More Fauna

Prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus)

7/30/04, Poncarr River in northeast Nebraska

9/7/04, Boyd County, Nebraska

Captain Lewis noted that these animals are about the size of a small squirrel, weighing from 3 to 3½ pounds, with shorter ears like a guinea pig's, and a tail like a ground squirrel's.  Six or eight usually lived in one burrow, which never had more than one entrance.

Captain Lewis noted that the prairie dog village covered acres of ground.  The animals sat upright at the holes making a whistling noise, and ducked into their holes when alarmed.  But when people came near them, they barked like little toy dogs.

Catching prairie dogs was no easy task!  The Corps spent hours chasing the animals, even digging out their mounds and climbing in after them.  One burrow went down more than 12 feet!  They finally flushed one out by pouring buckets of water into its burrow.  But the struggle was worth it:  Of six animals sent back East from Fort Mandan (a grouse, a prairie dog, and four magpies), only two lived through the 4,000-mile, months-long trip:  one magpie and the prairie dog.

Pronghorn (Antilocarpa americana)

9/14/1804, Chamberlain, South Dakota

The Corps began seeing a new large mammal with forked horns and hooves near the big bend of the Missouri in modern-day Nebraska.  At first, the Corps called this animal an antelope or goat, but it's really not related to either.

The pronghorn is one of the most unusual mammals in North America—the only living species in its family, not closely related to any other animal.

Lewis and Clark noted that, unlike goats, pronghorns are beardless and their horns are forked.  Their gracefulness reminded Captain Clark of African antelopes or gazelles.  Even today, pronghorn are sometimes called pronghorn antelope in error.  They are not antelope or deer or goats...they are just plain pronghorns, a unique North American mammal.

Gray Wolf (Canis lupus)

7/1/1804, Leavenworth, Kansas

Wolves are very social animals, like dogs, their close relatives.  Wolf packs always hunted near large herds of bison, elk, and pronghorn.  Captain Lewis wrote of how the wolves worked together to capture a speedy pronghorn:  first they cut a pronghorn off from the rest of the herd, then took turns chasing it until the pronghorn got too tired to run any more.

Captain Clark wrote about how packs of wolves always followed herds of buffalo, feeding on the weak and those too fat to keep up.  The wolves ate any meat that the explorers left out overnight.

Captain Lewis noted that these wolves were smaller than wolves back East, colored from black to creamy white.  They lived in forests and plains but never dug burrows, as far as he could tell, and never barked, but howled like wolves "of the Atlantic states."

American Bison (Bison bison)

8/23/05, Vermillion River, South Dakota

No one knows how many bison lived in North America in Lewis and Clark's day, but guesses are in the tens of millions.  The bison population used to be one of the largest populations of big mammals anywhere on Earth.  Today, there are less than a quarter of a million bison.

Captain Clark recorded an exciting buffalo story on May 29, 1805:

In the last night, we were alarmed by a Buffalo, which swam from the opposite shore, landed opposite the pirogue [canoe] in which Capt. Lewis and my self were.  He crossed the pirogue, and went with great force up to the fire where several men were sleeping and was [within] 18 inches of their heads, when one man, sitting up, alarmed him and he turned his course along the range of men as they lay, passing between 4 fires and within a few inches of some of the men's heads as they lay, immediately in the direction to our lodge about which several men were lying.  Our dog flew out and he changed his course and passed without doing more damage than bending a rifle and breaking his stock and injuring one of the blunderbusses in the pirogue as he passed through.

Whew!

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