No wooly mammoths, and no moose, either

When Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Second Lt. William Clark started their Corps of Discovery expedition across the western United States on May 14, 1804, President Thomas Jefferson charged them with recording as many new and distinct animals and plants as they could — including any mastodons or woolly mammoths.

They didn’t find any ancient relatives of elephants, but they found plenty of other interesting creatures not previously documented by Europeans, including 12 fish species, 51 bird species, 44 mammal species and 178 plant species, according to Dave Shea, a former Glacier National Park backcountry ranger and historian and educator for the Glacier Institute.

Shea talked about Lewis and Clark and the animals they encountered at the Conrad Mansion in Kalispell last week.

Not only did Lewis and Clark document new species, they ate a lot of them, too.

All told, the 45 men in their party killed and ate about 1,000 deer, 23 black bears, 227 bison, 43 grizzlies, 375 elk, 35 bighorn sheep, at least one of their horses and the blubber of a beached whale they discovered at the Pacific Ocean. They did not kill a moose, but they wounded one, Shea noted.

Lewis and Clark also ran into plenty of Native Americans along the way, including 4,400 Mandans near present-day Washburn, N.D., where the party spent their first winter. In some regions, however, they saw few Native Americans because previous Europeans had given them smallpox, which proved fatal to many Native Americans.

Among the new animal species the party encountered were mule deer, bighorn sheep, black-tailed prairie dogs, badgers, white-tailed jackrabbits and pronghorn antelope, which they referred to as “goats.”

Of particular note were the grizzlies. The party first encountered them in the Dakotas, Shea said.

“They were an animal of the plains in those days,” he said.

Grizzly bears followed the rivers and the bison, feeding in the spring on bison carcasses that died over winter as well as those that fell and drowned in the great rivers of the West.

Some creatures Lewis and Clark encountered are now extinct. Both the Carolina parakeet and the passenger pigeon were shot to extermination. At one point, Shea noted, the passenger pigeon made up 20 to 40 percent of the entire bird population in North America.

The expedition party even shot a few California condors, referring to them as “beautiful buzzards.” A few species are named after the explorers, including Lewis’s woodpecker and Clark’s nutcracker.

Shea’s talk was part of an ongoing partnership between the Glacier Institute and the Conrad Mansion. Justin Barth will speak about the history of Glacier National Park’s fire lookouts on March 19. Seating is limited, so RSVPs are required. Cost is $10 per person required at the time of reservation. To RSVP, call the Conrad Mansion at 755-2166.