When the writer first visited the hunting lodge home of Seth Iredell
Nelson (1809-1905) at Round Island, Clinton County, in August, 1899,
he noticed a medium-sized set of moose-horns hanging on the wall of
the great Nimrod's living-room. Having heard traditional stories
of the occasional appearance of the Black Moose or _Original_ in
Pennsylvania, the thought flashed through his mind, "Those may be
the antlers of a Pennsylvania Moose." Upon asking Nelson where the
horns came from, the magnificent old hunter replied that they were
Canadian horns, sent to him some years before by a party who had once
hunted with him in Pennsylvania in deer season. "But," added the old
Nimrod, "there once were moose in Pennsylvania." Asked if he had ever
seen any, he replied that he never had, that the last were gone long
before his day, but that he had killed at least 500 elk, sometimes
called "grey moose" in the Pennsylvania forests. That same fall, the
writer heard that a farmer named John Hennessy, about 1850, as near
as could be ascertained, while grubbing stumps on the edge of the
Tamarack Swamp in Northern Clinton County, had unearthed a pair of
fresh looking moose horns. When Samuel N. Rhoads published his great
work, "Mammals of Pennsylvania and New Jersey," in 1903, the writer
found little comfort in the assumption that moose had wandered into
Pennsylvania in post-Columbian days. This is what Rhoads has to say
under title of "Eastern Moose": "The fossil remains of moose have
been found in Pennsylvania caves. Certain statements of earliest
travellers imply that the moose was found on the west shores of the
Hudson River opposite New York and in Northeastern Pennsylvania. There
is a Moosic in Lackawanna County; a Moosehead in Luzerne County,
and Chickalacamoose in Clearfield County. In Doughty's 'Cabinet of
Natural History,' Volume I, Page 281, a Philadelphia correspondent
says that the horns of moose were found in a salt lick in the
Allegheny Mountains, Pennsylvania, near the New York State line.
These items are here noted in support of the theory that the moose
in late pre-Columbian times wandered into the Allegheny Mountains
of Pennsylvania from its more favored haunts in the lake regions of
New York. Miller states 'it once ranged throughout the State of New
York.' If this can be verified by history it would be an interesting
fact, at once removing any improbability of its range in parts of
Northern Pennsylvania, quite as well suited to its needs." Rhoads
further states that fossil remains of the East American Moose (_Alces
Americanus Jardine_) dating from the Pleistocene period were found in
the Durham Cave, near Reigelsville, Bucks County, and that a skeleton
of Scott's Fossil Moose (_cervalces scotti Lydekker_) also of the
Pleistocene period were unearthed from a shell marl beneath a bog at
Mount Hermon, Warren County, New Jersey. It will be the purpose of the
following pages to endeavor to show that the Black Moose was present
in Pennsylvania as an irregular migrant or straggler within the last
one hundred and twenty-five years, citing as evidence, the writings of
reliable travellers and historians, and the traditions of old hunters
who were themselves sons of old hunters. That it is not a case of
confusion of Nomenclature, for Rhoads states that somewhere in Dr. B.
S. Barton's writings the grey moose or wapiti is called the "Original,"
will also be demonstrated, as the old-fashioned hunters were very
jealous and proud of their knowledge of the different kinds and species
of wild animals.
[Illustration of bobcat]