"How we react to animals is in part primate hard-wiring. The thump in the dark, the start to full waking, the pounding heart can transport us back to our African origins in a fraction of a second. But mostly what we think when "bear" comes to mind emerges from the tangled mess of software programs that is culture. What we've heard, what we've read, what we've inferred, what others have implied, for some of us what we've experienced-- all these and other ways of absorbing information-- go into creating a construction in our minds like "bear." When an Idaho governor publicly opposed recovering grizzly bears in the Bitterroot Mountains at the turn of the twenty-first century because he said didn't want "massive, flesh-eating carnivores" in Idaho, the bear he imagined was a very specific kind of historical memory. But many other kinds of bears look back at us, a maddening but fascinating aspect of the world."

"There must have been a powerful cultural psychology at work in nineteenth-century America, a Freudian feedback loop with respect to the continent. North America's wildness produced enough unease about the thinness of civilization's veneer that we reacted with a numb, almost instinctive orgy of destruction aimed at the animals that embodied the wild continent. "Non-human nature," writer D.H. Lawrence once wrote, "is the outward and visible expression of the mystery that confronts us when we look into the depths of our own being." For much of American history that exercise, when we've indulged it, has not pleased us, producing a self-hatred that we've deflected outward. As another writer who sought to understand our relationship with nature, Paul Shepard, put it in one of his last books, "By disdaining the beast in us, we grow away from the world instead of into it." That line stands as an evocative summary of much of the history of the American Great Plains."

"Almost a century later, in 1690 and far, far inland, a Hudson's Bay Indian trader named Henry Kelsey was traveling overland on the grassy yellow plains of Saskatchewan when his party encountered a grizzly. This was not a view from the safety of a sailing vessel, but face-to-face on the ground, and Kelsey's first reaction was to shoot. He thus became the first European of record to kill a grizzly bear, and event pregnant with portents for the future of bears and of the Great Plains. Kelsey's act greatly alarmed his Indian companions, who warned him that he had struck down "a god."

"American attitudes toward wildlife like bears by the Jeffersonian Age were complex and deeply internalized across thousands of years of human history. Genetic programming from as far back as the Paleolithic obviously preservers a human memory of giant bears. Mammals of the Northern Hemisphere, they would have been a new thing for modern humans migrating out of Africa and into Europe and Asia 45,000 years ago. Our Neanderthal ancestors would have long since been familiar with bears, but our own species likely first confronted them in southern Europe."


"In 1800 it was inhabited by perhaps 2 million Indians, 25-30 million buffalo in times of good weather, and perhaps 50-60,000 grizzlies. So many grizzlies, indeed, that Ernest Thompson Seton says Spanish travelers along the rivers of Northern California could easily see 30-40 grizzlies in a single day."

"Of course no one except the Indians thought to stop shooting up grizzlies for a very long time to come. A twenty-first century American has to pose the question- why, once they'd collected specimens for science, did Lewis and Clark and other nineteenth-century Americans feel such a compulsion to react to animals in the West by shooting them? What had history lodged in the American psyche that made the left-and-right, wholesale slaughter of animals- more than 500 million of them in Barry Lopez's estimate, although no one can ever know- such a part of the history of the West, and especially of the grand grasslands of the Great Plains? Why, for example, would the US Army officer and popular writer Colonel Richard Dodge, along with his four companions, feel it a worthy expenditure of their time to slaughter, in three weeks of lounging about on New Mexico's Cimarron River, 127 buffalos, 13 deer and pronghorns, 154 turkeys, 420 waterfowl, 187 quail, 129 plovers and snipe, assorted herons, cranes, hawks, owls, badgers, raccoons, and ever 143 songbirds? According to Dodge's obsessively kept scorecard, that was a total of 1,262 animals, many of which had functioned only as convenient live targets for bloodlust."

"In 1991 the writers Tim Clark and Denise Casey compiled a volume they titled Tales of the Grizzly:" Thirty-Nine Stories of Grizzly Bear Encounters in the Wilderness, which chronicle grizzly/human encounters in the Northern Rocky Mountains from 1804 through 1929. Their collection allowed them to chart what they decided were five distinct periods in the evolution of the American relationship with grizzly bears: (1) A Native American period, when bears were mythic fgures, teachers of medicines, helpers, a species whose physiological similarity to humans offered the possibility for transmigration in both directions- a relationship with nature, Clark and Casey asserted, that would have been "almost incomprehensible to most modern Americans."
(2) An Exploration/Fur Trade period, exemplified by the grizzly encounters of Lewis and Clark and Jacob Fowler, which exposed the fallacy of assumptions about human dominance and faith in technology, and created the initial impressions of grizzlies as the horrible bear, the wilderness fiend that offered Americans a reminder of the dangers of uncontrolled, chaotic nature.
Periods (3) and (4) in this chronology are the periods of conquest and settlement, when homesteaders resolved that it was a Christian duty to eradicate grizzlies and other formidable wildlife in order to liberate the wilderness for God and the Grand Old Party. During this phase, tens of thousands of grizzly bears were shot on sight, and not just to wipe them off the plains for the arrival of the livestock industry. Settlers killed 423 grizzlies in the North Cascade Mountains alone just between 1846 and 1851. In the early twentieth century the Great American War on grizzly bears featured an alliance between livestock interests and the US Biological Survey,, whose hunters made official the war on wolves, coyotes, lions, and bears, in the process creating an early federal subsidy for the ranching industry in the West."
"That same Progressive era witnessed the fifth period, the official rise of sport hunting and its replacement of market hunting, which now had a black eye. For the animals in the sights, of course, it wasn't so easy to tell the difference. But many sport hunters took to heart President Theodore Roosevelt's advice that "the most thrilling moments of an American's hunter's life are those in which, with every sense on the alert and with nerves strung to the highest point, he is following alone... the fresh and bloody footprints of an angered grisly." For hunters, eliminating "bad animals" like predators made sense not just in terms of growing the numbers of huntable elk and deer; going after grizzlies also had become the ultimate nostalgic capture of the vanishing frontier, the hunter's version of a Frederic Remington or Charlie Russell painting. As Roosevelt put it, tellingly, "no other triumph of American hunting can compare with the victory to be thus gained."

"Contemporary animal advocates assert an apparently radical doctrine: that individual animals have rights, and that the circle of ethical treatment- which in the Western tradition has expanded through history to confer rights to individuals of groups once denied legal standing, such as women, Native Americans, African Americans, now gay and transgender people- must and ought to be extended to animals on an individual basis."

"At the same, without trying to appropriate anyone's culture or romanticize anyone's past, it is difficult not to conclude that a way of thinking that recognized bears as essentially humans in another form, thus conferred individuality to bears, and thus a corpus of rights to bears- among them the simple right to exist- must have played some role in the historical fact that more than 5 million people and 100,000 bears were able to live together in America for so long. "

"Why does the buffalo matter? It strikes some as a slightly comic and ungainly holdover from a faded world, yet the truth is that this single animal's end-game exemplifies the whole declensionist story of the relationship between Americans and nature over the past five centuries. The buffalo was the essence of ecological adaptation to North America, perfectly suited to the grasslands of the interior of the continent from Alberta and Saskatchewan southward to Texas and Mexico. It was the wildebeest-plus of the American Serengeti, since the Pleistocene extinctions had left it with grazing competitors, allowing it to attain a biomass wildebeests were never able to achieve. It was a survivor of the great extinctions and of more than 100 centuries of dying at human hands, and yet in the space of less than a century we very nearly erased it from existence. No other environmental story in American history, and there is plenty of competition, produced quite so dramatic an ending."

"The historian Richard White has a single word for the callous disregard for life, the rotting stench that signaled the arrival of civilization to the plains, the brief and inconsequential economic returns of eradicating the buffalo: pathetic."

"In effect we dismantled and demolished a 10,000 year-old ecology, very likely one of the most exciting natural spectacles in the world, in the space of a half-century. There were people who made careers out of that loss, among them the artists Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington and the writer Zane Grey, and what they mourned was what they saw as life in"the wilderness," a thrilled-to-the-marrow life among native people and thronging wildlife and nature. As Grey believed, the West had offered the world once last chance to live in a state of nature as natural men and women. And then modern America had withdrawn the offer."

( )

A natural history of the Great Plains at the dawn of the 'American West'. Each chapter covers a different species and how they were impacted by the expansion of the United States. The same old sad story, well told. ( )