Story Bone - Elephants in the Americas

There was a link on the Endicott Journal Blog about the opera "Where Elephants Weep" and I was thinking about what animals have meant to societies. That lead to a thought of what animal in the US would be equal to the elephant, and what mythology we have regarding that animal.

Now, the easy answer is the buffalo, or American Bison. There's a lot of native mythology centered on the buffalo and they certainly permeated most North American mindsets (in case you don't know, even in Ohio we had buffalo, even into the time where us white men came into the Ohio Valley). I think, however, the buffalo isn't the animal to look to, having never been domesticated (yes, there are ranches, but having talked with some of those ranchers, the buffalo tolerate the fences, not really respect or consider them in their ideas of where they should be). The horse is the next logical conclusion, but I think the equivalent in the US would be more like the ox.

Anyway, there were elephants in the Americas. What if the elephants had survived and driven out the humans. What would an elephant society and civilization be like? That's not original. I know of at least one novel (I can't remember at the moment) that explored that. Now here's the more original thought. It could be claimed that environmental pressures shape the cultures that exist. Let's say we travel back to Conquistador time. What would an Elephant Aztec be like, and how would Cortez respond? What about an elephant Squanto and a Wampanoag tribe that would have taken a dimmer view of men in their lands (and had the population to deal with them effectively)? Also, elephants wouldn't have died out because of European introduced diseases, so all the colonists in what because the US would have had to dealt with fully populated tribes and a much more densely populated coastline. Also, guns of that time wouldn't have been as effective against elephants.

Keep in mind that if what you know about early American History (read, Europeans in the Americas) comes from 6th grade American History, you probably have wrong ideas about the interactions between Natives and the Europeans. The "Happy Thanksgiving" story wasn't really like what's in our popular mythos. In what became the US and the West Indie Islands "black" slavery was started because all the natives died out (all be it after several attemped revolutions).

This is an idea I've been toying for several years. So I thought I would free it.

"Oh, pretty, little white-man." Squish.