For 10,000 years, from the end of the Pleistocene to the coming of Old Worlders to America, a diverse population of Native people lived in North America while somehow managing to preserve almost all its biological riches. In contrast to the period when the prior Paleolithic hunters dominated America and the West, this 10,000 year phase of American history featured only one human-caused extinction that science has so far discovered. Was this some strange accident of continental history? Or were their concrete reasons for why, and how, Native America achieved this kind of environmental success? Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon. MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters" and "Mountain Men" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Native America existed for 10,000 years in a West marked by many prior extinctions, but somehow found it possible to preserve almost all the biological richness of the continent until the arrival of Europeans. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West. brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season that calls us home.
A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters, and wildlife. Enjoy responsibly. Ravens and Coyotes America. I am walking the edge of a sharp-rimmed cliff in outback Montana before sunrise, moving through a twilight of grays and blacks and outlines.
Large, graceful birds, sandhill cranes, are fluting their strange, plasticine cries in the pastel sky overhead. but I'm focused on the lines of the topography in front of me, especially the way the mesa I'm walking narrows up ahead. Seeing that, my walking pace quickens. This is a historic piece of ground.
Starting some 2000 years in the past and continuing down to 200 years ago, it was the scene of frenzied, albeit sporadic human activity. Like most historic places, there is something maddeningly mute about the spot now. It's why we often stand and gawk numbly in such places, unable to connect to the events we're supposed to marvel over.
But this morning, I'm not going to be stymied by lack of imagination. I'm here with a purpose, my intent to experience at least some part of what a buffalo jump drive was all about. It was fully dark when I arrived here an hour earlier, parked my car at an interpretive sign, finished a cup of coffee, then slowly worked through the boulders to the top of this mesa.
While I walked eastward to the luxuriant grassland of a high meadow, the sky had gradually lightened. Now turning back towards the car and the cliff I'd climbed in the dark, I'm becoming caught up in what I tell myself are echoes of the place. Pointing myself down the narrowing mesa towards the far rim rock, I start to jog.
I'm running a track that men and other animals have run many times in the past. But in contrast to my lope beneath the fluting cranes, then there would have been the pounding thunder of sharp black hooves cutting through the grass and the alarmed grunting of animals, their huge forms wrapped in billowing clouds of dust that must have made for a ghostly stampede.
Now I hear only my footfalls and my breathing, but in the real thing the air would have been rent by the exultant shouts of the drivers urging on runners wearing the skins of wolves and red-coated bison calves leading the herd to its destiny. Their costuming a ruse to fool buffalo cows into thinking that wolves were selecting out defenseless young ones.
Listening to the rhythm of my feet, I wonder if the herd's noise wouldn't have been so overwhelming it would have morphed into silence, adding a surreal quality to the ghostliness. The whole affair would have commenced days earlier with a religious ceremony and careful maneuvering of a bison herd in that high meadow into position for a stampede.
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