War Zones and Game Sinks in Lewis and Clark’s West
War Zones and Game Sinks in Lewis and Clark’s West
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刘易斯和克拉克西部的战区和猎物沉没
DOI：
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发表时间：
1999
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
C. Szuter
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
P. Martin;C. Szuter
刘易斯和克拉克的日记揭示了北美西部落基山脉两侧的大型动物在分类、数量和行为上的重大差异。之前的两件事为刘易斯和克拉克的发现奠定了基础。第一个是大约13,000年前美国西部三分之二的本土巨型动物灭绝。第二个是后哥伦布时代欧洲人带来的致命新疾病和新技术对印度人的影响。大型动物的种群是当地人的首选猎物，也不能幸免于欧洲的影响。沿着落基山脉以西的哥伦比亚河走廊，数以万计的人住在一个猎物水槽里。在这里，刘易斯和克拉克的团队发现动物太少，无法靠狩猎为生。他们不太适应内兹佩尔西人提供的鱼和树根的当地饮食，买了狗和马来养活自己。在东部，密苏里州上游和黄石河沿岸的无人居住的土地上有大量的野生动物，特别是野牛、麋鹿、鹿、叉角羚和狼。这个游戏来源占据了印度战争各方探索的12万平方公里缓冲区的一部分，其中一些人配备了步枪。威廉·克拉克认识到了这种关系，在他们旅程接近尾声时，他写道，他们在处于战争状态的国家之间的土地上发现了大量的大型动物。无论是缓冲区或战区的大量猎物，还是水槽中大型猎物的稀少，都被误解为自然或典型的状况。尽管将生态系统恢复到早期期刊所描述的状态的努力可能有可取之处，但它们的目标是一个摇摆不定的目标。早在这些日记被写出来之前，由于人类的影响，这片土地上的大部分本土大型动物都已经被剥夺了。在没有人类的情况下，我们预测，在西部分布的野牛、麋鹿、鹿和狼的数量将比历史文献中报道的要多得多。
The journals of Lewis and Clark reveal a major difference in the taxa, numbers, and behavior of megafauna on either side of the Rocky Mountains in western North America. Two prior events set the stage for what Lewis and Clark would find. The first was the extinction around 13,000 years ago of two‐thirds of the native megafauna of the American West. The second was the effects on Indians of deadly new diseases and new technologies brought by Europeans in the post‐Columbian era. Populations of large animals, which were preferred prey for native people, were not immune to European influence. Along the Columbia River corridor west of the Rockies, tens of thousands of people lived in a game sink. Here Lewis and Clark’s party found too few animals to live off the land by hunting. They adapted poorly to the local diet of fish and roots offered by the Nez Perce and bought dogs and horses to sustain themselves. To the east, uninhabited lands along the Upper Missouri and the Yellowstone rivers supported an abundance of wild game, especially bison, elk, deer, pronghorn, and wolves. This game source occupied part of a buffer zone of 120,000 km2 probed by various Indian war parties, some of them armed with muskets. William Clark recognized the relationship and near the end of their journey he wrote that they found large numbers of large animals in the land between nations that were at war. Both the abundance of game in buffer or war zones and scarcity of big game in sinks have been misinterpreted as a natural or typical condition. Although efforts to restore ecosystems to what is described in early journals may have merit, they are aimed at a flickering target. Long before these journals were written, the land had been stripped of most of its native megafauna through human influence. In the absence of humans, we predict that much larger populations of bison, elk, deer, and wolves would have ranged the West than were reported in historic documents.