah. He got his start. He bought a bunch of teachers somewhere

were getting paid with these bonds because of some school funding shortages. And he bought the bonds at 50 cents on the dollar or something like that and used. And then when the bonds matured, turned around using to buy a bunch of piglets and went out in the desert and fattened all those piglets on wild horse meat.

And that was sort of the start of Simplot. Then when I lived in Miles City, Montana, we had a guy in his 90s that lived next to us. And in the 30s- He had been a must singer. Well, he was raising pigs on horse. On horse, yeah. And he said that they would have the most beautiful sheen the pigs

would get the most beautiful sheen he said a very tight curl in the tail perfectly erect ears like every sign of a well-fed pig he was reluctant to send the pigs to slaughter with meat in their belly he would finish them on barley just to clean their system out. He said they would visibly deteriorate quality. And before his eyes. On barley. And he would take a horse, take it into the pig pen, shoot the horse, tie it off to a fence post, pull the hide with a tractor and sell the hide for three bucks. Then he'd give the pigs a day or two. They'd eat it down to the bone. And then before the bones would would splinter he'd go in and throw all the bones out of there one day him and his brother were cutting wood and he cut his thumb off on the saw his brother flicked that into the pig pen

pigs ate that send those off that's a great story steve and he was just like what did that finger What did that thumb do to the sheen? I don't know. Yeah, so someone bought a pig that had actually been eating folks. But it's just like the picture he paints of how horses were used and viewed is bizarre. Well, yeah, so that's one way that they were used. I mean, I can tell you two others. There was an attempt, actually, in the 1890s to use horse meat in the United States to feed the poor.

In the 1890s? In the 1890s, yeah. I've got a newspaper article from 1897. In fact, it's over here on the Pacific Coast. I think it's from Seattle. Someone arguing what we ought to do. That's what we ought to do in order to feed America's poor is that we should feed them because we've got a lot of horses, plenty of wild horses too. And that's what one good use of horse meat would be is to feed the poor. But one way that I guarantee you lots of wild horses ended up sacrificing their lives for

kind of a dual good, as people saw it in those days, was they would be caught and led out, shot, and then laced with strychnine in order to kill the one last big animal, charismatic animal of the old American Serengeti, which was gray wolves. And so the technique that the biological survey used for the teens and 20s and into the 30s when there were still plenty of horses around in order to poison wolves in large numbers and to try to eradicate coyotes as well was to lead horses out and shoot them and lace the carcass you'd inject the before the vascular system shut down you'd inject the strychnine in there to distribute it so it would distribute it through the through the body that's right yeah yeah and that was again for better grazing for better cattle country not

grazing but just to get rid of to get rid of predators right but but on cattle yeah for the for the sake certainly for the sake of converting that landscape into a working agricultural society and you know i mean one of the things I say in this book is that, first of all, thinking about the Great Plains as this grand wildlife spectacle that you could, without any stretch whatsoever, refer to as the American Serengeti is kind of a way to reconceptualize it, to me, in the proper ecological way. This did exist becausei is kind of a way to reconceptualize it to me in the proper ecological way. This did exist because we've kind of, in a way, forgotten that it existed. The only story that we've preserved out of any of this really is the story of bison.

And we haven't really preserved the story of all the grizzly bears that were out on the Great Plains, for example, feeding on the bison surplus and the dead animals, the bison that drowned in the rivers and so forth. We haven't thought too much about wolves or of driving elk into the mountains or of the pronghorn slaughter or of what happened to the wild horses. We've just thought about bison. But if you think of it in the whole, it's easier to conceptualize it as this really was an American Serengeti that we had. And what's so striking about it to me is that we almost wholesale converted it into this agricultural, privatized landscape, agricultural empire. Whereas the

colonial powers in Africa, they didn't really do that. I mean, they made sure that we ended up with Serengeti National Park and the Maasai Mara National Preserve and Kruger National Park in the veiled in South Africa. So in Africa, we ended up with these big game parks to preserve the African version of this. And in North America. We declared it flyover country. We declared it flyover country and a place that you just ignored that really wasn't interesting enough for people to even stay there. I mean, it's been one of the stories of the Great Plains is that unlike any other region of the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries, it endlessly is hemorrhaging population and losing people. So one of the, I mean, the way I end this book is that, so that it's not a complete downer about what we did and it's just all gone, is that, I mean, one of the really uplifting

parts of this story is that you get to the 21st century, and in Montana, along the Missouri River, we've got this organization called the American Prairie Reserve that has so far raised about $100 million in the last 10 or 12 years in order to try to tie together two big public lands, the Charlie Russell National Wildlife Refuge and the Missouri Breaks National Monument with the private lands that lie in between them. And what they're trying to do is to, as ranches come up for sale, to try to buy them with- Yeah, willing seller, willing buyers.

Yeah, and willing buyers with the idea that we can ultimately create this preserve that will kind of be really a Yellowstone of the Great Plains. And they're hoping for an aerial extent that's going to be twice the size of Yellowstone. Yellowstone is 2 million acres. They're hoping, American Prairie Reserve is hoping for as much as 3.5 to 4 million acres of land where we actually can do what has happened in the parks in Africa and recreate this American Serengeti with all these animals restored. Grizzly bears and gray wolves and pronghorns and bison, of course, and possibly the full suite of animals that were there 150 years ago. Are they seeking a park designation in the end? No. No, they're not.

At least they're not saying they are. No, they're sort of arguing at this point that it's going to be private enterprise that creates it it's going to be accessible to the public um they're running block management right now yeah on some of it yeah yeah public access hunting we'll see yeah cool you know just to editorialize a little bit i think they'll find tremendous amounts of support um with outdoorsmen if they articulate if they clarify and articulate that a little bit but which might do them some good it would do them some good it would bring a constituency uh that they may not have anticipated i think yeah because unfortunately just to i don't know if it's editorializing or not but when i hear that i can already hear the voices of

you know a lot of people that we deal with every day when i hear that i can already hear the voices of you know a lot of people that we deal with every day when they hear that they're going uh uh sounds like you're just taking it all away from me but you gotta understand that they're dealing with in a private land they're dealing with private land yeah already deeded land right so i mean in some way you could argue what they're doing right now, they're not decreasing access. I want to move on to your- The coyote book? Yeah, but first I want to ask you something because this has always bothered me.

All right. Is there proof that there were not elk in the mountains? I always hear that, this idea that elk were pushed into the mountains. Don't you think that there was elk across their entire range? They were eradicated in some areas and continue to survive in some areas i think there were elk in the mountains yeah yeah like people when people say i hear that so much but just doesn't make sense to me i think you know there

were grizzlies in the mountains there were elk in the mountains there were there were bighorn sheep in the mountains obviously those animals were also out on the Great Plains, and the ones that were on the Great Plains ended up either being killed or fleeing to the mountains. Just gradually pushed by pressure. Because, I mean, you can push animals. I mean, we see it today. Like, pressure moves animals.

But I just have a hard time imagining that they very quickly adapted to yeah like yeah to like an alpine environment i'm guessing that they were just evenly distributed and you saw the great abundance now we think of them as a mountain animal yeah but they were a plains animal oh man they were a plains animal for sure yeah there's no doubt all right so lay out the coyote book. I call them coyotes. I know the proper terms. Maybe coyote. I call it Wile E. Coyote.

I don't call him Wile E. Coyote. Right, you don't say Wile E. Coyote. You know, it's funny. My kids have been watching. I let them watch Looney Tunes just because I relate to it. And they watch a lot of Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. And outside of my house, there's a phone pole that provides power to my house that's leaning at a precipitous angle. And my brother was visiting. He commented how that phone pole was going to tip over.

And my son asked, will the whole house tip over too? And my brother said, I think these kids watch too much Wile E. Coyote. They learn physics from Wile E. Coyote. They learn physics from Wile E. Coyote. And Wile E. Coyote, of course, can fall off the highest cliff in the solar system. And it flattens him, but he gets up and walks away from it. Yeah, you can't teach your kids the natural laws by watching that show. But yeah, so lay out the the coyote book for me. I'm going to call them coyotes just for consistency.

Yeah, but what I will say about that is, and I tell the story in two places, in the introduction and then in a chapter called Prairie Wolves, which is what they were originally called in America. The book's Coyote America. The book is called Coyote America, a natural and supernatural history. But I lay out the story in two different places in that book The book's Coyote America. The book is called Coyote America, A Natural and Supernatural History. But I lay out the story in two different places in that book,

why you say coyote and I say coyote. Oh, please. Yeah. I always said anybody who's ever killed one says coyote. Yeah. Well, that's sort of it. People who kill them, who manage them, who attempted to poison them to extermination back in the 1930s, 1940s, all call them coyotes. And the origin of that two-syllable pronunciation

goes back to the mountain men who were in the southwest, in the southern Rockies, in the 1830s and 1840s because they, for the first time, were encountering a name other than prairie wolf. Everybody in America who first encountered coyotes in the early 19th century, starting with Lewis and Clark, that's the name Lewis and Clark gave them was prairie wolf. That's what everybody called them. You know Stanley Hall Baker? Yeah.

Yeah. In his old trapping books uses that name prairie wolf yeah and i would be like what in the hell is he talking about one day it occurred to me that's what he's talking about but he was writing in the 1900s yeah that's right and there i've seen examples and by 1915 or so where people are still using the term prairie wolf that was the anglo-american name for an animal that they had never seen before because coyotes, I mean, let me back up with their evolution a little bit because this is a really, they've got probably the most fascinating biography of any animal in North America.

And it is a surprising and unexpected story, really, that coyotes have. They are part of the evolution of the canid family that took place in North America beginning 5.3 million years ago, and that produced all the wolves, all the jackals, and the coyotes of North America all around the world. So all the jackals of Africa and southern Europe, all the wolves of the entire globe, all come from the evolution of a North American family of animals, the canid family that evolved 5.3 million years ago. I never heard that. I didn't know that. Yeah, and so for one thing, it makes coyotes,

I mean, they're a distinctively North American animal in part because they not only evolved here, we think probably in the Southwest is where this family of animals evolved, but unlike jackals and wolves, coyotes never left North America. They remained here. Wolves, on the other hand, became cosmopolitan,

followed the big herds of animals that were migrating across the Bering Strait and across the connectivity bridge to Europe and ended up in Europe and Asia and everywhere else. Jackals ended up about a million years ago separating from the coyote line and getting into Africa and Southern Europe. Coyotes never left. They stayed in North America and they were found only in the West from the Great Plains westward when Americans like Lewis and Clark first encountered them. So nobody who was settling Plymouth or Jamestown ever encountered a coyote.

Lewis and Clark get to what is now Nebraska in the fall of 1804. And in the stretch of about, it's about three weeks, they encounter all the classic animals of the American West. They encounter the first bison they'd ever seen. This is in middle of August of 1804.

They encounter pronghorn antelope. They encounter, they see a deer with strangely large ears that hops rather than runs. The mule deer. And then they say, and we keep seeing this fox, a kind of fox that nobody has ever seen before. And after about a week or so of describing seeing this fox, one of the hunters in the party finally shoots one and William Clark lays it out on the

grass and he starts looking at it and he says, this is not a fox. This is some kind of wolf. It's a small wolf, but this is a wolf. And he says, I think the best name for it since we're out in the prairies is a prairie wolf. And so Lewis and Clark name it a prairie wolf, and for more than 100 years, many Americans refer to coyotes as prairie wolves. But in the 1830s and 1840s, Americans start going across the plains to Santa Fe after, for example, Mexico becomes independent of Spain in 1821, they open up the trade between Missouri and Santa Fe. And so all of these traders are going from St. Louis to Santa Fe, and along with them go mountain men to trap the beaver strains, like Kit Carson. And when these guys get to Santa Fe and they start pointing out,

there goes a prairie wolf, the people in Santa Fe say, no, that's a coyote. And so these Americans listen to that word, coyote, and what they're actually hearing is a Spanish version of a Nahuatl Indian word, or Nahuatl is the name of the language. Nahuatl is the language been either Aztec or Nahuatl speakers, Indians who had been probably subjugated by the Aztecs and forced to speak the Aztec language. And so they got to Santa Fe and they saw these animals. They used the old Aztec word for them,

which was the original pronunciation was coyote. The Spaniards heard coyote, the Indian word. They converted it to coyote in a Latin pronunciation. And then Anglo-Americans start showing up in the 1830s. Coyotes. And they hear coyote. And as Frederick Ruxton, one of the chroniclers of the mountain man life in the Southern Rockies says, as we all sat around the campfires

in the Southern Rockies in the 1830s and the 1840s, you could hear the Mexicans say coyote, the Indians say coyote, and all the trappers would say, they couldn't pronounce that with three syllables, they would say coyote. Is that right? And of course, those guys went back to Kentucky and Virginia and Illinois, and when they heard people say, so did you see any prairie wolves out there? They would say, so you mean coyotes?

What we've ended up with then is kind of a bifurcated pronunciation where rural people in America, and as you said a minute ago, people who tend to shoot coyotes, that's what they say. I just, that's a coyotes. That's what they say. I just, that's a coyote. But in the sort of more literary circles of urban places, yeah, they use the term, they use the term coyote as the, as the classic

pronunciation. And I think it's probably what they're trying to do is to pay homage to the Spanish pronunciation. Nobody says coyote anymore, but a lot of people say coyote. That's fascinating, man. I had no idea. Yeah. So that's one of many gems someone would discover in your book. Yeah, that's one of the things that you're going to discover. You're also going to discover, as I said, that these are North American animals that evolved more than 5 million years ago.

And one of the fascinating consequences of that today is one of the things we've got going on in the eastern United States is the emergence of an animal called the coy wolf. And it's an intermixture, an interbreeding between coyotes that under persecution by the federal government and state governments over the last 70 or so years have expanded their range out of the West all over North America. And not just all over North America, not just to Maine and Florida and Virginia, but into all the major cities of the United States. They've done that because they've been persecuted, but it's taken coyotes into places where there are remnant eastern wolves. And one of the things that's happened is that they are freely interbreeding with the red wolves, the endangered red wolf of the south, and with these eastern wolves that are still found in eastern Canada and creating a new predator that is – And in Minnesota, Wisconsin, northern Michigan.

And New York and Virginia and the deep south. They're creating this animal that- No, I just meant where they run into eastern wolves. That's where they run into them. Yeah, from the Great Lakes basically eastward in Canada. Yeah. And then- And those descendants are going.

Yeah. When they interbreed, how does it work? Is it male wolf, female coyote? Yeah. When they interbreed, how does it work? Is it a male wolf, female coyote? Yeah, it's usually that way. Yeah, it's usually a male wolf and a female coyote. But evidently, there have been crosses that have gone the other way. And they produce a— They produce viable offspring, and the reason they do is because red wolves and eastern wolves are also from this North American wolf stock that never left North America.

And so they're closely related biologically to coyotes. And so they easily interbreed. breed. But in the West, where we have gray wolves, gray wolves, for example, in Yellowstone, when they were introduced into Yellowstone in 1995 and 96, the first thing that happened was that gray wolves knocked the coyote population back in Yellowstone by 50 to 60%. Yeah. They, gray wolves, do not interbreed with coyotes. They kill them. They attack them.

And the reason we think this is happening is because gray wolves are a set of wolves, there are five subspecies of them, that left North America, evolved for a couple of million years probably in Asia and in Europe, and then only began returning to North America about 20,000 years ago. So they had had enough separate evolution in another part of the globe that by the time they returned to North America, they no longer

recognized any biological ties with coyotes or with American wolves like red wolves. And their reaction to coyotes has not been to interbreed with them, but to basically attack them and kill them. Yeah. Yeah. And coyotes return the favor on foxes. Like where I grew up, we used to have a lot of red foxes, a lot of gray foxes. And that's when they roll in, that's one of the first, you know.

That's right. It's the big dog, little dog thing. And it happens at every level. on air here that what we think explains the cleverness, the wiliness, and the survivability of coyotes. I mean, if you think about this for a second, we managed to wipe wolves out in North America. We extirpated wolves. We did everything we could, even including passing a law in 1931 that earmarked coyotes for total extermination in the United States and have not been able to do it. Despite spending billions of dollars and developing a whole witch's brew of poisons to try to eradicate them, we have never been able to do that.

So one of the things about the coyote story is that this is a story that turns upside down our notion about the human relationship to nature where we think we arrive and everything goes shit bang because nothing in nature is able to resist us. The coyote story is completely the opposite. These guys have won. What is it attributed to? Like fecundity? It's attributed to the fact that

for the last 20,000 years, they have been persecuted by gray wolves and they evolved an ability to survive under persecution and even to colonize new areas under persecution. So what we think is going on is that coyotes haven't evolved their wiliness and their ability to survive in our presence and under our persecution just as a result of the last 200 years of us trying to wipe them out. they brought to bear these evolutionary adaptations that go back at least 20,000 years as a result of their interaction with gray wolves. And what they

evolved was a whole suite of these kind of remarkable adaptations. One of them that's probably the most important one is called fission fusion adaptation. And what it means is coyotes, and there are only about 19 mammal species around the world that can do this. One of the other ones happens to be us. We do this. And what it means is they have the ability to exist both communally, in coyote terms, in packs, or as singles and pairs. And so, whereas wolves are only pack animals, and it became kind of their Achilles heel when the government was trying to poison them out because you could kill one wolf out of a pack and use the scent glands of that wolf to bait your meat cubes and you would in turn in a few days

kill every single animal in the pack as they would be drawn to the scent of that lost companion. But coyotes, when you try to do that, their response is to go into this fish infusion kind of adaptation and they just scatter to the winds. And what they do is when you're persecuting them and driving their populations down, one of the things coyotes, I mean, we all love how coyotes howl. What they're

actually doing with those howls is they're taking a census of the coyote population in a territory. And if they howl at night and they don't hear responsive howls from other pairs or packs of coyotes, that triggers an autogenic response, a hormonal response in them so that they have larger litters. And so as you drive the population of them down and they take this howling census and don't hear other coyotes in the landscape, they produce larger litters. And what these larger litters often prompt them to do is to go into what's called colonization mode. So they start going out to the edges of their territory and expanding and colonizing. And what it's meant is that once we started trying to eradicate them,

that produced the spread of coyotes all over North America. I mean, in response to our persecution, they scattered everywhere yeah i once watched a movie a documentary that was highly critical of coyote hunting okay and it was like a like a pro coyote movie highly critical of coyote hunting and the thing he makes the point he's like the more you hunt them the more we're gonna have but then i want to think okay so if that's true then i would think that you would welcome hunting because you like them and it makes more of them it does indeed if you live in boston and you want them you should send your cousin in nebraska to go email to go on a coyote tournament that's right go out. Go out and blast away at them. Yeah. So they make up this creature that, in a lot of ways, throws environmentalists for a loop.

Yeah. I mean, I had a conversation a few months ago with a couple of women who wanted to do a coyote documentary. And we sat down over the conversation, and it emerged fairly quickly that what they wanted to do was to do a documentary to save the coyote. And so I had to say to them, so you realize they don't need your help. They are perfectly capable, thank you, of saving themselves and go about it in a completely nonchalant manner, trotting by, looking at you with those yellow eyes and sort of see you later. So long, it's been good to know you. And they don't really need your help.

They can do it very well on their own. So it's not... There's a small handful of species like that. Yeah, very small handful. Crows, Canada geese, coyotes. And these guys are, you know, the truth is, and if we thought of them this way, I think it might change the way people think of them. I mean, what they are is

they're a wolf. They're a small species of wolf. And so what, you know, if you sit in back east in your study and you lament the loss of wolves in America and you would love to see wolves return to America. Look out your window. And a coyote trots through your backyard, that's cause for celebration because the fact is that's what they are. And they have managed to re-inhabit our landscapes, including our biggest cities. I mean, one of the great recent stories of Coyote was a group of people walking out of a bar in Queens last spring and looked up,

they heard a sound and looked up and a coyote was on the roof of the bar in Queens looking down at them. And they snap pictures with their phones. And somebody, of course, calls the police who alert animal control. And the animal control people arrive. The coyote is just sort of walking back and forth along the roof of the bar. And people by now are gathered out in the street. Traffic's going by. Here's this coyote a few feet away. And as soon as the animal control

truck comes around the corner with the lights on, the coyote looks back behind him. There's an abandoned building with broken glass in the windows and sort of like some Hollywood action hero, he just sort of hops off the roof of the bar through the broken glass of an empty building and it's gone. That's great, man. You know, we're getting to where I'm going to wrap it up, but I want to

remind you of something that you said all those years ago when I was in your class. I'm trying to think of what year it would have been.

99? Somewhere here? Something like that, yeah. We were talking about a famous battle, Adobe Walls.

Tell everyone what the battle of Adobe Walls was. I know there's like part one and part two, but you were getting, you were driving at a story about where one of the participants from the Indian side, from the Native American side, one of the participants described what went wrong at that battle. Juxtaposed to the narrative of what went wrong from them from the Euro-American side.

I'll remind you later what it was, but can you just set the stage for what that battle was? Yeah, well, I mean, and I remember the story I told you too. The Battle of Adobe Walls was a battle between buffalo hunters and the Texas panhandle who were holed up in this old trading fort, which is up above the present-day Amarillo on the Canadian River. And a group of Comanches and Southern Cheyennes who, by the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek of 1868, knew that buffalo hunters weren't supposed to be below the Arkansas River. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek, the Indians had insisted the buffalo hunters have to stay north of the Arkansas and Kansas.

And that's basically where the railroad ran through, right? Yeah. The Southern Pacific. Yeah. So here these guys were. These buffalo hunters had crossed the deadline and had gone down into the Texas Panhandle where they weren't supposed to be. And so this group of Comanches and Southern Cheyennes felt perfectly justified in attacking this buffalo hunter camp.

And so they mounted up a war party, and about 5 o'clock in the morning, just as it was starting to get light, they decided to make a raid on this camp and wipe these guys out. And from the side of the story of the buffalo hunters, some guy gets up at about 4.30 or 5 in the morning. He's got to go outside and take a whiz, and as he's taking a whiz, he looks up on the ridge, and he sees silhouetted in the coming twilight of the morning this group of Indians getting ready to ride down on them.

That's one version of what happened. Another is that this was an old fort, and a vega, or one of the roof the roof beams cracked and it woke somebody up. Yeah, that's the one. I'd read that. And they walked outside and were looking around to see what had happened and looked up. So it was supporting earth and roofs. It was an old adobe building and this roof beam cracked.

And so it woke a couple of them up, and they walked outside, and they saw. Anyway, the Indians launched an attack, which they thought was going to be a surprise attack on the sleeping camp, and it turned out some of these guys were already up. And so they repulse the attack. And the Indians, in attempting to explain it later, so we'll see if this is how you remember. This is exactly how I remember. The Indians, in attempting to explain it later, used their own cause-effect logic to explain why this had happened the way it had. And their logic was not that,

damn, we were going to launch a surprise attack and some of those guys were already up and they alerted everybody else. Their logic was, on the way to launch a surprise attack, and some of those guys were already up, and they alerted everybody else. Their logic was on the way to the attack that morning, one of the Cheyennes has shot a skunk, and it was taboo to arrow a skunk. And so that had screwed the medicine for the whole band. And so when they launched that attack, they no longer had the right medicine with them. And in their cause and effect explanation, which we would call a supernatural explanation for why it failed, this was the reason. A taboo had been broken. The animals had turned against them and therefore the attack

was a failure it took me 10 years to understand what that story means i resisted it at first yeah i was like that's not what happened what happened was but but when you were telling you were making the point of um we have our ways of explaining things. Yeah. And we have these things that are true to us. You know? And like a decade later, I'm like, you know, I finally, I'm old enough now or I've been around enough now where I'm like, he was right. He's right.

It's because of the goddamn skunk. So you worried about that for 10 years. I would return to it periodically. Yeah, you never said anything. Randall, you didn't say much. You guys got any concluding thoughts? Man, too many names. This is going to be one of my favorite podcasts to date,

I think. I have a clarifying question. Well, I have a couple things. One, I'm wondering if we have enough time. Because I think if it's all right with you, if you can chat a little bit longer. I would love to hear, to talk about just the Bison. If we could get like the very abridged version of the Bison.

The Bison story? Story. You mean his influential paper he referred to? And then coyotes. It's always kind of like this myth that you hear about like the more you shoot them the more there's going to be so really what what you explain that is to be true like they're they are going to produce more offspring the more pressure you put on them whatever poisoning shooting yeah so one of the ways that we know it's different from what it could be is that we had about 70 years in Yellowstone, for example, of healthy coyote population, nobody hunting them, no wolves there because wolves are eliminated

from Yellowstone by about 1925 and we don't get wolves there again until 1995. So we have this period of about 70 years where there's a coyote population that biologists can study that don't get pressured either by people or by gray wolves. And what they did is very interesting. Their population rose to this carrying capacity plateau, and it never got any bigger. And so as soon as wolves arrived, what happened was the coyote population dropped by almost half. But then under wolf pressure, it has begun to build back to its original size and larger, and they have scattered out of the park. So it's almost like this test case of the theory of whether or not it's pressure that causes them both to colonize and expand their range and also causes their population to rise.

And so the guy who's done this study also did, for his PhD dissertation, he studied the Hanford Preserve around Hanford, where the same thing was true. There were no wolves. People weren't shooting, trapping, or poisoning coyotes. Where is this reserve? It's in Washington State. It's the Hanford nuclear site. And what he discovered was the same phenomenon that without pressure, their populations rise to this carrying capacity level, and then they don't get any bigger. And the reason they don't is because it's not so much the litter sizes fall. They fall to maybe four or five pups, whereas when they're under pressure, sometimes they'll have 13 or 14 pups. But the litter size would fall to about four or five pups.

And because the population of coyotes was at the carrying capacity of the resources, they would not often be able to get all those pups raised without losing a couple of them or maybe three of them because there just weren't enough resources out there to raise the entire litter. And so that seemed to be what provided the ceiling. So, I mean, we actually do have a couple of these sort of test cases where you can observe what happens if they don't have any pressure on them. And Yellowstone is probably the best one. But as I said, there's at least one other one, too, that people have studied. Can I ask a follow-up question? Well, no, because he hasn't gotten – you wanted him to explain the bison ecology, bison diplomacy.

I know about a follow-up question with the coyotes. Yeah, sure, go ahead. Then does that flip the whole predator control thing to basically kill more coyotes equals more big bucks? How does that relate to that? And just the research that you've done in your opinion. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a... So, for example, the state of Utah,

the Mule Deer Protection Act a few years ago, you know, created a bounty on, a state bounty on coyotes. They did that almost two years to the day after a major study came out on coyote effects on mule deer populations in Idaho. It was a result of about a 10-year study on coyotes and mule deer. And the conclusion of this study, authored by about 15 or 16 biologists, was that coyotes had virtually no effect on mule deer populations. And, I mean, this is one of those classic instances, almost like climate science or something. Some major study comes out, and next door, the neighboring state completely ignores it and nonetheless goes ahead and puts a bounty on coyotes in order to save mule deer.

So the science that's out there indicates, I mean, and this science goes back to the 1930s, really, when the Murie brothers were studying coyote depredations in Yellowstone and in Jackson Hole. Because the biological survey, after they wiped out wolves, they decided, I mean, you can kind of see the transparency of it. It's the government bureau. Our major target is gone. We got to survive some way. So they proclaim the coyote is the arch predator of our time. It turns out, actually, most of that predation that was going on, that was really coyotes and not wolves. So government needs to keep funding us and we need to continue to do this predator control thing. And they send the Murie brothers out to study coyote predation on game animals as the arch predator of our time in Yellowstone and in whole. And both the Murie brothers, Olas and Adolf, both argue that we have no evidence that

coyotes are causing the population of sheep, mule deer, pronghorns, bighorns, elk, any of those animals to go down. I mean, it's true in bad winters, they will sometimes manage to kill a calf. And you can certainly find, as the Bureau had, as hunters had argued, well, we can open their stomachs up after we poison them and it's got elk meat. But the Murie brothers watched them close enough

to realize it's scavenged. I mean, these elk herds are in bad winters. There are animals dying. And for sure, the coyotes are going out and scavenging on the dead animals, but they're not out there hauling down elk in packs of little coyotes nipping at their heels. The same conversations happen right now in the East with whitetails where a lot of even though study after study keeps coming out saying you know i think that the whitetail decline we've been seeing in the last you know five six seven years is contemporaneous with coyotes coming in um it seems that maybe it's not what's really going on here there could be other factors at play and and there's a great reluctance with people to accept that

because it's clean. Yeah, we love scapegoats. It's clean to think that way. I got friends in Wisconsin, good friends, who on one hand advocate on we need to shoot more whitetails. We got too many whitetails. We got an unhealthy herd. There's too much risk of disease transmission.

Got to shoot coyotes because they're going after the deer. So, yeah, well, they don't want the coyote to get the deer, you know, they want to, they want to put their tag on it.

Yeah. But, but I do, you know, I do. I had a guy recently telling me that the thing he – and he's a very astute observer of the natural world in his area in Kentucky. And he was saying that he's – he says,

I'll tell you one thing that happened when coyotes came in here. He says, the fucking groundhogs vanished. I'll bet they did. No one else is crying for groundhogs, but he's like, that's one thing I do think is exactly attributable. Because I think they came in and just hammered the groundhogs. I'm sure they probably did that. And what people in New York and Chicago and Denver and L.A. I'll argue is that your pets aren't safe when coyotes are in town.

That argument is the least interesting to me. Yeah, well, that's, you know, for a lot of people living in the suburbs, that's the thing that, I mean, I just saw online the other day a couple that had invented a coyote vest. And you put it on your little dog, and it's got these spikes coming out of the vest and some sort of quills that come up off the back of its neck, and it's got these spikes coming out of the vest and some sort of quills that come up off the back of its neck and it's supposed to repel coyote attacks. I mean, they're advertising on the internet that they've got these coyote vests that you can buy. But I mean, what's actually going on is it's not, everybody thinks what's happening is that coyotes in urban situations, you know, they're scavenging garbage from the back of the McDonald's and the Burger King,

and they're eating cats and they're eating poodles and stuff. I mean, the truth is what they do in urban areas is the same thing they do in rural areas. They basically go after mice and rats. Eat a lot of grasshoppers and shit. They eat a lot of grasshoppers, a lot of fruit, and primarily mice and rats. And although they do kill cats and they do kill small dogs, it's not because they're eating them. It's because they regard them as intra-guild competitive predators. And they see a cat or a small dog out there, and their response to that is that this is another predator that's invaded my territory.

And so they will kill them, but very rarely will they haul them off and chow down on them. I mean, this is just another one of the urban myths about coyotes that's out there. From the perspective of the pet owner, it probably doesn't matter.

Probably doesn't matter. The animal is dead. It's like, and he ate him and it might be better actually if they haul the cat down to the den of pups and actually the cat got was made some use of yeah uh but yeah coyote vest so you can you can acquire one no doubt soon for your cat as well as your dog hey, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. That was your follow-up question. You wanted to know about bison, though, the story? Bison, yeah, your paper.

Yeah. Please. Well, the chapter that I do in American Serengeti on bison yeah your paper yeah please well the the chapter that i do in american serengeti on bison uh is a it's a new take and so it's not the it's not a regurgitation of my original 1991 story although i do i do build on that and what that 1991 story argued was that what we've thought about what happened to bison is far too simple. I mean, we've basically always argued that, you know, there were still 60 million of them at the end of the Civil War. And these buffalo hunters go out in the space of 20 years. They managed to wipe out 60 million animals in the market hunt.

And that's what happened to them. And what I argued in that piece back in 1991 was that the truth is the bison herds, for one thing, were never that big. They were only about half that size. And secondly, they were dwindling visibly as early as 1850 because of a whole group of causes that kind of came together like a perfect storm in the 1840s and 1850s. And one of them certainly was the market hunt, although it wasn't the American hide hunters who were responsible. It primarily was Indians being caught up in the buffalo robe trade that was sponsored by the fur companies. Robe being hides with fur on. Yeah.

Hides with hair on. Right, and tanned by Indian women who were the processors, who were the labor force. And the men would go out and procure the animal, and the women would take the pelt off and then tan the robe and produce this marketable commodity that was then traded to the fur trade companies.

So there was a- For wagon blankets and- For all kinds of things. Primarily as people were sort of competing for the last big buffalo hunting grounds. In many instances, what they were getting in trade were firearms and ammunition and powder, metal goods of all kinds, certainly textile blankets and beads and things, but often firearms and ammunition because there was a competition away the buffalo grounds of the Pawnees, ultimately the buffalo grounds of the crows in order to exploit the herds themselves. So it was kind of this capitalist market-fueled intertribal competition for the last remaining

resource. So that was one of the causes, but there were others. One was the spread of horses across the plains again, which ate the same grass, drank the water that bison drank. And so, and the horse numbers were becoming high enough that the competition between horses and bison was beginning to draw down the size of the buffalo herds. And there was as well the fact that diseases, exotic bovine diseases, whose impact we can't really quantify, but things like bovine tuberculosis and anthrax were having an impact by the 1840s because of the immigrant trails that were going across the plains. And then perhaps the one that's the easiest to assess in terms of quantifying

is the change in climate that was happening in the 1840s and 1850s. And what was going on was that what we called the Little Ice Age, about a 250-year period of much cooler, wetter temperatures in the northern hemisphere, was coming to an end in the 1840s and 1850s. And as it came to an end, it was producing a series of droughts. There was a drought on the Great Plains in the 1850s and early 1860s that was probably the most severe drought that we have a recordains in the 1850s and early 1860s that was probably the most severe drought that we have a record of in the last thousand years. And as it drew down the carrying

capacity of the grasslands, what this meant was that buffalo didn't have as much grass to eat. And so the numbers were plummeting as a result of deteriorating environmental conditions for them. And one final thing that I talked about, I talked about all of these causes in this article which argued for this multiplicity of causes. The one other one I talked about was the fact that in the past when conditions like this had prevailed on the Great Plains,

buffalo had tended to migrate westward into the mountains where there was more grass and lusher conditions and eastward out into the prairies towards the Mississippi River where there would be more grass and more rainfall. placed something like 85,000 eastern Indians in Kansas and Oklahoma in the Indian Territory as a part of the removal policy, the most famous aspect of which is the Cherokee Trail of Tears, where they're taken out of the southeast and put out in Oklahoma. And that puts this body of people right in the way of where Buffalo would formally have spread eastward in order to sort of relieve the pressure

of a drought out on the plains. So they don't have any refuges to expand into anymore. And they're just kind of caught out in a deteriorating Great Plains landscape with all these other effects. And so the argument became that by 1850, I mean, we actually probably only have maybe 12, 14 million buffalo left on the Great Plains, not 60 million. So by the end of the Civil War, that makes it quite a bit easier for the white hide hunters to arrive and sort of shoot down the remaining animals. So that was the story that I did in 1991.

And I certainly fold a good bit of that into the chapter on buffalo. But I try to tell a sort of a bigger story in this chapter in American Serengeti about Buffalo. And the main thing that I take on is our supposition that we all have, I mean, you can go online and find t-shirts that sort of argue for this, that it was a conspiracy between the federal government and the American military that wiped out the Buffalo. Yeah, people still talk about that. Yeah, they still talk about it. And the scapegoat of it is Philip Sheridan.

And Philip Sheridan, you can go online right now and find a T-shirt with this quote on the front of it. Philip Sheridan is supposed to have made this speech in Austin, Texas in the early 1870s when the Texas legislature, as the story is told over and over again, was considering a bill to outlaw the hide hunt in the Texas panhandle. And Sheridan supposedly goes to Austin and stands up in front of the Texas legislature and says, you can't do this. What you should be doing, in fact, is making sure that those animals are wiped out in order to be able to put the Indians on reservations and open up the plains to the festive cowboy and the speckled cattle. And he goes on to say, instead of denigrating these buffalo hunters, you should give them a medal. They should be recognized as American heroes, and the medal should have a discouraged plains Indian on one side and a dead buffalo on the other side. And so this story gets told. I mean, amazingly enough, no historian had ever looked at the origin of this story.

It's told by a buffalo hunter in 1905 during the conservation period of Teddy Roosevelt at a time when we were trying to save buffalo, and a lot of people thought of these buffalo hunters as having been murderers of all these animals. And this buffalo hunter named John Cook writes a memoir published in 1905 called The Border and the Buffalo. And he produces this speech, which is something like Patton's speech at the beginning of that movie. You can almost see the American flag rippling behind Sheridan as he says all this.

And historians, journalists, the Buffalo Field Campaign up in Yellowstone have just bought this thing hook, line, and sinker and nobody has ever bothered to go back and say, first of all, did Texas ever actually try to pass a law to outlaw the buffalo hunt and the panhandle?

Did Philip Sheridan ever actually go to Austin, Texas, and make a speech in front of the Texas legislature? And the answer to both those is Texas never considered such a law. And in fact, when a law like this came up in the national legislature, it was the Texas component that fought it tooth and nail at the national level. Philip Sheridan, we have no record that he ever went to Austin, Texas, and made such a speech. And the source of the story then you realize is this buffalo hunter who's writing his memoir at a time when buffalo hunters are being castigated. And when you look closely at the story, he even starts it out with this disclaimer of it is said that the texas legislature was considering so he does this kind of removes himself removes himself from it it's not me it is said however and so i tell this story

in this chapter in order to try to disabuse people dispatch a grad student down the guy who's go through all the shit down shit you remember this because that happened when you were at montana dan brister is he is he is now the director of the buffalo field campaign yeah dan is now the director of it and he's the grad student who went down to austin to try to find all this and came back from his spring break and a week of being down there. He was working for the Buffalo Field Campaign then and said, man, I got to say, it's not there. And so a friend of mine who works in the National Archives, knowing that I was working on this, dug up for me the ultimate sort of reversal of this. I mean, I don't know if this will rescue Philip Sheridan's reputation or not, but Philip Sheridan was in Montana territory in 1878 and

heard about buffalo hunters shooting down buffalo right and left and wrote a telegram to Washington saying, I want this buffalo hunting stuff stopped right now. We are going to end up with Indians who don't have a bite to eat this summer because these white guys are shooting down all these animals we've got to stop this i'm not shitting you and so i quote sheridan's exact opposite story than what he's been credited as saying in history that story is everywhere it's everywhere yeah when i was kind of immersed in this whole world it was like the thing it's just like oh I had already known because I'd heard about that. And I just like always dismayed about how many people would point that out. Yeah, yeah, it's everywhere.

So one of the things I do in American Serengeti. It's a comfortable, easy thing. Well, I mean, so think about it. We tried to claim that, you know, in the aftermath of the Civil War, that the Civil War is not about slavery. It's about the Southern way of life. It's about preserving a culture in the South. I have a brother back in Texas who still argues this. And so, I mean, that's the reason these kinds of stories are comfortable to us is that it removes the responsibility for the action in history from us to some agency out there,

like the federal government that everybody is always quick to take aim at. And so it wasn't, we didn't do it. The federal government and the military did this. I mean, and the truth is, of course, we did it. American citizens did it. The market hunt did it. Unrestrained capitalism did it. I've tried – when I was writing about hide hunters in my Buffalo book, I don't know if i ever i don't think i actually wrote this but when i was talking about it i would say let's just sound like i'm

condemning these guys i want to say in all honesty i'd have been right out there with them yeah well there were a lot of guys who were broke after the war and how in the world world would they have even, like, you got some guy pushing the plow, like you said, the Ohio Valley, or coming out of Pennsylvania, right? Next to no education, or no education, quite possibly illiterate, has never been out there. That it's like, that he's like, I'll go out there and fix them Indians and shit. It's just like, not what I'll go out there and fix them Indians. And it's just like, not what he was going out there for. He was going out there for like money adventure. You know,

it's like the grand picture wasn't there. I would like as much as like, I grew up, you know, I'll tell him what it's earlier today. I grew up shopping for a trap line in Canada. It's like, if I was alive at that time, i was alive at that time i'd have been like you're shitting me let's go before they're gone well i'll tell you what i i can't say that i wouldn't

have been right out there too it's impossible to say at the time but but it's like yeah it's a simple you know you take these like kind of like everyday motivations, the kinds of things people still do and still think about and apply it in that context at that time. And that's the kinds of things you wind up with. It's not that mysterious. There were some of these buffalo hunters like John Cook, the guy who wrote this memoir, who, I mean, they defended it all to the end, even when society had turned against it. I mean, there was a guy down in Texas, Jay Wright Moore, who used to lead parades in his buffalo hunter outfit. And he had this. This book's Buffalo Bone Days.

That's right. Buffalo Bone Days. was that all the buffalo between the Brazos River and the Platte didn't amount to one homesteader family somewhere in Kansas. And so don't go mourning all those buffaloes. That didn't amount to a single thing. One homesteader family amounted to more than that. But there were some of them. Buffalo Jones in Kansas, and you know about this guy, Steve, I know.

I mean, he sort of spent the rest of his life stricken with guilt about what he had done. He said, I spent my entire youth trying to wipe these animals out, and now I'm going to try to atone for that wickedness by attempting to save some of them for America in the 20th century. Yeah, he'd ride out, try to rope up calves, and then put them on cows to get milk. Yeah, and he knew from his hunts where some buffalo, even when everybody thought they were all gone, he knew there were some of them left in the Texas panhandle where I used to hunt in those breaks along the Ano Esacado. I guarantee I can go down and find some.

And he did. He went down and found a group of about 60. And this was seven or eight years after everybody was convinced that there were no more buffalo on the southern plains. I mean, but these guys, you know, they knew how to hunt. And they knew guns. And a lot of times that's all they knew how to do. And so here was an opportunity to make some money from it and they went out and did it

but when you got 20,000 of them out there on the plains and doing it, the ultimate result is, ultimate result is in our time, we only get to read books about this or see movies about it. And one of the things that kind of excites me about the idea of the American Prairie Reserve and recreating the American Serengeti is I want to experience it myself. I don't want to just read a book about what it was like.

Or go see The Revenant to see what the West was like. I want to, as Thoreau said, I want an entire heaven and an entire earth. I don't want to think that some demigod has come along before me and plucked the best of the stars out of the sky.

Yeah. So you're rooting for it. The return of the American Serengeti I am man absolutely it's a noble cause there's a lot of you know there's a lot of arguing

a lot of arguing needs to happen in Phillips County Montana I think there's a lot of arguing a A lot of arguing needs to happen. In Phillips County, Montana, I think there's a lot of arguing. A lot of arguing is going to happen. I certainly agree with the goal. It's going to be like all worthwhile things. It's going to amount to a fight. Yeah, well, getting Yellowstone was, you know, that was not a huge fight, but it was something of a fight. Listen, everyone's come to agree.

Teddy Roosevelt's a great man. Everything he did was great. You think at the time, when he says, hey, I got an idea, people were pissed. People were livid. Well, they were livid about the Grand Canyon, you know, when he made it into a national monument. I mean, people were furious about that, especially in Arizona. Yeah. And in Arizona Territory, I mean, they were absolutely furious about it.

But as Roosevelt said, you know, nothing man is going to be able to do to it is going to improve what it is. The ages have been at work on it. And so all we can do is detract from it. The best thing to do is to preserve it as it is. I think in this American Serengeti issue, it's not that we have a remnant thing that we can preserve. We're going to have to recreate that. And that's going to be, that's an even bigger task. Yeah, it's different than setting something pristine aside. It is. Yeah, recreating something is a bigger project.

But it's kind of, to me, on the scale of setting, you know, the world's first national park aside in the form of Yellowstone. And so it's kind of one of these big vision things for our time, the way Yellowstone was for people in the 19th century. It's coming up now, like, just in the political environment where people

look at chunks of wild land, and like the wild land sort of has to justify its existence it's like oh it's sitting there doing nothing as though at every minute wild places are supposed to be like to lay out their ledgers and prove at any given moment like what their value is in the moment when i think that a more accurate way of thinking about wild places is it's like money in the bank what am i doing with it right now it's setting there and that shit's getting more and more valuable that's right every minute and

i don't know i might not cash it my children might not cash it my grandparents might not cash it right or my grandchildren might not cash it but at the same time it's just something they're getting exponentially more valuable yeah no valuable as time goes by. It's disgusting to me that somehow people look at a chunk of ground and it has to justify itself. In terms of jobs, Aldo Leopold, he had this line where he said that America, in case you don't know, Aldo Leopold was one of the fathers of the modern conservation movement and avid hunter and fisherman. And he had this line where he said that we've become like hypochondriacs about our economic health, where we're incapable of being healthy. We view our economic health as so full of anxiety about it that we can't realize that we're actually okay. You know, and I think that the way wild lands

need to just like, in sort of some kind of petty economic way, account for what they're doing in the job cycle. All right. Like who's creating more jobs? It's a thing like in hunting and fishing right now, so many people are starting to say like, okay, we got to do,

we should do conservation work because look at the economic imprint of hunters and fishermen. We contribute all these billions of dollars to the economy every year. And I wound up thinking to myself, okay, so let's say you did that same math and realized that having clean air and clean water in wild places is costing us money. Does that mean we feel differently about it? Like that doesn't change my perspective on it. I'm not like, oh yeah, you're right. We should have wilderness because we're making money off it.

It's just like, you know, I hear that. I'm like, you know, that's great. But it doesn't change my opinion one way or the other. I don't like it less or more now that you've justified its value to me. That's trying to think about values that are sort of outside economic determinism and trying to insert them into that kind of model. But I mean, there's some things that you don't put price tags on. I mean, a lot of the, seems to me, the finer sentiments in the human spirit are not really things that you add up in ledgers.

I mean, you know, I still believe in that great old Wallace Stigner line about the geography of hope. That's kind of, to me, what wild places represent. So, I mean, as our population grows around the globe, I mean, we're going to be putting more pressure on wild places and shrinking the possibility of biodiversity. And that's the theme of the modern era. So every opportunity, it seems to me, when you can take a stand against that and even reverse it with something like this American Prairie Reserve idea, I mean, that makes me want to endorse it and work on behalf project is kind of an opportunity to do good in the classic old Aldo Leopold, Teddy Roosevelt fashion. Groups like the National Geographic, for instance, and the Grosvenor family are really excited about it because it does have a little bit of a whiff of that old-time, big-vision conservation thinking.

Do you know Leopold's kid is a hydrologist, I believe? I've never – I don't think I've ever met him I could be messing this up I think he has a son Luna yeah I love him he's a hydrologist

he has a great quote I could mess this up too but I think it was kind of right where he says rivers are the gutters through which run the ruins

of continents that's a good one yeah that's a good one too we could toss good quotes from these guys around for a long time. All right, I don't have any concluding thoughts. That was a fine conclusion. Thank you for your time.

That was great. Former professor, current author, Dan Flores. Go out and find your books. You can get them on Amazon. Pre-order them or order them. Order one, pre-order one. Yeah, I think that's the way it is now. You can order American Serengeti and pre-order Coyote America.

And Coyote America is not very far away, about six weeks or so. Yeah. Order now, you'll get it early. All right, thanks, man. You bet. Thanks. you you Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this.

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