been so numerous that the rate of encounters in early America ranged from 30-40 sightings in a single day in northern California, to nine sightings in a month in the Big Horns in 1877, to bears every 50 yards during salmon runs in Idaho.Relying less on journal descriptions and more on ecological carrying capacities, more recent scholars have revised many of Seton's figures, yet the imagery of a great natural garden remains. Victor Shelford speaks of an average of 400 whitetail deer, 50-200 wild turkeys, five black bears, three cougars, and one to three wolves per 10 square miles along the edges of the Great Plains in 1500. I've calculated bison herds on the Great Plains, in times of good grass, to reach as high as 24-28 million.For the country from the Rockies westward, Frederic Wagner estimates 20-30 million large mammals in 1492, including 5-10 million bison, 10-15 million pronghorns, 1-2 million bighorn sheep, 5 million mule deer, 2 million elk. And I note in my Hall and Kelson, Mammals of North America, that the eastern perimeter of the grizzly's range is originally believed to have stretched from Mexico's Sierra Madre Mountains across West Texas to eastern Kansas, thence due north along the Mississippi to Hudson Bay. We now think grizzly populations across that vast stretch totalled more than 100,000 animals.Along the Alaskan coast and in the Northwest as far inland as present Idaho, salmon runs featured so many different species that it would take several minutes just to list them, a living mass that surged up the rivers during spawning runs with such need and power that even those who had witnessed bison herds on the plains were stunned to speechlessness.This brief litany of diversity and abundance only scratches the surface:Hundreds of cactus and reptile species in the deserts of the Southwest; so many passenger pigeons in the annual migration flights up from Texas that some scholars believe the Cross Timbers, a 400-mile long st...
