Project Scroll Research Note 2026-06: Seven elk for the King of Italy: James E. Bonine's own account of 1875

On 1 April 1875 James E. Bonine, a Quaker farmer at Vandalia, Michigan, wrote to the New York sporting weekly The Rod and the Gun, replying to an article on whether wounds from deer antlers are poisonous, and described his farm along the way: "I have a park containing two elk, a very fine pair; I sold seven which went to the King of Italy." It is the earliest record of the sale we have found, and it is in the seller's own words. It supports the seven elk of the county history of 1882 against the two that a visitor wrote down in 1885, and it dates the sale before April 1875, to Victor Emmanuel II. Records of the time in Italy and America help explain why a king would buy elk from a Michigan farm: his first wapiti, bought at Antwerp and London in 1863, died within days; his agents brought more from the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast, reported in March 1864, and more came in 1865; a New York breeder sold him some thirty by 1866; and the herd at his park of La Mandria kept dying through 1873. No Italian record yet names Bonine or Michigan.

Project Scroll Research Note 2026-06, version 1. The note sets out the record quoted, where it is held, what it changes, its limits, and what was searched before calling it new. Web version: projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-06/.