Bernard Dupont
Black Jaguar (Panthera onca). CC BY-SA 2.0.
On June 12, 1886, The Donaldsonville Chief reported that a large predatory cat had been killed in Ascension Parish. After the feline had attacked horses, hogs, and cattle in the area over a period of several weeks, Allen W. Martin and John Walker put some hunting dogs on its track. The dogs chased the cat for ten miles before finally treeing it.
Two shots knocked the animal from the tree, only for it to then kill in the ensuing attack. A third shot put it down for good.
The newspaper claimed that the feline was very muscular with an especially broad breast, measured eight and a half feet from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, and weighed more than two hundred pounds. While it was assumed the cat was a “panther,” or cougar, the newspaper noted that it “resembled the jaguar, or American tiger, more than the panther.”
Most mature male cougars are about a foot shorter and weigh under two hundred pounds. Because the animal killed in Ascension Parish was much larger and odd looking, it is believed that Martin and Walker did, indeed, shoot a jaguar.
Jaguars (Panthera onca) are the largest cats native to the Americas and can weigh up to 350 pounds. They are most often associated with Central and South America, but are occasionally seen as far north as Arizona. Surprisingly, jaguars once called Louisiana and the eastern United States home, as well.
Skulls of extinct jaguar species have been found in caves in Georgia and Tennessee, so Native Americans were probably encountering them regularly during the Ice Age. In historic times, Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca reported hearing and seeing jaguars along the Texas Gulf Coast in the 1500s. When other Spaniards pushed deeper into the modern-day United States, they encountered more jaguars, which they called “tigers.” The settlers who followed referred to them as “American tigers,” “spotted cougars,” or “spotted leopards” to differentiate them from the more numerous, and smaller, cougars.
Jaguars were still living in the Appalachian Mountains as late as 1737, and naturalist Richard Harlan reported the big cats being seen in other places east of the Mississippi River up into the 1800s. John Lawson was another naturalist who had a personal encounter with an American tiger. Lawson wrote, “I once saw one that was larger than a panther and seemed to be a very bold creature . . . It seems to differ from the Tyger of Asia and Africa.”
French naturalist Constantine Rafinesque also wrote of the “large wandering Tygers or Jaguars of the United States.” He ran across jaguar skins that settlers had nailed onto barn walls and talked with hunters who claimed to have shot them in Kentucky, Ohio, and around Lake Erie.
Many early settlers even reported encounters with “black panthers” (some people still do, but that’s another story). Despite popular belief, cougars are not genetically black. Of all the big cat species, melanism (or black coloring) is only found in jaguars and leopards.
As the Americans spread westward, they killed the jaguars and cougars that preyed on their livestock and finally extirpated them in most areas. Texas and New Mexico were exceptions, and jaguars continued to have a presence there well up into the twentieth century.
Seventy-one jaguar carcasses were discovered in those two states between 1900 and 1998, and at least ten jaguars were killed in south Texas during the twentieth century. Three of those were shot in the 1940s, and the last known jaguar kill in the United States took place in 1948 near Harlingen, Texas.
In a 2010 report on protecting the jaguar’s American habitat, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service recognized that the cat’s home range once reached into South Louisiana. In fact, it’s possible that Cheniere au Tigre is so named because there were once jaguars in that area (the French and Spanish referred to both jaguars and cougars as “tigres”). However, the biologists decided not to include Louisiana in its plans, and to focus, instead, on Arizona and New Mexico.
The reason for that decision is that jaguars have occasionally been documented in the American southwest in modern times; seven or eight were seen between 1996 and 2017. Male jaguars can roam for hundreds of miles, so these cats probably wandered northward from the nearest breeding area in northern Mexico. While it’s possible an American tiger might cross into Louisiana someday, the extreme distance from Mexico makes it highly unlikely.
Dr. Terry L. Jones is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. An autographed copy of “Louisiana Pastimes,” a collection of the author’s stories, costs $25. Contact him at tljones505@gmail.com
