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    Texas | Columns | "Texas Tales"

    Pronghorn Antelope

    by Mike Cox
    Mike Cox
    No thanks to Lester B. Colby and anyone else who may have done what he did, thousands of pronghorn antelope are still home on the range in the Panhandle.

    Colby, who in 1912 wrote an article on the Panhandle for a long-defunct monthly called The Texas Magazine, probably was an OK fellow. Even so, he did something – and openly wrote about it in his five-page story -- that likely would land him in jail today, not to mention netting him a big fine.

    His offense involved using unfair and arguably cruel means to hunt pronghorns. If he reflected at all on his actions, he must have believed that the species would always exist in vast numbers. That or he simply didn’t care.

    The cocky young magazine writer certainly did not stand alone as the only early-day Texan to take the state’s wildlife for granted, particularly antelope.

    Years before Colby wrote his Panhandle piece, an Army officer lately returned to Washington, D.C. from duty in Texas wrote a “Professor C. Stemms” in Austin saying that his friends at the Smithsonian Institution had been disappointed that he had not brought them “some specimens of the natural history of Texas, something of the bug, reptile, fish, etc. species.”

    If the good professor would send some critters to assist “their efforts in the advancement of science” the military man continued, Smithsonian scientists “will send you copies of all the scientific papers published by their institution and give you credit in their papers for all information and specimens…”

    The Smithsonian had a particularl interest in obtaining a stuffed antelope for its collection since there was “not one to be seen in any of the museums in the United States.”

    Referring to a couple of their Texas acquaintances, the officer continued, “Can you not get Polly or King to kill one and have it sent to me?”

    Whether Stemms followed through is not known, but Texas had no shortage of antelope in those days, even if the nation’s museums did. Numbering in the scores of thousands, antelope roamed two-thirds of Texas, as common as deer.

    By 1907, when Colby took a 500-mile automobile tour of the Panhandle before it had any paved roads, Texas’ antelope herd had been reduced by overhunting and pushed farther west. Still, the fast-running, tan and white ungulates could be found in the Panhandle and Trans-Pecos.

    Near Tahoka, using his car as a horse, Colby and a local cowboy went antelope hunting.

    “It is hard to imagine a sport more exciting than running down an antelope with an automobile,” he wrote.

    Part of the thrill came from the terrain. Even though flat and open, as Colby put it, there were “some bumps” on the high plains. “Badgers and prairie dogs dig holes,” he wrote, “and now and then there [are] the remains of an old buffalo wallow.”

    Meanwhile, back to the chase...

    “For the first two or three miles the animal will distance the average car,” Colby reported. (Indeed, antelope ran run as fast as 70 miles an hour.) “At the end of 10 miles the antelope, no matter how good a runner…is no longer a bobbing spot against the horizon. Gradually the machine overcomes the fleeing flesh.”

    After a pursuit that Colby estimated at 30 miles, the antelope began to lag. Finally, he wrote, “a cowboy in the car lassoed him as neatly as he could have caught a steer from a pony’s back.”

    Colby did not explain in his story what happened next, but the long-ago magazine article includes two photographs of him posing next to his spoke-wheeled runabout holding a dead buck by its horns and white tail.

    A decade later, the Hansford Headlight informed readers in its part of the Panhandle that a new state law intended to protect pronghorns from extinction had gone on the books. Effective June 10, 1917, the hunting of antelope was prohibited in Texas for the next quarter century, but the prohibition on hunting already dated to 1903. That meant Colby’s hunt in 1907 was illegal, though the state had only a few game wardens back then.

    The measure worked. On a permit basis depending on herd size, pronghorn hunted resumed in 1944 and has continued since then. But you still can’t chase and lasso them from a car.

    © Mike Cox
    "Texas Tales"
    March 3, 2011 column
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