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Book Review
| Prairie Ghost: Pronghorn and Human Interaction in Early America. By Richard E. McCabe, Bart W. O'Gara and Henry M. Reeves. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004. xvii + 175 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.
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| What a fascinating and little-understood animal is the pronghorn antelope! Even its name, like the "Indians," who have shared its grassland, shrub land, and desert habitats for over ten thousand years, is a misnomer, for it is unrelated to the true antelopes of Africa. Unlike other large fauna of the American plains and prairies, the pronghorn evolved in North America, and that evolution produced an animal with protuberant eyes that allow for a nearly 360-degree field of vision, and eyesight that is equivalent to a person looking through 8X binoculars. Invariably, the pronghorn sees you before you see it, and then it is only as the animal is heading rapidly for the horizon or vanishing, ghostlike, over a rise. Able to reach speeds of 60 mph for a short time, it is the second-fastest land animal on earth; only the cheetah is faster. |
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Despite these physical advantages, the pronghorn has always been vulnerable to human predators, and it is the previously neglected history of this relationship between hunter and hunted that is the central theme of Prairie Ghost: Pronghorn and Human Interaction in Early America. Written by Richard E. McCabe, Bart W. O'Gara, and Henry M. Reeves, the book is the nontechnical "companion volume" to the scientific treatise, Pronghorn: Ecology and Management (2004), by the same three authors, and also published by the Wildlife Management Institute and the University Press of Colorado. Originally, Prairie Ghost was going to be simply a chapter in the much longer monograph on pronghorn ecology, but the authors decided that the information they had compiled would be of interest to a far larger audience than those likely to read the monograph alone. Though scientists by profession, rather than historians, they have produced a beautiful, unique, and valuable historical work. |
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Extending from the time the first humans entered North America to the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, Prairie Ghost is divided into two chronological parts: "prehistory," the time before the coming of Europeans and written records, and "history," the time after the arrival of Europeans, beginning with the Spanish in the 1500s. Instead of the usual chapter format, the authors provide a continuous narrative within each of the two chronological sections, discussing, in turn, topics like "The First People" and "Distribution of Pronghorn" in the prehistory part, and "The Coming of Horses" and "Indian Uses of Pronghorn" in the history section. |
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Scattered throughout the book is an excellent selection of historic black-and-white photographs, paintings, sketches, and lithographs, with long and informative captions. Besides the black-and-white illustrations, the authors provide sixteen pages of color reproductions of paintings by masters like Karl Bodmer, Albert Bierstadt, and Carl M. Rungius, as well as original art work by Daniel P. Metz. |
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In addition to the historic illustrations and art work, the book is a valuable reference tool for its figures, tables, and appendices on nearly every aspect of pronghorn-human interaction. Despite the thoroughness of their research, which is based on a bibliography of over seven hundred sources, and the sheer quantity of detailed information they present, Prairie Ghost remains a lively read to the end. |
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John F. Reiger is professor of history at Ohio University-Chillicothe. The third, revised and expanded, edition of his American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation was published by Oregon State University Press in 2001. |
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