Dan Flores's American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

Editor's Note: The 2017 Stubbendieck Distinguished Book Prize was awarded to Dan Flores, A. B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of Western History, University of Montana, Missoula, for American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, University Press of Kansas (2016). Given annually since 2005, the award comes with a cash prize of $10,000 and the Stubbendieck Distinguished Book Prize medallion. The prize was created to emphasize the interdisciplinary importance of the Great Plains in today's publishing and educational market. Only first-edition, full-length nonfiction books published in 2016 were evaluated for the award. We asked George Wolf, chair of the book prize committee, to talk about the characteristics of Flores's book that led to its selection as the winner of this year's award.

About eleven million years ago, give or take a million, a gigantic volcanic eruption in what is now southwestern Idaho swept a thick mantle of ash over huge areas of the evolving grasslands in what we now know as the Great Plains. In a corner of northeast Nebraska, at Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park, twenty-first-century visitors can view the startling articulated remains of some of the area's abundant ancient wildlife—various species of rhinos, camels, horses, dogs, and deer—that gathered to drink and bathe at a subtropical watering hole where they succumbed to the deadly ash and were buried in it. Ashfall tells us mammalian megafauna were at home here a very long time, well before their extinction.

Dealing with vast stretches of time is what environmental historian Dan Flores calls Big History. The Big History he recounts early on in American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains is far more recent, starting about 13,200 years ago, when mammoths, giant ground sloths, antelopes, ancient bison, dire wolves, Late Pleistocene camels and horses—a bestiary, all told, more diverse than the present Serengeti's—and the Clovis people who hunted them inhabited the Great Plains. By laying out with clarity and concision the dramatic changes in Plains climate, plant and animal life, and human cultures between that time and roughly two centuries ago—changes that drove most of these species to extinction—Flores establishes what gave rise to the flourishing environment in which the great grassland mammals we're familiar with thrived at the start of the nineteenth century. It is the catastrophic story of the loss of "the last big animals of the Great Plains" during the nineteenth century—far briefer than

a heartbeat in terms of Big History—that is the subject of his remarkable book.

To grasp the momentousness of that loss requires a sense of its magnitude. Among the few places left on Earth that provide a limited impression of that sense, Flores proposes, is the Serengeti Plain of East Africa, where bountiful mammalian wildlife still abides, though under grave threat, as all natural places now are. There may be glimpsed over a million wildebeest, a quarter of a million zebras, along with numerous lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas, elephants, jackals, gazelles, antelopes, eland, giraffes, rhinos, hippos, African buffaloes, and impalas. The American Great Plains wildlife that explorers Lewis and Clark and painters George Catlin, John James Audubon, and Karl Bodmer encountered early in the nineteenth century—and Native Plains people had long lived among—was less diverse than the Serengeti's, but far more copious. Millions of bison, perhaps as many as 20 to 30 million, grazed the Plains grasslands. Grizzly bears may have numbered close to 9,000. Horses, reintroduced by Spanish colonists to the New World bestiary, had been let loose or escaped, bred, gone wild, and by 1800 roamed the Plains in numbers estimated at a million or so. Pronghorns, the only large Plains species to have survived their predators from 13,200 years ago as well as the profound extinction event that wiped out most Pleistocene megafauna, likely numbered 15 million. The howls of 200,000 to perhaps 1 million wolves are thought to have...