In "Wild Animals and Settlers on the Great Plains", Professor Fleharty has compiled primary accounts (not reminiscences penned years later) from newspapers and diaries to detail the impact of settlers on the native fauna of Kansas during a short, critical period, 1865 -1879. His reports, while specific to Kansas, can be generalized to the settlement of the extensive Great Plains of western America.
I was pained by some of the detailed accounts of uncontrolled hunting, of unwitting habitat destruction, of seeming obliviousness to the irreversible changes that were occurring. The newspaper accounts seemed so real, because they were.
Professor Fleharty does more than report the decline of the buffalo, bear, deer, antelope bobcat, and other animals during this period of intense settlement. He also shows, again from primary accounts, that a concern for the diminishing wildlife gradually developed, leading to hunting regulations and protective legislation. Our modern understanding and appreciation for protecting wildlife and the environment did not suddenly emerge a few years ago, but evolved steadily from these early concerns.
The strength of this book - its extensive quotations from newspapers and other primary sources - is also its weakness. I commend Professor Fleharty for his extensive research. However, as might be expected, many of these reports are similar, some even repetitious. Some, possibly a sizeable fraction, could have been relegated to an appendix, or possibly footnotes.
Possibly because Dr. Fleharty was trained as a zoologist, and not as an interpretive historian, he seemed reluctant to offer interpretations and extrapolations based on the rather sparse and anecdotal reports. And yet, as a zoologist willing to undertake historical research, his interpretations and insights, even speculations, would have been very interesting indeed. If Dr Fleharty does revise this interesting book, I would like more discussions on how and why things happened. Tell us more about animal population dynamics in Kansas from 1865 to the present. What other ecological trends were set in motion during this short, catastrophic period? Could more steps have been taken earlier to mitigate the negative impact of the extensive settlement on the Great Plains?
Also, while I recognize that we cannot recreate the Great Plains of the 1860s, I am curious about Professor Fleharty's views on the ongoing movement to create large, natural grasslands preserves in the mid-continent. We cannot change the past, but we may be able to shape the future.