In 1878 Samuel W. Williston, a veteran of dinosaur-fossil hunting expeditions on the plains, was a would-be scientist between jobs. He wrote an article for a popular magazine, The American Naturalist, entitled, “The Prairie Dog, Owl and Rattlesnake.” He begins, “Very singular and amusing stories have been, and still are, accepted by many of the amicable relationship between the prairie dog, burrowing owl and rattlesnake.”
Williston promises to sort out the folk beliefs around these creatures. His findings are unsurprising: prairie dogs, burrowing owls, and rattlesnakes did coexist in dog towns, but they were not the bosom buddies that popular belief made them out to be.
Indeed, there was an elaborate network of narrative and belief about prairie dogs and their companion creatures on the prairies, beginning with Washington Irving and his book of 1835, A Tour on the Prairies. Irving describes a dog town he visited as “a republic of prairie dogs,” thus beginning a tradition of depicting prairie dogs as exemplars of republican virtues.
Irving describes prairie dogs as sprightly, quick, sensitive, mercurial, petulant, gregarious, and in habits, “continually full of sport, business, and public affairs.” In short, they are American animals with American virtues living in American communities. Irving is noncommittal about the place of snakes in this social order, but the owls, he says, are the “preceptors” of young prairie dogs, teaching them how to bark.
A few years later George W. Kendall, returning from an ill-fated invasion of New Mexico by Texans, echoes Irving as to the “republican” nature of prairie dogs and refers to individual rodents as “citizens.” “If any animal is endowed with reasoning powers,” says Kendall, “or has any system of laws regulating the body politic, it is the prairie dog.”
If prairie dogs were citizens of a republic, then surely they must “provide for the common defense,” right? In 1889 the Cooperstown Courier printed an exchange item from an eastern paper explaining what prairie dogs did if a rattlesnake entered one of their burrows. The rodents would muster like good soldiers, gather round, and commence filling in the burrow, smothering the snake.
An item in the Emmons County Record in 1912 elaborates on this system of dog-town security. The writer says a rancher told him how he watched a rattlesnake gliding through a dog town, with prairie dogs like minute men dogging him and raising a ruckus. Finally the snake slipped into a burrow.
Whereupon, the aroused prairie dogs “got to work in earnest and kicked dirt into that hole in a way that would put a railway section hand to shame.
“They worked systematically,” the writer recounts. “When the entrance was well filled with loose dirt they tamped it and threw in more dirt and tamped that. They were not satisfied until the entrance to that hole was blocked and packed down with dirt as solid as the original soil.
“Then the little fellows seemed greatly amused and rubbed noses many times before they danced off to join their friends and relatives.”
Such plucky defense was no good against the poisons of stockmen and federal land managers in the early twentieth century, who actively prosecuted campaigns of extermination. In a story datelined Alexander, North Dakota, in 1914, based on information from the US Biological Survey, a reporter concluded, “If you want to see a prairie dog town you have to hurry.” Such a prediction of imminent demise was premature.
