Recently I have been doing research
and reading personal accounts of early homesteading and town building in
eastern Nebraska where I grew up. I ran across a story of antelope (pronghorn)
hunting in that area in the 1860s. I had never heard of Pronghorn in that area
and I decided to do some digging.
When Lewis and Clark and the Corps
of Discovery explored the west in the early 1800s there were an estimated 35
million pronghorn antelope in North America. One hundred years later the
population was estimated at 13,000 with extinction coming within the next
decade. Today there are nearly a million pronghorn in Wyoming several hundred thousand
thrive on the hard grass, yucca, cacti and sagebrush in the high grass prairies
of this state.
It took full protection in every
state to increase the heard, full protection for fifty years, but it worked.
Much of the west has enough pronghorn for an annual hunting season as game
managers watch and manage the herds carefully across the west.
Today pronghorn are a tourist attraction
in the west, most of the year they are easy to spot and a joy to watch,
especially running, up to 55 MPH.
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