gregor

Check this out: here is a Confederate Soldier from East Texas wearing Jaguar-skin chaps from a cat killed in the woods around Marshall, TX. Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of these pelts still exist. But so many explorers recorded seeing the pelts hung up in Indian homes, used for arrow quivers, even hung up in barns in the mid-1800s, & so on. Nobody has really tried to extract the best/most evidence possible for the Jaguar’s historic habitation in the US (yet) - I started putting together the archives in Texas & now I’m onto Louisiana. The lack of hard evidence is disappointing. Around 500,000 Jaguars were shot from 1900-1950 across the Americas &, somehow, nothing was preserved. I would imagine they were largely treated the way the Eastern Cougar was: the last Cougar in the Carolinas was supposedly shot around 1886 — but I know of a box of Eastern Cougar pelts & bones sitting in an old man’s garage from cats his dad shot in the 1950s. They’re in bad shape & soon enough they’ll disappear too. Maybe these posts will reach someone who has a box with an old Jaguar pelt in it… 🐆