TRAVEL DISCOVERY - The Extinct Appalachian Jaguars... that Explorers saw.

So, most Americans will go their entire lives believing that there are no big cats in the eastern United States, and that in North America we have only one big cat, the American mountain lion, also known as a puma or a cougar. And even fewer know that this is actually not correct. Across the lower half of North America and yes, into the United States, the population of jaguars is steadily and stealthily increasing. Jaguars are one of the world's most overlooked and unstudied large cats. Even in the 1960s, there was no survey or estimated population of jaguars in the Americas. They were virtually non-existent in Mexico and Guatemala due to the logging and oil and gas industries, and most scientists assumed that the jaguar lived solely in the Amazon, and even then must have had a small population. And because of this, not only people in the Americas, but people all around the world view the jaguar as the jungle cat. The jungle cat lives deep in the rainforests of Brazil. It roams the vast Amazon basin. But what if I told you that the jaguar isn't a jungle cat? What if I told you it was living somewhere else long before logging, oil and gas, and hunting pushed their population to hide deep within the Amazon? What if I told you that jaguars are actually native to the continental United States and were here long before they wandered down into Mexico, Central and South America? Just 300 years ago, jaguars could be found north of the Rio Grande from the great forested mountain ranges of California, the wooded river valleys of the American Southwest, to the swampy lowlands of the Gulf Coast, and yes, across the woodlands of the Eastern U.S., all the way up into the Appalachian Mountains and around the Great Lakes. My name is Luke Caverns. I'm an American explorer, and I come from a lineage of explorers who searched for lost Spanish treasure and ancient artifacts in the American Southwest dating back to the 1890s. And this is the American Wilds. In 1680, the American colonies were not what we imagine the colonies of the American Revolution to be like. It was still a wild and sometimes lawless place. Colonists at the time would have seen themselves as survivors as much as settlers on the rough, untamed eastern coast of a remote, mostly irrelevant and wild frontier. The colonies were populated by impoverished citizens with no other opportunities and criminals who were essentially cast out of England, thrown as fuel into the furnace of the English colonies, churning out profits for the crown back home across the Atlantic. And English explorers like Thomas Ash were frequently sent from England to spend time in the colonies, oversee its way of life, economy, landscape, and wildlife, document their findings, and report an assessment back to the crown when they were finished. In 1680, Ash was sent from England to perform a two-year assessment on the state of affairs in the province of Carolina, now known today as North and South Carolina. He arrived in Charleston and spent time gathering information on the city's economy, trade, climate, land, and agriculture. But he also ventured on horseback farther west into the foothills of Appalachia, where he gives what may be the very first descriptions ever written of the region's wildlife. Deer and infinite herds are found in all places of the woods and fields, the flesh of which is very good food and the skins very serviceable for many uses. Wolves, bears, panthers, and wild cats are always present here, and bears are sometimes found in great numbers. There are also plenty of deer, but there are no beavers at all, and no ground squirrels. Now, most likely the absence of beavers and ground squirrels is not because they weren't there, but much more likely because the fur trade began in Appalachia long before historical documents would indicate. Though gray squirrels and flying squirrels are abundant, alligators are very common in this area, but they aren't particularly dangerous. Still, because of them, people swim much less here than they do in the northern colonies. And finally, he says something here that will really pique your interest. So have you ever found out that you were being charged for a streaming subscription that you had totally forgotten about, or you subscribe to some channel to watch a show, the show ends, and you just completely forget to unsubscribe, and the company basically makes it impossible to unsubscribe? Well, that's happened to me, that's happened to you, that happens to everybody. But luckily for you, I teamed up with today's sponsor, Rocket Money, to finally find a solution to this problem. 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To save more and spend less, join the over 10 million members using Rocket Money. Scan the QR code or click the link in the description to get started for free. And you can also unlock even more features with premium. Thank you to Rocket Money for sponsoring this video. Now I'm going to get back inside and you can get back to the show. The tigers are very numerous and often very troublesome to the inhabitants in so much that they often must share their hogs with these prowling creatures. Now, some people have interpreted the term tiger as it appears in numerous historical accounts along the eastern continental United States as referring to the American mountain lion, but this is not the case. When analyzing the various sources, it becomes obvious that the term panther was reserved for the mountain lion while tiger was in reference to a different large cat distinctly different from the panther with a spotted pattern rather than a solid colored coat that was larger and more bold than the panther. And here in just a few minutes, I think you'll agree with me. In the year 1700, another Englishman would arrive to explore the wilds of the Carolinas, John Lawson. A 36-year-old explorer, naturalist, surveyor, and writer, Lawson would become one of the key figures in early colonial history that gives us a detailed peek into the wilds of the Appalachian frontier. Lawson was an explorer in the truest sense of the word. He didn't arrive in the Carolinas on official business from the crown. He was searching for adventure, opportunity, and a way to make a name for himself. He made port in Charleston in 1700 and soon set off on a 1,000-mile expedition to explore the uncharted interior of what is now North and South Carolina. He planned to sell his surveys and maps back to colonial proprietors who were looking to expand trade routes and settlements as well as collecting natural specimens and documenting the region's wildlife, plants, and native tribes. This information, too, he planned to sell back to the colonies looking to spread settlements into these uncharted regions. But perhaps his biggest drive was his own lust for adventure and endless curiosity. He describes himself as someone whipped by the desire to see and explore unknown places, and in fact, he is the very first person in the recorded history of the colonies to give us a first-hand description of looking at the Appalachian Mountains. That day, all of us wanted to rest, but our Indian guide was strongly against it. He said the spot where we were camped wasn't good for hunting. He told us that if we kept going by noon, he would lead us to a much better place. So, we set out again. Around 12 o'clock, we came to the most amazing view I had seen since arriving in Carolina. We were traveling along the edge of a swamp which I believe was no less than 20 miles wide. On the far side, as far as I could make out, there were great ridges of mountains stretching out to the west-northwest. One peak, shaped like a sugar loaf at the top, rose noticeably higher than all the others. The day was perfectly clear and calm, letting us see a long distance. These mountains were completely covered in trees which looked to us like very large timber. At the sight of this beautiful panorama, we decided to stay there for the night. This quote is one of the first documented instances of anyone from the colonies laying eyes on the Appalachian Mountains. He eventually published his findings in 1709 in a book called A New Voyage to Carolina, where he describes everything he saw during his journeys across the wilds of the province. I was able to find a digital copy of the original book on the internet archive, and to my surprise, I found some of the most vivid descriptions of the now extinct large cats of Appalachia, as well as other species like bison and buffalo that were found around the foothills of the mountains. There's so much in this book that will make for an entire video of its own in the future. But as it pertains to the jaguar, I found several passages that should leave us all with absolutely no doubt as to what cat John Lawson was seeing and hearing about. Saturday, as we were crossing our road this morning, our Indian shot at a tiger that crossed away, he being a great distance from us. I believed he did him no harm, because he sat on his breech afterwards and looked upon us. I suppose he expected to have had a spaniel dog that I had with me for his breakfast who ran towards him, but in the midway stopped her career and came sneaking back to us with her tail betwixt her legs. Now, what he's describing here is a large, bold, quote unquote, tiger that wasn't deterred by the sound of a gunshot fired toward it, clearly different from the typically shy demeanor of a mountain lion. And he asserts this exact point in another passage by saying, tigers are never met with all in the settlement, but are more to the westward and are not numerous on this side of the chain of mountains. I once saw one that was larger than a panther that seemed to be a very bold creature. The Indians that hunt in those quarters say they are seldom met with all. It seems to differ from the tiger of Asia and Africa. Here, Lawson tells us that jaguars are rarely seen down the east side of the Appalachians, but when they are encountered, they are a bold and dangerous creature. Even the natives of the eastern Appalachians hardly see them here, and they are never seen around the native villages. Likely, they were only seen by native hunting parties that ventured deep into the wilderness. He also states that they are different from the tigers of Asia and Africa, which seems like a puzzling statement in part due to the fact that tigers as we know them are not in Africa, but it makes much more sense when you understand the word tiger within a colonial context. That word was a well-known shorthand for a spotted or striped cat. Christopher Columbus wrote about tigres he saw during his mainland visits. All Spanish chroniclers from the 16th century onward refer to the jaguar as a tigre. Jesuit missionaries across South America used the term tigers or the Latin variant tigres when referring to jaguars, and 1700s naturalists exploring the Andes and the Amazon used the word tigre interchangeably. And up until the late 1800s when scientists began becoming more and more precise with their terminology, they began exclusively using the indigenous term jaguar. Up to this point, the jaguar was essentially solely referred to by Europeans as the quote-unquote American tiger. And for even more evidence that John Lawson was not mistaken, he even provides a list called the Beasts of Carolina, where he explicitly lists tiger along with the panther, catamount, and wildcat. He again lists the jaguar or tiger alongside the panther when recounting an experience sleeping alongside a swamp with a group of native hunters. When we were all asleep in the beginning of the night, we were awakened with the dismalest and most hideous noise that ever pierced my ears. The sudden surprisal incapacitated us of guessing what this threatening noise might proceed from, but our Indian pilot acquainted us that it was customary to hear such music along that swamp there being endless numbers of panthers, tigers, wolves, and other beasts to prey, which take the swamp for their abode in the day, coming in whole droves to hunt the deer in the night, making this frightful ditty till day appears. Then, all is still as in other places. Between Lawson's publication in 1709 and Richard Harland's 1825 book Fauna Americana, A Description of the Mammals of North America, there is a blank spot in the jaguar's historical record. There are no surviving or known documents attesting the jaguar's presence in Appalachia, but later publications, including Fauna Americana, actually seem to be referencing publications that used to exist in the mid to late 1700s which do attest to the jaguar's presence. What these lost publications are, what context they're in, and who wrote them, nobody knows, but hopefully someday they will resurface if more independent researchers pick up the search for the lost history of the North American jaguar. By the 1800s, the jaguar was still known to exist in small numbers east of the Mississippi River, and French explorer Constantine Raffinesque claimed to have known of or seen large, wandering tigers of the United States, and even saw their skins hung up in the barns of farmers who killed them across the frontier, from Kentucky to Ohio all the way up to the Great Lakes. By the 1800s, both jaguars and mountain lions in the Appalachian Mountains had been almost entirely hunted to extinction by long hunters searching for beaver, elk, and buckskins who never hesitated to shoot and kill a large cat. With the last officially documented sighting of a mountain lion in the region taking place in the forest just outside of Franklin, North Carolina in 1886. From then on, the jaguar continued to be hunted to extinction across the United States, Mexico, Central America, and near extinction in South America until by the 1960s, nobody had any idea how many jaguars actually existed. In just 80 years, anywhere from 50 to 90% of the entire jaguar population across the Americas was hunted down and killed for commercial fur trade or trophy hunting, resulting in the approximate extermination of around 500,000 jaguars across the Americas between 1900 and 1950 until by the 1960s when the only known domain of the jaguar was deep within the unvisited regions of the Amazon. And even then, on the peripheral of the Amazon, it's estimated that throughout the 1960s, around 15,000 to 18,000 jaguars were killed every year for the fur trade. By the 1970s, when jaguars were on the cusp of total extinction, they were finally widely declared a protected species, and in the last 50 years, they have slowly migrated back north up through Central America, Mexico, and in 1996, lion tracker Warner Glenn photographed the first jaguar officially sighted in the United States since 1948. Now, spending so much time studying ancient Native America, the jaguar and the mountain lion have become a deep fascination of mine over the years, not only in the way that Native Americans viewed these large cats across North, Central, and South America, but also the regions they used to inhabit. Old Appalachia is a lost world without its original wildlife species, and from just these few historical accounts I've found, it's very apparent that Appalachia was a wild, dangerous, and densely inhabited region filled with species that no longer exist within those mountains just 300 years ago. So next week, I head off on my first extended and unsupported expedition of my career, meaning 10 to 14 days unsupported in the wilderness. There is a specific area of the Gila Wilderness that has never been officially explored in any The goal is to perform an independent and non-invasive expedition to locate and document uncharted ancient sites and evidence of large cat habitation, such as tracks, dens, and scat. Over the last 15 years, around five individual jaguars have been documented crossing the Rio Grande and entering the wilderness areas of Arizona, and the only other place they're thought to potentially exist undetected in the U.S. is the Gila Wilderness. If they're there, it's likely that they're living secluded in the most remote and totally unvisited area of the wilderness, and that's exactly where we're headed. I'm Luke Caverns. Like and subscribe for more lost history of the American wilds, and I'll see you guys when I get home.