Das Moose!
The word elk is derived from the German name for the European moose.
Pictured left is an elk. According the Pa. Game Commission's Joe Kasmack
eastern elk once ranged statewide, but colonization and exploitation by
European settlers eventually led to the subspecies’ demise. Prior
to the arrival of European immigrants, elk were found from northern New
York to central Georgia. Pennsylvania’s largest elk concentrations
are believed to have been in the Allegheny Mountains. Elk, or wapitis
as they were called by native Americans, were doggedly pursued wherever
they could be found in colonial Penn’s Woods. They were chased with
dogs, jack-lighted, tracked whenever snow provided a trail, and shot on
sight.
Elk were exterminated in southeastern Pennsylvania and rare west of the Allegheny River and in the Blue Ridge and Cumberland mountains by the opening of the nineteenth century. By the late 1840s, they were gone in southwestern Pennsylvania and eliminated from the entire state by 1877.