PRAIRIE GHOST

PRAIRIE GHOST Pronghorn and Human Interaction in Early America Richard E. McCabe, Bart W. O'Gara, and Henry M. Reeves University Press of Colorado, Boulder, 2004. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendixes, bibliography, index, xvii + 175 pp. $29.95 cloth.

The pronghorn, like all other large North American mammals, suffered catastrophic population losses as the continent was settled. Estimates of pre-Columbian pronghorn populations range from 10 to 40 million. Prairie Ghost, an interpretive compendium containing accounts from a huge number of archeological and historical sources, traces the world of the pronghorn from those days of spectacular abundance to the animal's near-demise by 1900, when a few thousand pronghorns lived in scattered pockets throughout the West.

In his foreword, Richard McCabe, executive vice president of the Wildlife Management Institute, describes this handsome, authoritative book as a companion volume to a recent scientific work, Pronghorn: Ecology and Management (2004), coedited by Bart O'Gara and Jim Yoakum. Together, the books join a distinguished series of Wildlife Management Institute books on America's large native mammals. Like the previous volumes, this new book will superbly serve wildlife professionals and others, not only as a reference work, but also as a compelling saga of human-wildlife interactions on a continental scale.

I recommend this book especially for the richness of its documentary voice and for its historiographical exercises. The authors combed the scientific and historical literature for every tidbit of narrative and information. This is an intensely firsthand tale, and the authors are generous in letting the witnesses to several centuries of pronghorn history speak for themselves.

Modern wildlife managers, researchers, and wildlife advocates and commentators of every stripe are more and more often compelled to reconstruct or model historic conditions for important and contested habitats. Many kinds of evidence-paleontological, archeological, anthropological, historical, and others-are brought to bear in these sometimes quixotic efforts to know the ecological past. Prairie Ghost provides readers with a fascinating short course in what is involved in such inquiries (and in why our tools sometimes aren't good enough).

Today, there are more than a million pronghorns in North America. The authors are unabashed celebrators of "America's unique and successful wildlife management system," based primarily on sport hunting, that has achieved this numerical recovery and now guides the pronghorn's fate into an ever-more complicated future. Of course, for all its justly celebrated accomplishments, that system is not held in such high regard by everyone. The disadvantages of a century of sport-hunting-based wildlife management have been pointed out and debated by many people in the scholarly and popular arenas. But., however you may feel about past and present wildlife management, you will find Prairie Ghost an incomparable overview of the changing fates of this important and beautiful animal.

Paul Schullery

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Copyright Montana Historical Society Summer 2005
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