KANSAS’ LOST WILDLIFE SCRIPT
In the early 1800s, Americans called Kansas and the Great Plains the North American Desert. They were misled by Major Stephen H. Long and his poor attitude towards the plains during his expedition across North America. To him, the Great Plains was a boring, drab place. Today, many people share his view of this expansive grassland that historically rivaled the African Veldt in terms of biodiversity.
Sadly, Long’s assessment was a prediction. We’ve wiped out most of our megafauna. Environmental historian Dan Flores called the Great Plains pre-Manifest Destiny “one of the marvels of the world.” Today, that marvel means seeing the ghosts of bears, elk, and other animals who called Kansas home before Americans migrated west.
In today's video, we’ll explore Kansas’ rich environmental history, and I’ll show you a small part of that biodiversity. It will start with a crash course in Kansas ecology and discuss some of our native wildlife.
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As you travel across the state, you’ll go from forests in the east to the short grasses of the Great Plains in the west. In between are tallgrass and mixed grass prairies. Those prairies are named for, you guessed it, how tall the grasses are. The vegetation follows annual rainfall, with eastern Kansas getting the most and western the least.
Like the rain, we’ll go east to west in this video. I’ll highlight black bears, elk, and grizzly bears. All three are animals people don’t typically associate with Kansas.
In eastern Kansas, black bears were the largest predator. Historically, they occupied the eastern half of the state while grizzly bears dominated western Kansas.
Black bears are omnivores, so they eat a wide variety of nuts, berries, grasses, insects, fish, and mammals. They were more widespread in Eastern Kansas because the forests provided them with abundant food and shelter.
Unfortunately, black bears vanished within 30 years of Kansas becoming a state. The last official bears were killed in the 1880s though they started disappearing a couple of decades before that.
They were uncommon enough that when a bear was shot near Cottonwood Falls, KS, in 1866, some locals speculated about where it came from. The Daily Kansas Tribune shared the story on October 10th, 1866.
It was a lone bear who wandered onto Mr. Fisher’s prosperity. His gun failed to go off, so “Messrs, Fisher, Jonathan Wood, and other citizens of Chase County” chased the bear down and killed it.
According to the paper, they didn’t know where the bear had come from, which led to speculation that the bear was an escaped pet from “somewhere up the Cottonwood.”
If bears were an everyday occurrence, I doubt there would have been speculations about their origin. Our next species was much easier to spot, and no one could confuse them for someone’s pet.
Elk were creatures of the Great Plains and called all of Kansas home. Americans pushed elk up into mountainous areas.
You may think about majestic elk bugling in the Rocky Mountains, but these huge cervidaes were the dominant deer species on the Plains.
Sources show elk were mostly found in the Tallgrass Prairie but were eliminated by the 1830s. After that, elk in the mixed-grass and short-grass prairies were killed off as Americans took over the rest of Kansas. By the late 1800s when elk were officially eliminated in Kanas. Like bison, elk were a casualty of market hunting and the quest for civilization.
Wild elk, black bear, and even a stray wolf have returned to Kansas, but our last species has not and probably never well.
I compared the Great Plains to the African Veldt at the beginning of this video, and the mighty grizzly bear brings that comparison home. The grizzly bear is our lion, tiger, or great white shark.
They are our link between the current neutered Great Plains and the historic wild country that stretches between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River.
Grizzlys tended to stay within river basins where they would have found food, shelter, and water. We know through historical accounts that grizzlies were found throughout the state, but physical evidence is rare. I could only find one story where sisters found a grizzly skull along the Arkansas river in south-central Kansas. It was approximately 16 inches by 8.5 inches.
A vivid description of a grizzly bear hunt happened in a similar environment along the Missouri River in Montana. It occurred in 1874, and William de la Montagne Cary witnessed it from a steamboat headed up the river.
He wrote that “about a mile off an immense grizzly bear [was] making for a cottonwood miles away and behind the bear came two men superbly mounted, armed to the teeth… We could see distinctly the horses straining every muscle to overtake the bear who was equally anxious and making every effort to escape his pursuers.”
Removing grizzlies represented the ultimate taming of the Great Plains. After they were wiped out of Kansas in the mid-1800s, no other predator could truly threaten people. The last removing wolves were killed in the early 20th century, leaving coyotes as the largest mammalian predator in Kansas. In typical American fashion, we tried to kill them off, also.
Every time one of these keystone species was eliminated, Kansas became quieter. We Americans took this once grandiose landscape and domesticated it to the point where it's almost unrecognizable in the 21st century.
If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to get notified when new videos are published. In February, I will talk about coyotes. Thank you for watching.
Citations
Dan Flores American Serengeti
Fort Hays State Mammal Atlas
The Daily Kansas Tribune, 10/25/1866.
Historical and Current Status of Elk in Kansas, University of Nebraska
https://www.kwch.com/content/news/Kansas-sisters-find-grizzly-bear-skull-along-Arkansas-River-563213811.html
Footage
United States Fish and Wildlife Service
American Mammals 1
American Mammals 10: Elk
American Mammals 5: Black Bear and Javelina B-Roll
American Mammals 12 and 13: Bison
United States National Archives
Predators
Music
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Still Pickin by Kevin MacLeod
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