Despite Lewis and Clark’s singular fame, Thomas Jefferson never intended their expedition to be the sole U.S. scientific exploration into the country’s new Louisiana Purchase. Just as compelling to him was a second major expedition into the southern reaches of Louisiana, for which he chose two leaders – Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis – who had a similar opportunity to become famous early American explorers into the West. Dispatched up the Red River of the South in 1806 with a bigger party and twice the congressional appropriation of Lewis and Clark, Freeman and Custis suffered a very different fate, one that assigned them to the dustbin of American history and made Jefferson’s “Grand Expedition” a forgotten western story.

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America’s pronghorn antelope has long struck observers as a beautiful feature of western landscapes, but as an enigma. Why does it run so fast? Why can’t it jump obstacles? And for those who really know its biography, why did its population fall from 15 million to a mere 5,000 over the course of a single century? This episode answers all those questions by arguing that the pronghorn is an American original who, like us, is the sole remaining member of a large, ancient family of animals. And that it seems enigmatic only because it is one of the few survivors of America’s Pleistocene extinctions, with behaviors strongly shaped by the vanished world to which it evolved.

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In the early 1800s, when American and European scientific explorers first began to probe the unfamiliar West with its landscapes and animals so remarkably different from those of the East, the Great Plains and its wildlife seemed the most fascinating part of the West, an “American Serengeti.” Commencing with Lewis and Clark’s adventures and their attempts to catalog western wildlife, it took the entire 19th century for American explorers to introduce to science the staggering biological diversity Native America had bequeathed the United States. Accounts from Lewis and Clark to Stephen Long to C. Hart Merriam give us inspiring descriptions of what the Natural West was only two centuries ago.

Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck.

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