WILD NEW WORLD

A passionate history of North American animal life and people.

Historian Flores, author of Coyote America, American Serengeti, and other acclaimed books on the American West, writes that when humans arrived in America 15,000 years ago, they found a vast continent teeming with unfamiliar creatures, including mammoths, mastodons, horses, bison, beavers, ground sloths, saber-toothed cats, and flightless birds. During the 20th century, scholars believed that, unlike modern man, early cultures lived in harmony with nature. Trying to explain why megafauna went extinct, they proposed climate change, disease, normal evolutionary processes, and even an asteroid strike. That they were wiped out by hunting is still considered controversial. Modern herd animals (bison, elk, deer) replaced them, and Native Americans thrived and took up agriculture as their populations got too large to survive by hunting alone. Contrary to many accounts, early travelers to America—including de Vaca, de Soto, Coronado, and others—found a populated land of cities and farms. After 1600, it was the British and French who encountered wilderness following a holocaust of European diseases, which killed 80% to 90% of Native peoples. With the human population devastated, wildlife flourished. Flores offers an illuminatingly disturbing history of the following 500 years. Disappointed at the absence of cities of gold, early colonists quickly discovered another source of profit, and a vast industry soon delivered an avalanche of animal body parts to Europe. In a single year, 1743, a modest port (La Rochelle, Louisiana) “took in 127,000 beaver pelts, 30,300 marten furs, 110,000 raccoon pelts, along with its big haul for that year, the stripped skins of 16,500 American black bears.” The author makes it abundantly clear that money “trumped any philosophical debate elites might be having about humanity’s animal origins.” Readers will squirm at the vivid accounts of the fates of many species, but they will be heartened by the stories of men and women who devoted themselves to saving them and sometimes succeeded.

An outstanding addition to the literature on the ecological history of America.