Dan Flores - Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

WILD
NEW
WORLD

THE EPIC STORY OF ANIMALS AND
PEOPLE IN AMERICA

DAN FLORES

As always, for Sara

That which happens to men also happens to animals; and one thing happens to them both: as one dies so dies the other, for they share the same breath; and man has no preeminence above an animal: for all is vanity.

ECCLESIASTES 3:19

There is grandeur in this view of life... whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless
forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

CHARLES DARWIN
On the Origin of Species

CONTENTS

WILD
NEW
WORLD

I t was the lead-up to a presidential election, an unsettling late summer for many Americans since the hugely popular incumbent, Theodore Roosevelt, was declining to run for president a second time. The national gossip centered around whether portly William Howard Taft, who Roosevelt handpicked as his successor at Chicagos Republican convention that June of 1908, could possibly follow the charismatic advocate of the strenuous life. Somehow Taft seemed an unlikely replacement for the president who does not shrink from danger, from hardship. So the news story out of the remote Southwest late that August initially seemed little more than a momentary distraction from politics, even if for some it might have been a reminder of the kind of heroic leadership the country was losing.

What the nation read in its newspapers was that on the night of August 27, a sixty-five-year-old telephone operator named Sally Rooke had gotten a call that an immense thunderstorm hovering over the Colorado-New Mexico border had spawned a flash flood in the Dry Cimarron River. With a debris-choked wall of water ripping straight for the town of Folsom, New Mexico, Rooke had spent a crucial half hour frantically calling every local number on her switchboard, saving scores of people. Then the flood had torn through Folsom and swept her away, along with half the town. Sally Rookes heroism became a national story. Telephone operators around the country contributed thousands of dimes for a memorial. But eventually the story faded from the papers. Folsom had imagined itself competing with Colorado Springs a hundred miles up the Rockies. But the town never recovered. Today Colorado Springs has half a million people. Folsom has eighty.

In the days immediately following the Dry Cimarron flood, an African American cowboy named George McJunkin was riding through grassy parkland a few hundred yards below the rimrock of a miles-long mesa that extended eastward from the Rocky Mountains, checking for ranch fencelines damaged by the flood. Suddenly McJunkins horse braced, its hooves furrowing into foot-deep mud at the edge of a ragged scar floodwaters had cut into the slope below the mesa. McJunkin leaned out of his saddle to peer into a fresh chasm sliced into the brown shale. What he saw changed the story of America forever.

On a similar rainy August day in 2018, some thirty-five of us are stepping through the lush grass of that same slope as it angles up toward the rimrock of Johnson Mesa. Were following David Eck, a New Mexico State Land Office archaeologist with a long ponytail halfway down his back, who is leading us toward the very spot where George McJunkins horse had pulled up 110 years ago. A century of floods and cattle grazing has changed the look of the place, which the flood erosion of 1908 had exposed as an ancient box canyon. The topography is now a grassy, shallow drain called Wild Horse Arroyo, and as we crowd around its edges it seems somehow too commonplace to be the scene of one of the continents most significant historical finds. Nonetheless, this, in the flesh, is the legendary Folsom Archaeological Site. Its the place where the world found irrefutable proof that we humans had been intimately involved with American wild animals that long ago went extinct.

What McJunkin had done, about where we now stood talking, was to spot in the flood-gashed arroyo bones of an immense size he had never seen before. The exposed skeletal materials turned out to be from a herd of Bison antiquus, an extinct form of giant bison. But the bones themselves werent the pice de rsistance. At the time, the sciences of ethnology and archaeology in the United States were firm that American Indians had arrived in North America only a couple thousand years prior to the coming of Europeans. In the Old World, artifact hunters at Frances La Madeleine rock shelter in 1864 had found a piece of ivory with the representation of a mammoth on it. That seemed certain evidence that in Europe humans once coexisted with extinct Pleistocene animals. As early as the 1870s, popular magazines in Europe were carrying illustrations of humans doing heroic battle against monsters like cave bears and mammoths.

George McJunkin on his horse. Courtesy Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

That such sites hadnt turned up in the United States fed into a bias going back to a famous debate in the late 1700s between the French naturalist Comte de Buffon and Thomas Jefferson about whether America really was marginal to the global biological and human story. History has taken Jeffersons side in their argument, but Buffon turned out to be right about one aspect. In contrast to Jefferson, who thought extinction impossible, the French naturalist convinced the world that the strange creatures quarrymen were unearthing in Europe and America were species that had once roamed Earth but were now long vanished. Buffon likewise annoyed Jefferson by casting aspersions on American Indians assumed lack of a significant history compared to that of Europe. In 1908 the flood that swept away Sally Rooke, and George McJunkins discovery in the wake of it, were about to change forever the narrative that America was marginal to humanitys deep story.

Since Jeffersons time, scientists and ordinary citizens had been looking for something to refute Old World snobbery about Americas past. In the wake of the La Madeleine discovery in France, the Smithsonian had mailed a circular asking military officers, missionaries, and Indian agents to be on the lookout for ancient fossil sites that might also show human antiquity. The stakes for demonstrating a deep human past in America were huge, and over time amateurs and scientists of various stripes advocated for at least two dozen sites, from Florida to New Jersey, from Idaho to California, as possible evidence humans had been in America in the Pleistocene. They thought theyd found it in 1882, when footprints embedded in stone at the Nevada State Prison seemed to show mammoth tracks overlapping human prints. That led to an excited New York Times headline: Footprints of Monster Men! Famous paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope thought the account convincing. But when University of California geologist Joseph Le Conte went to investigate, he concluded that the monster man tracks were in fact those of a giant ground sloth.