Pennsylvania Game News - September 2017 - 9

known, experienced elk hunter.
Parmenter and Nelson objected to
Jacobs joining the chase, and he left them.
They followed the tracks west, for four
days, through almost-unbroken wilderness, to the headwaters of the Clarion
River. A blinding snowstorm came up,
but they kept on, believing the elk would
not travel in the storm.
The elk appeared to take refuge in a
laurel swamp, and they felt their prize
almost was in grasp, the article states.
Then a shot rang out through the
snowy air.
Jacobs, who himself had been tracking
the elk on its long escape, read its course
and positioned himself in the swamp
before it got there. As Nelson and Parmenter made their way into the swamp,
they encountered Jacobs in an opening in
the thicket - one foot on the elk's body
and his riﬂe held "threateningly" toward
the hunters.
While disappointed their "hundredmile" journey yielded no elk of their own,
the men helped Jacobs remove the elk
from the site.
True or not, it's a good story.

Pennsylvania elk
The biggest problem with the Utica
Globe article is the conﬂicting footnotes
about it in consecutive publications by
Rhoads.
In his 1897 A Contribution to the
Mammalogy of Central Pennsylvania,
Rhoads includes a footnote that he'd been
in contact with Nelson regarding the Utica
Globe article, and Nelson conﬁrmed it
was correct.
Then in 1903, Rhoads includes another
footnote, stating the details of the hunt
generally were correct - Jacobs outwitted
the other hunters. But the hunt occurred
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in 1835 or 1836 - not 1867.
Maybe that would make Nelson's 1845
elk, or another taken prior to 1867, the last.
At the same time, another answer
might be out there.
Maybe one of the elk reported to have
been harvested in the late 1870s was a
true native. Maybe the harvest of the last
native elk went unreported. Maybe the
exact location of Flag Swamp, or whether
Jacobs bull was started or downed there,
somehow can be veriﬁed.
But, in the end, none of it matters terribly much.
In his book, The History of Pennsylvania Elk Country, the late-Ralph Harrison
- known as "The Elk Man," to the many
who learned from him, makes no attempt
to identify which of the remnant Pennsylvania elk truly was the last.
"It really is not important who killed
the last native elk in Pennsylvania, or even
when or where it was killed," Harrison
writes. "But the important fact was that
they were gone and, equally important
is that, after an absence of more than 40
years, they returned due to the efforts of
a few enlightened people.
"Pennsylvania was the ﬁrst state in the
east to reintroduce elk, and we can forever
be grateful for this."
Even today, elk might be found at any
of the sites associated with Flag Swamp,
though all generally are outside the area
elk frequent, said Game Commission elk
biologist Jeremy Banﬁeld.
"Nevertheless, the historical accounts
of native Pennsylvania elk are fascinating
for the glimpse of the past they provide,"
Banﬁeld said. "I'm always enthralled by
the historical descriptions of Pennsylvania's wilderness and the sheer tenacity
of the hunters back then. While the landscape has surely changed, the passion for
hunting has not."
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