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Tracking the Kaibab Deer into Western History
Neil Prendergast
In the 1920s, an overpopulation of deer on Arizona's Kaibab Plateau helped inspire scientific and popular stories about the balance of nature. This essay examines other stories about the deer—ones told by Southern Paiutes, Mormon settlers, and national tourists—to understand the cultural creation of innocence in the West.
Durante la decada de 1920, la sobre población de venados en la mesa de Kaibab Arizona inspiró historias científicas y populares sobre el balance de la naturaleza. Este ensayo examina otras historias sobre venados, come son contados por los Southern Paiutes, los colonizadores Mormones, y turistas nacionales, para entender la cultura de inocencia creada en el oeste.
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The New York Times called it a "range of death." Tens of thousands of starving deer nosed through deep snow to reach bushes and tree limbs already picked clean of food. Thousands more deer lay dead in the snow. What once had been the nation's most celebrated deer herd had become, in the winter of 1925, a symbol of devastation. Trapped on their degraded range—the Kaibab Plateau of northern Arizona—their deaths were haunting: anyone could watch, but no one could save the herd.1 |
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The story of the Kaibab deer is a western history, although its narrators have more often told it as an environmental parable. Scientists, historians, writers, schoolteachers, and countless others have told of the herd's great population increase, or irruption, following the extermination of predators on the plateau. In Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the story of the Kaibab deer irruption warns Americans against upsetting nature's balance. As ecologists argue today, that relationship between predator and prey is not always so firm, and the idea of balance in nature is equally suspect. But if conventional wisdom has proven inaccurate over the last thirty years of ecological study, then something else has been much more durable about the Kaibab story: westerners have looked to large prey mammals, especially deer, to understand their own place in nature.2 |
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Place, many western historians have argued, is something best understood through stories. Elliott West, for example, writes that any western place "is also what it is because of the stories people have told about it."3 He urges scholars to read deeply into narratives of all sorts, paying attention to where they conflict with one another, and suggests that consequently, attachments to place come into view. Often, a common reference point can hold an analysis together. In his study of wolves, Jon Coleman examines the stories people tell about this one animal as a way, at least in part, to capture the anxiety westward settlers felt about their new homes, as well as to explain the hate that this anxiety frequently became.4 Deer have a similar potential, but as prey, they inspired far different narratives in the past than did wolves. Stories about deer more often sound like the cultural narratives Patricia Nelson Limerick has found to have upheld many westerners' self-proclaimed innocence amid social conflict.5 Together, the works of West, Coleman, and Limerick suggest a new way to think about the Kaibab deer, a way related, but somewhat removed, from the environmental parable. |
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