and the inquiry can be' interesting- only in as far as it regards the change which:
time may have produced in the geographical distribution of the species, for there
can be no great difficulty in ascertaining whether the animal is at present an
inhabitant of California or not; and if the credit of having first noticed it be
conceded to Hernandez, still it is to Lewis and Clark that naturalists owe their
present knowledge of this animal. These intelligent travellers passed through
the country where it chiefly abounds, and as it was often an object of chase with
them, they had an opportunity of observing its manners ; hence to the facts which
they have recorded little of importance has been added by subsequent writers. It
is a common animal on the plains lying betwixt the Saskatchewan and Missouri
rivers ; yet, although the English Fur Traders established themselves above the
forks of the former river, in the year 1770, and the French Canadians had been
in the habit pf collecting furs along both rivers many years previous to that date,
and must have been well acquainted with this animal, from the ciroumstances
probably of its skin being of no value in trade, and its flesh little prized as food,
nothing beyond its name was known to the civilized world until the year 1790,
when Umfreville gave a short account of it in his “ Present State of Hudson’s
Bay.” The anonymous author of the Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale has a
passage respecting an animal that he terms Squenoton, and which has been copied
by Dobbs. His description of it is too short to be of any use in determining the
species *, but from the habitat which he assigns to it, of the plains to the south
west of Lake Winipeg, we know that he must allude either to the Antilope furcifer,
or to the Cercus macroiis. The Cervus mexicanus, to which Pennant refers the
Squenoton, does not inhabit those plains, and the author mentions the Cervus
leücurus under the name of Chevreuil. The appellation of Squenoton has not
descended to the present day, and this antilope has for a considerable time past
been known among the Canadian voyagers by the name of Cabrée, which is
probably a Basque corruption of the Spanish word Cabra (goat), as it resembles
the common goat .in colour, and in the erect position of the hair covering the
spine of the neck, and forming a kind of mane. The English Fur Traders still
call it “ the goat.”
Lewis and Clark brought a specimen from the Missouri, which was deposited in
Peale’s Museum at Philadelphia, and described (according to Dr. Godman) by
Mr. Ord, under the name of Antilope Americana, in an American edition of
His -words are :—“ Le Squenoton ressemble au Chevreuil ( Cervus vwgmianus or leucurus il est plus haut, la
jambe plus finè, et la tête plus longue et plus pointue.* The word: squenoton is perhaps derived from the Huron,
language. Theodat uses a nearly similar term, (sconoton) to designate the stags which frequent the borders of Lake
Huron.— Vide p. 753.
Guthrie’s Geography, published in 1815 ; and in 1818, the same naturalist published
in the Jourrnl de Physique an account of a new genus founded upon it,
which he termed Antilocapra. M. Blainville having inspected a pair of horns of
this antilope in the Museum of the College of Surgeons, where they were attached
to a board with their points in a wrong direction, published a notice of them in
1816, wherein he named the animal to which they belonged Cervus hamatus ; and
an account and figure of Lewis and Clark’s specimen, taken by Major Smith in
1817, appeared, in 1823, in the 13th volume of the Linnean Transactions.
Major Smith considers the horns mentioned by M. Blainville to belong to a
distinct species, whose name he has altered to Antilope palmata. From this
detail it is evident that the specific name of Americana is the prior one; but
the term furcifer having been generally adopted by naturalists, I have retained it
here, including under it also the Antilope palmata, as I conceive the greater
breadth of the horns to be merely the effect of age. The term Americana is
objectionable as a specific name, where more than one species of the same genus
exists in that country, and in reference to the present instance, the animal which
will be afterwards described and figured as the Capra Americana, is by several
eminent naturalists considered to be an antilope ; and if it is to be permanently
placed in that genus, a change of name either of it or of the species at present
under consideration would be indispensably necessary. The Antilope furcifer
differs from the true antilopes, in having a snag or branch on its horns, and
wanting the crumens or lachrymal openings, and also in being destitute of the
posterior or accessory hoofs, there being only two on each foot.
The most northerly range of the prong-horned antilope is latitude 53°, on the
banks of the north branch of the Saskatchewan. Some of them remain the whole
year on the south branch of that river, but they are merely summer visitors to the
north branch. They come every year to the neighbourhood of Carlton-house,
when the snow has mostly gone ; soon after their arrival the females drop their
young, and they retire to the southwards again in the autumn as soon as the
snow begins to fall. Almost every year a small herd linger on a piece of rising
ground not far from Carlton-house, until the snow has become too deep on the
plains to permit them to travel over them. Few or none of that herd, however,
survive until the spring, as they are persecuted by the wolves during the whole
winter. They are found in the summer season in the fifty-third parallel of latitude,
from longitude 106° to the foot of the Rooky Mountains. According to Lewis
and Clark, they also abound on the plains of the Columbia to the west of the