INTELLIGENCE OF THE PRONGHORN 
high idea of their brain power after keeping them in his park. 
“When taken young,” he says, ‘it soon acquires the attach- 
ment of a child for the human species, and when captured 
adult in a short time becomes so tame that it will take food 
from the hand and follow one by the hour, walking through the 
grounds. ... One that was in the constant habit of following 
me soon became disgusted with the elk which chased him, so 
that whenever he saw me going toward the gate which opened 
into the elk park, he would place himself in front of me and 
try to push me back.”’ Hornaday warns us, however, from his 
experience in zodlogical gardens, that as the bucks grow older 
they become dangerously rough in their play. 
The speed of the pronghorn is scarcely surpassed by that of 
any antelope, but it is unable to sustain a swift pace for many 
miles, so that a pack of coyotes working together 
will tire it out, and a good hound, from which at 
first it will glide away with ease, will finally overtake it; nor 
does it seem able to leap over an obstacle more than a yard or 
so high, which accounts for the great influence the cattlemen’s 
wire fences have had on its disappearance. This animal, in- 
deed, seems to have a superstitious fear of iron, and the early 
railroads across the plains permanently divided the herds north 
and south of them. Like all plains runners the pronghorns 
gathered toward winter into herds, and those of the North 
migrated southward to where the snow lay thinner over the 
pasturage, and streams remained unfrozen; but thousands 
starved during severe winters. Nowhere were they originally 
more abundant than upon the high, dry plains of the Arkansas 
Valley, western Texas, and thence out to California. 
The history of sport in the West abounds in stories of how 
the pronghorn is shot and coursed with hounds. The present 
writer will never forget some rides of that nature near Cheyenne, 
when his mettlesome gray seemed more bird than pony, as it 
raced over sage bush and gopher hole, up hill and down, after 
291 
Speed. 
