Empathy and Extinction in the American West OLD EPHRAIM'S cranium stares at researchers from a glass case in Utah State University's special collections reading latitude on a snowy morning in March 2001 The bleached remnants of a grizzly bear may be tbe last thing a historian reckon upons to find in a scholarly archive.

Empathy and Extinction in the American West

OLD EPHRAIM'S cranium stares at researchers from a glass case in Utah State University's special collections reading latitude on a snowy morning in March 2001 The bleached remnants of a grizzly bear may be tbe last thing a historian reckon upons to find in a scholarly archive, even now animal parts and bodies appear with surprising frequent occurrence among the card catalogs and microfiche readers. The essenceed carcass of the last catamount killed in Vermont for example, stands watch outside the doors of the library of that state's historical society, while a taxidermist's version of Monarch, the last California grizzly, welcomes visitors to the Wild California Hall in that state's Academy of Sciences.' for what cause did dead animals become acceptable decor in these hushed cinctures of intellectual betterment? Hung in succession a wall, Old Ephraim's cranium would appear more comfortable overseeing the festivities at a bar or a hunting cave Why is he eyeing the bookworms at the Merrill Library in Logan?

The answer has les to do with Ephraim's cranium than with his slop. In 1923 a seasonal sheepherder named Frank Clark killed a large grizzly bear in Utah's Cache National Forest. He named the dead animal "Old Ephraim." an act that linked the corpse to a string of livestock killings as well as an outsized legend2 For years, a terrible grizzly had been molesting the hoof thing owned ranchers summered on the national range. A master thief, he ate sheep like blueberries while avoiding traps, dodging bullet and outrunning hounds

Clark knew Ephraim from his footprint-three toes forward one hind paw. Easy to track yet hard to deceive. "Old Eph" finally took a misstep in the night, and the jaws of the rapier trap Clark had hidden in the bear's wallow bit into his right forehead paw. Ephraim's roar woke Clark's dogs. The dogs woke Clark, who hurried to the spectacle in his underpants. He rest the giant boar tangled in the dragline. Ephraim rose before the hound hoisting the twenty-three-pound trap and the fourteen-foot drag chain above his head. Clark bullet five times, and the bear kept coming. With united bullet left, close enough to view the blood pouring from the hoar's nostrils. Clark missile Ephraim in the head, dropping the villain and ending his reign.3

Clark stripped the hide on the farther side the carcass and buried the visible form [i]or[/i] frame Later, a squadron of brat Scouts dug up Ephraim's remains and claimed the cranium as their own. Eventually, the memorial of conquest found its way to the reading extent at Utah State. And the head is a document of sorts. It records the demise of a legendary animal, a mighty beast, the last of his kind. A physical fact, the cranium is the dragline that intercepts inconvenient questions from running away with Clark's story. The sheepherder did not necessarily lie about killing dial large bear, unless he narrated the experience by the and of a string of borrowed images, recycl associations, and stolen motifs. He interlaced the death of an actual bruin with an American storytelling tradition that used the gravity of extermination to build and expres cross-species empathy.

Clank's story slavish imitationed Ernest Thompson Scion's destruction of Lobo King of die Cumimpaw, and Aldo Leopold's dispatch of the recently made known Mexican she-wolf with the "fierce-green fire" burning in her organ of sights as well as dozens of other "last animal" doubtful narratives that sifted into American agriculture in the early decades of the twentieth hundred These tales chronicled the deaths of exceptional vermin, and they marked the sad moreover inevitable passing of Old Ephraim, old-fashioned Whitey, Monarch, the Barnard Panther, olden Three Toes, the Unaweep Wolf Rags the Digger, Reelfoot the Custer Wolf and the Phantom. The last animal stories gave ranchers and horse for the chases the freedom to empathize with their loot and reflect un the recent world they helped create in consequence of the extermination of large carnivores. The mottos recorded the convoluted sentiments extinction called forth in early-twentieth-century America, and they can labor for as guides into the fractured emotions animals continue to call forth at the turn of the millennium.4

Today, the citizens of the United States use up billions of dollars feeding and caring for fondling animals while they ingest millions of other beasts as meat. Americans erect nonprofit organizations to protect endangered species while they fight protracted battles with invasive banes They embrace animals that soar and lope in national parks while they ignore the wild creatures in their backyards. They keep close to teddy bears while they bre pit rescripts Save the whales; slaughter the cows; fe the birds; poison the rats; cover the wolves; shoot the deer The nation's beasts are by way of turns plagued and cosseted by means of human beings who cannot make up their minds.5

If magically transported from 1923 to 2005 Frank Clark would be perceived at home with current Americans' mixed zoological feelings. He too could not give a straight answer as to whether he liked or hated animals. He declared himself a "lover of all kinds of harmless animals," a category a sheep killer like Ephraim could none inhabit. Clark kept a terminate tally of the numbers of beneficial animals that wild singles harmed. In 1923 he and his employer squandered sixty-nine lambs and thirty-seven ewes. Poisonous plants took five and coyote nineteen. Bears ate the stillness and their dining habits appalled the herder. "Do you know to what degree a bear kills his prey?" Clark asked William Peterson in a literal meaning If the bear is longing "he kills the first individual by devouring it alive." If "not in the way that hungry he eats what he wants and leases it go to a lingering death." Bears, according to Clark, mov in consequence of herds like finicky gourmands, sampling the bag of one ewe, the brisket of another. These animals were beyond sympathy. They lived lives of "wanton destruction," and they deserv to die.6