In winter of 1900, the famed nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton lived briefly in a log cabin built in the middle of the National Zoological Park, located just north of the White House. The small lodging was placed between the muddied bison paddocks and the denuded deer and antelope yards.

By the turn of the century, Seton had established a blurry genre of animal fiction and natural history popular within white Nature movements.Footnote ¹ He authored Mammals of Manitoba (1886), Birds of Manitoba (1891), and Studies in the Anatomy of Animals (1896). In 1894, Seton published “The King of Currumpaw, A Wolf Story,” which Scribner’s Magazine made into a sensation. Yet most influential was his 1898 story collection Wild Animals I Have Known, which sold millions of copies before World War II and influenced white men across a century, from Rudyard Kipling to David Attenborough. Seton’s prose structured an important gaze and esthetic within American wildlife studies and conservation:

It is not my goal here to explore Seton’s many legacies for American environmental history or to re-open the thoroughly documented nature-fakers controversy, which pitted science against nature writing in the decades around 1900.Footnote ³ Rather, I would like to briefly isolate an interest of Seton’s left out of this literature but which appears in an essay for The Century Magazine—a curiosity about pronghorn rump hairs, scent glands, and nonhuman languages. First, how did these become entangled in a janky zoo cabin? Second, what might Seton’s interests say about the value of using longer timelines to understand human–animal relations in modern U.S. history?

Seton was captivated by wildlife and wild places. He saw both (like Lobo) fast disappearing. With the zoo’s support, Seton used the zoo cabin as an outdoor laboratory to pursue an irksome quandary about pronghorn (commonly called American antelope). A few years earlier, on horseback in Yellowstone National Park, Seton noticed “white specks” on the horizon. He stated that they “showed and disappeared several times and began moving southward.” Then, he saw, from the opposite horizon, “other white specks, which seemed to flash and disappear.” Through a looking glass, Seton identified the animals responsible as antelope, and he observed as the “two bands,” separated by a valley, reunited. He left the park believing that he had witnessed mysterious antelope language. And careful observation in the zoo would help Seton gain anatomical knowledge and pose an ethological theory about flatulence and olfaction that was quite out of the norm in the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁴

In a typical picturesque style, he painted the following “zoo story” (a genre of zoo media content, infused with zoologyFootnote ⁵) that was read by a vast American public:

Sometime after, Seton obtained a dead zoo antelope and dissected the specimen in search of the “mechanism of the rump-patch,” which operated with truly machinelike precision (Figure 1). Here is Seton’s drawing:

Figure 1.

Continuing an established early modern anatomical tradition, Ernest Thompson Seton sketches a diagram of the anatomy of a pronghorn’s rump, locating muscles, glands, hairs of differing colors, and the anus in order to describe (in Cartesian fashion) the anatomy of antelope communication. “The National Zoo at Washington,” The Century Magazine (March 1900): 659.

He explained, with careful attention to sequence and anatomical structure, that rump hair near (A) appeared long (3¾ inches) and graded toward (B). The hair near (B), half the length, was “snowy white” and pointed toward (C), the anus. Beneath the skin, there was a “broad sheet” of muscle, which grew thickest under (B), where a musk gland (one of five “different sets of glands” in the antelope body) resided among hair roots. When an antelope became alarmed, this muscle would contract, causing (seemingly automatically) the short, white hair near (B) to protrude straight out from the rump, creating a “flash,” “a twin chrysanthemum of white.” This exposed the dark-brown gland, “and a great quantity of odor is set free,” a “musky message” to “all those that have noses to read.” Danger is near. In other words, antelope used their rumps and efficient glands, and the processes they put into motion, “as a means of getting and giving intelligence to its kind.”Footnote ⁷

As I have developed in longer form elsewhere, the zoos that emerge across American cities between the 1890s and 1920s were filled with legions of captured animals living in deplorable conditions. Despite this, amid misery and violence, zoos simultaneously housed traces of empathy, hope, and liberatory potentials. And I see these in Shufeldt’s pronghorn curiosities. Indeed, Seton poetically concluded that “observations of the captive [antelope] … proved the key to those made on the plains. … The changing flecks in the Yellowstone uplands were made by this antelope heliograph, while the two bands signaled each other … and fearlessly joined their relations.”Footnote ⁸ What a beautiful turn of phrase to follow the discovery of a language—they joined their relations. Employing longer timelines may point modern American historians to new ways of seeing and contextualizing our own species’ relations with animals. Doing so certainly expands the breadth of modern history and historiography by challenging periodizations that were typically established by national-political-economic human affairs. Animal history may need to revise or rework the constructs (“modern,” “medieval,” “ancient,” and so forth) that have overdetermined historical thought.Footnote ⁹

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It is important for historians to avoid essentializing animals by homogenizing vastly different species and individuals underneath a catchall umbrella. “The confusion of all nonhuman living creatures within the general … category of the animal,” as philosopher Jacques Derrida suggested in 1997, “is not simply a sin against rigorous thinking, vigilance, lucidity, or empirical authority … but a crime of the first order against the animals, against animals.”Footnote ¹⁰ And historians must resist pressing animal histories too firmly onto a linear timeline that all-too-often overemphasizes changes over continuities. Across the twentieth century, many understandings about many different animal individuals, families, populations, and species coexisted simultaneously; and they intersect in surprising ways. To illustrate, I will call attention to just three entangled histories upon which Seton’s antelope fascination sits. Each are crucial to understanding human–animal relations in the twentieth century, yet they require longer perspectives and a multiplicity of visions.

The first history is “ancient” yet also “modern,” persisting for six thousand years since the first city-states. The origin of the menagerie (a collection of wild animals for exhibition) coincides with the emergence of sedentary societies. Menageries exuded status, power, and imperial ambitions as the creatures they held captive became symbols of Wilderness, real and imaginary environments just beyond the controlled reach of agricultural civilizations. When Hittite and Assyrian kings, for example, displayed lions, wolves, and tigers, they showcased wealth and the geography of their empires. And they presented beasts who were feared anathema for farmers, herders, and peasants whose lives depended on the precarious management of co-domesticated herds and crops. For all, and especially for urban dwellers, these predators—as well as animals like gazelle, boar, and avians of all sorts—became increasingly mysterious since their numbers declined steadily with growth in human populations and agriculture’s requisite deforestations. Through the gazes of domesticated humans, animals became exotic—an ethereal quality that breathed the alterity of a far-off place on the edges of imagination and embodied a danger so terrifying that it became an object of desire.

Whatever historically situated (or universal?) processes are embedded within the construction of “the exotic,” the idea has proved durable across millennia. As an archetype of a “modern zoo,” the National Zoo in which Seton observed antelope was a direct product of the long histories of menageries, preserving numerable features of the ancient predecessors. Yet perhaps more than anything, Seton’s site of study continued the maintenance of “the exotic.” The National Zoo housed antelope because their populations were plummeting due to the ecological impacts of monoculture and ranching on prairie habitats and the overhunting that decimated so many American animals—from bison and wolves to grizzlies and bighorns.Footnote ¹¹ By the 1870s, pronghorn became exotic symbols of the American frontier, embodying a “land before time” (before agriculture) in the white imagination.Footnote ¹² This exotic species seized Seton’s patient attention and captured the interests of urban zoogoers. There is much historical work to be done on “the exotic” in the twentieth century. How did processes labeled “modern” nuance this ancient trope, or its corollary “the wild”? Inversely, how did ancient ideas impact the supposed “modernity” of the twentieth-century United States?Footnote ¹³ To ask, let alone answer, these questions modern American animal historians must embrace longer timelines, deeper perspectives, and comparative frameworks. This approach would benefit a vast range of modern animal histories—concerning, for example, histories of meat and masculinity, weaponized animals, dreams of interspecies communication, urban animals and infrastructures, politics and anthropomorphisms, religious and spiritual animals, taboos about animal sexuality, and intellectual histories of types of animals with tenacious symbolisms and rich folkloric and bestiary traditions (like lions, elephants, house cats, salmon, and the names of a litany of American sports teams).

The second history undergirding Seton’s antelope interest is “modern” in that it identifies a current in Western science and medicine that originates in the seventeenth century and intensifies thereafter. With influences of Aristotle, the mechanistic worldview advanced by Enlightenment scientist, philosopher, and mathematician René Descartes shaped scientific discourses in large and small ways across the nineteenth century, and it should be no surprise that Seton’s pronghorn observations reflected the Cartesian language of “automata” and “beast-machine.” Descartes argued that, unlike humans, animals lacked thought, language, and a soul. He explained their movements and behaviors—indeed all physiological processes—through the framework of the automaton. Animals were merely complex, self-moving machines. Lacking Reason, they did not “will” their actions with intentionality; and they did not have the capacity to feel. Rather, like clocks, animals and the processes that composed their organic lives were the result of a sequence of operations. For Descartes, an animal body was composed of cogs and pistons doing automatic work.Footnote ¹⁴ The influence of this “sterile physicalism,” as evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr put it, on the Western sciences was momentous and, perhaps, more central to nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific thought than to early modern thought.Footnote ¹⁵ However, nowhere has Cartesianism been more influential than on human–animal relations. When Seton described the sequence of an antelope seeing a dog, prompting the contraction of a rump muscle, causing the rise of particularly angled white hairs (the “flash”) and the squeeze of a gland, which, in turn, initiates the release of a nasty yet communicative smell, he is relying on an unconscious Cartesian typology that narrates bodies as machines and behaviors as their work.

Descartes’ “beast-machine” produced nearly two centuries of scientific-philosophical-theological debates about that status of animals, much of which still needs to be fleshed out by historians. However, the grandest Cartesian assumption that the enlightenment “Human” subject—possessing Thought, Language, and a Soul—required a deprived categorical “animal” had earthshaking consequences on Western (and, thus, American) cultures. How, for example, Cartesian assumptions about “beast-machines” impacted the technologies and labor regimes of industrialization (from languages regarding “work,” like the standardization of “horsepower,” to the interior logic of factories and assembly lines) have only been examined in the most cursory of ways. The same holds true with emergent capitalist systems that transformed animal bodies into “capital.” To what degree does Cartesianism facilitate the remaking of animals (from chickens and cattle to codfish) into the sortable, countable, mass-produced, disembodied, material yet invisible abstractions that can store value across supply chains? Perhaps most prevalent in the daily lives of modern Americans is how the modus operandi of American institutions (from churches and laboratories to schools, fast-food chains, and pharmaceutical companies) have been assembled around implicit assumptions that animals do not feel pain, do not possess languages or cultures, do not make decisions of their own, and are defined primarily by their “lack” in comparison to humans. And as race and posthumanist scholars have demonstrated, “Human” was always implicitly qualified to uplift privileged groups—male, European, white, educated, upper-class. Therefore, the Cartesian relegation of animals was historically mobilized against Others deemed “less than human,” which has only begun to be explored by historians of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and ability in the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁶ Ernest Thompson Seton certainly benefited from being deemed fully human, allowing for his gazing-upon-antelope in the first place.Footnote ¹⁷ Put simply, Descartes is just as, if not more, relevant to modern American human–animal relations than to the same relations of Enlightenment Europe. The mode of Seton’s description of antelope communication is evidence.

A third history entangled with Seton is bound dialectically to the second. In response to Enlightenment mechanist heuristics, a swathe of diverse European intellectuals reinvigorated an ancient vitalist tradition that saw animals as possessing nonphysical elements, vital forces, energies, or souls that could not be reduced to material causes. Vitalism had origins in Egyptian and Greek philosophy and circulated through medieval Galenic medicine. It took many forms across centuries, shaping physiology, physiological chemistry, and natural theology and history (especially the zoological encyclopedic traditions of observation and taxonomy). Some vitalist modes were metaphysically elaborate, and some (like Liebig’s theory of digestion) were compatible with mechanistic frameworks.Footnote ¹⁸ Other vitalist assumptions were absorbed into a broader Romanticist tradition that had long sought an open outlook on Nature, infused with ideas of beauty, passion, the supernatural, and the sublime—influencing nature writing into the twenty-first century. These positions held space open for animals and their beings. Though Seton relied upon Cartesian causes and effects, the purpose of his descriptions was to reveal pronghorn languages and cultures—to depict pronghorn relations. Historians of science have studied the rise of ecology in the twentieth century within the context of the history of biology (especially the influences of evolutionary theory, plant and animal physiology, and other experimental disciplines).Footnote ¹⁹ Yet there has been little attention on broader cultural assumptions about animals—their cultures, languages, beings, emotions—within these studies, in part because, today, individuals like Seton fit into notions of “culture” more than “science.” Further, the history of ethology (the study of animal behavior) and ethological thinking, defined broadly, has only just begun.Footnote ²⁰ This work is essential to unearthing how “modern” Americans in their vast diversity—from farmers, hunters, and schoolchildren to scientists, artists, and mounted police—related to the animals who composed their lived experiences.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, as Ernest Thompson Seton utilized a cabin in the National Zoo to be near pronghorn, he was unknowingly entangled in much longer histories that give shape to much shorter ones. I suggest that ancient Near Eastern animal collecting, ancient ideas of “the exotic,” as well as opposing early modern intellectual currents are both crucial to situating Seton and antelope in the National Zoo in 1900. Surely, other histories would be relevant too—evolutionary histories of pronghorn themselves; histories of olfaction and the senses; of art, literature, and print media; of race and conservation nationalism; of zoo marketing; of gazes, optics, dissection, and inspection; and of language and biosemiotics. As far as I can find, there has never been a formal scientific study about scent glands and pronghorn communication. I imagine such a research proposal would struggle to secure grant funding. Though, perhaps not since the literature of fish flatulence as communication had a short heyday at the beginning of this century.Footnote ²¹ Regardless, Ernest Thompson Seton camped in the zoo in 1900 to see antelope from a new perspective. And I believe longer timelines and deeper visions may also help modern American historians forge fresh perspectives of animals, humans, and their relations since periods of time are always entangled with others.