NOEL: Civilization in cat's debt

Published July 14, 2007 at midnight

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"If a man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat." Mark Twain Like cats stalking birds, revisionist historians have long been pouncing on white males, the guys once credited with winning the American West. Since the 1960s, scholars have stressed the importance of women and people of color.

Elliott West's Growing Up With the Country: Child- hood on the Far Western Frontier even argues that "until its children are heard, the frontier's history cannot be truly written."

Such revisionists make history more inclusive. Our past should not be celebratory boasting by, for and about white male conquerors, as University of Colorado historian Patty Limerick says in her work. Women, children, American Indians and His- panic, African, Asian and all eth- nic Americans should be heard.

But the revisionists haven't gone far enough. They've left out a species that's yowling to be let in. House cats determined when the American West really became civilized.

Cats have an uncanny ability to find the most comfortable, genteel place in any environment. Little wonder they were slow to head west.

Dogs joined America's mass migration westward at a moment's notice, happily leaving behind the creature comforts, refinements and culture of the East. Cats had more sense. By the thousands, they deserted wagon trains going west, high-tailing it back to their old haunts and homes. Only after cats arrive can any place be called truly civilized and refined.

Dogs became and still are a problem in many communities. They overrun a place, barking, brawling and failing to tidy up their messes. Felines, however, understood the law of supply and demand. Western frontier towns infested with rodents were desperate for cats, which sold for up to $25. The Rev. Jacob Adriance, a pioneer Methodist minister, reported that Denver's first cat, Tabby, arrived in 1860. Adriance admitted that he envied that lucky family.

Interested in discovering how cats shaped this nation? Just ask them. Admittedly, interviewing cats is tricky. Don't feed them first - they talk more when they're hungry. Just before my cat, Max, went to sleep, he shared a few feline feats:

• New cat-friendly anthropological research is finally exploring the real reason that Mesa Verde, in southwestern Colorado, was deserted by American Indians around 1300. The Mesa Verde cliff dwellers had dogs and turkeys, but they lacked cats, which would have controlled the rodents that ate all the stored corn that might have taken these paleo-Indians through the great drought of 1275-1300.

Civilizations without cats, as American Indians discovered, are vulnerable to civilizations clandestinely controlled by feline stealth and intelligence.

• Cats, as you recall, discovered their human hosts around 10000 B.C. They wandered into the pioneer agricultural communities of the Near East after those societies first learned to grow and store grain. That grain, of course, attracted rodents.

Smarter civilization welcomed cats, honoring them, even deifying them, as did the brilliant Egyptians. By allowing cats into their homes and letting them control things, these wise civilizations avoided being doomed by ever larger, more numerous hordes of rats and mice. It was not the Irish, friends, but the felines who saved civilization.

Instead of celebrating cats, historians have maligned them with such terms as cat houses, catastrophe, cataclysm, catatonic and cataphrenia.

Cats, of course, are offended when sports teams are named wildcats, cougars, panthers, jaguars and so on. Cats, you know, don't go in for organized sports - or anything organized, for that matter. Catty should be the highest compliment. Instead, it's become a derogatory term.

These carnivorous quadrupeds (Felix libyca domestica) are too proud to complain that they should be elevated to their proper pedestals in history. They'll never say this, but surely, dear reader, you realize it's high time to build a museum, launch a journal and Web site and do all we can to make sure the significance of felines is not forgotten, not allowed to nap forever.

Tom Noel welcomes comments at Coloradowebsites.com/ dr-colorado.

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