There are Spanish reports of elk, thought to have been a subspecies of Merriam’s elk, in North Texas from the 1600s; loss of habitat and hunting shrunk their range to West Texas, where they became extinct by the late 1800s. (They have since been reintroduced). An early Erath County immigrant noted in an 1884 Stephenville Empire, that in the 1850s there were herds of 50 to 75 “red bucks,” thought to have been these elks.