“James, was there any elk back east during this time? [1800-1830] All Meshach Browning mentions sound like Whitetail deer.”

-Ishmael

Elk in Maryland were gone by the Revolution. Keep in mind that the plantation economy of Maryland and Virginia targeted the land and the animals like an ecological war machine. “Great Hunts” in which every animal great and small were sought by expeditions that exceeded the operational size typical for military strikes against the Natives, hit larger animals harder. Not only the animals but their habitats were targeted from the 1640s onward. Northern states in the east were even more fanatical in their devotion to this war on the forest ecology, which was seen as a door to hell itself.

Underlying such Christian hatred for wilderness in the north and the southern greed for tobacco acreage, was the very real experience of George Washington, repeatedly getting his ass kicked by Indians, having to depend on Indian guides, and of the realization that he shared with many, that Indian defeat must be abetted by ecological destruction.

I have camped in Elkneck State Park, between the Elk and Northeast River, and have passed through Elkton a few times, with a friend living in Elkridge, and another who belonged to the Elks Association.

In the early 1800s Meshach was already hunting in mountain islands surrounded by a sea of farms, lumber yards and mines, and may have been largely responsible for the extermination of the eastern cougar in Western Maryland.