Caribou were once plentiful in pine tree state, during the early years of the United States, but then because of hunting and disease destroyed the population around the turn of the century.

But in 1963, Maine attempted to restore its population, by working out a trade with Newfoundland. They swung a wildlife swap. Maine sent Canada 320 grouse, and Newfoundland agreed to hand over 24 caribou. These weren’t just any 24 caribou, either. Six were males, but eighteen of group were pregnant females. With all those young ones on the way, the LIFE story about this plan sounded a hopeful note: “Maine hopes its herd will be multiplied come spring.”

The process took some effort.

Caribou being prepared for their journey.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

Caribou being flown to Maine.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

The Caribou were brought to Mount Katahdin in Maine’s Baxter State Park.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

In Maine but before being released into the wild, the caribou attracted the curious.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

The caribou were penned before released so they could be tagged and given penicillin shots.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

Did all these effort succeed? Not really. A recent report on Maine’s state website looked back on the 1963 effort, and Matthew LaRoche, Superintendent of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, wrote of the caribou of the class of ’63: “They dispersed after three or four years and were never seen again.” Maine again tried to bring in caribou from Newfoundland in 1993, but failed once more. The second time around the caribou—a dozen of them were this time—were fitted with radio collars, which means that the defeat was a little more detailed: “They all died or migrated out of the area.”

Caribou didn’t last in Maine, experts believe, because their habitat changed. Old growth forests had been cut down and replaced with new growth forests, and the younger trees didn’t produce the kind of lichen that are a staple of the caribou diet. Also, the whitetail deer population had increased, and those deer which carry a brainworm that doesn’t affect deer but is deadly to moose or caribou. While it is speculated that a caribou replenishment might have succeeded with a bigger initial herd—maybe closer to 100—that’s a big and expensive project. So if caribou are to come back to Maine anytime soon, no one will be buying them a ticket.

The post When Maine Got Its Caribou Back appeared first on LIFE.

Here, LIFE looks back at one of his lesser known shoots—the African Antelope, which was a cover story and a follow up to The Great Cats of Africa, which would earn him Magazine Photographer of the year in 1966 and later become a book. In the Editor’s Note that accompanies the story, Dominis described how he was able to get the dramatic photo of the “bizarre wildebeest” (the last slide in the gallery above) without a telephoto lens.

“I wanted to get low-angle shots that gave a dramatic sense of their speed. I built boxes out of plywood and mounted cameras inside of them,” Dominis explained. “John [Mbuthi, a local whom Dominis worked with on the story] and I worked for three weeks with them. We’d go a mile ahead of a herd and put down the boxes and camouflage them. Then we’d hide a quarter of a mile away and wait maybe for several hours. Meanwhile the light might change and there was no way I could alter the exposure on the cameras. If the animal reached the boxes, I pushed the button that triggered the motorized cameras by a radio signal and ran off a whole roll of film. I must have exposed 40 rolls, but ended up with only one really good frame.”

Featured in this gallery are images provided by the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin of these contraptions that John Dominis set up. These rarely seen images show a photographer at work and just how resourceful Dominis was in getting the shot.

The Briscoe Center recently acquired the John Dominis archive after his daughter, Dori Beer, reached out to the center. His longtime friend and photo editor M.C. Marden organized the collection, which contains a comprehensive look at his professional and personal work and life. While his archive won’t be open to the public until later in 2017, the Briscoe Center the photojournalism collection of which also includes the work of Diana Walker, Eddie Adams, Dirck Halstead and others is open for research and focuses on a behind-the-scenes look at how Americans experience the world, from politics to war to wildlife, via the media.

“Pictures like [Dominis” animal series] have something to say about how Americans (though magazines like LIFE) perceive the outside world,” said Ben Wright of the Briscoe Center, in a statement to LIFE. “These pictures and collections are not only beautiful and interesting: they’re historical evidence that help historians to understand the past with accuracy and integrity.”

John Dominis on assignment in Africa, 1969.

John Dominis Photographic Archive/UT Austin’s Briscoe Center

There are few more spectacular sights than a herd of oryx striding across the grasslands, with scores of saberlike horns glistening in the sun.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Soaring above the thick brush of East Africa, two impala moved with a flowing grace unsurpassed in the animal kingdom.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The gazelle is one of the fleetest of the antelope. Among it’s natural enemies, only the cheetah has a chance of running it down.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Dominis on assignment in Africa, 1969.

John Dominis Photographic Archive/UT Austin’s Briscoe Center

John Dominis on assignment in Africa, 1969.

John Dominis Photographic Archive/UT Austin’s Briscoe Center

John Dominis on assignment in Africa, 1969.

John Dominis Photographic Archive/UT Austin’s Briscoe Center

John Dominis on assignment in Africa, 1969.

John Dominis Photographic Archive/UT Austin’s Briscoe Center

The wildebeest (South African Dutch for “wild beast”) are the oddest and fiercest-looking antelope of all.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post How John Dominis Photographed Wild Antelope Without a Telephoto Lens appeared first on LIFE.

“Lake Erie, the smallest and shallowest of the five lakes, is also the filthiest; if every sewage pipe were turned off today, it would take 10 years for nature to purify Erie. Ontario is a repository for Buffalo-area filth. Michigan, where 16 billion small fish, called seawives, mysteriously died last year, is a cul-de-sac without an overflow pipe, and if Michigan becomes further polluted, the damage may take 1,000 years to repair,” the magazine explained. “Huron and Superior are still relatively clean, but they are in danger.”

And, statistics aside, the photographs Eisenstaedt produced told the story in lurid browns, oranges and grays, punctuated by the vivid iridescence of the occasional oil slick. As many in the United States were starting to realize, pollution of the American environment seemed to be reaching a point of no return. From that, there was some hope. “For selfish as well as civic reasons, more has been done in the past three years to clean the lakes than in the preceding 30,” the article reported.

Though federal water-protection laws did exist already (the Federal Water Pollution Control Act was 20 years old at that point) they were only just starting to get teeth, and technology that would facilitate a clean-up was improving. In 1972, the law was revamped as the Clean Water Act, and the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency made the lakes a priority. They still are, just as they are still under threat from a variety of sources. Though progress has been made on some fronts—Lake Erie has come back from the “dead—the words of one teenager who wrote to the Secretary of the Interior in the 1960s, and who was subsequently quoted by LIFE, still read as a warning.

“I was truly amazed,” he remarked upon visiting a polluted lakeshore, “that such a great country should not solve this problem before it’s too late.”

Masses of dirty soapsuds glided down Ohio’s Cuyhoga River. Shimmering in sewage, they were bound for Lake Erie.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In the Cleveland port, litter was used to build unsightly breakwaters.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fred Wittal, shown cleaning a meager perch catch, was the last of the commercial fishermen in his area.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Cuyahoga snaked through Cleveland, carrying a load of detergents, sewage and chemicals to Lake Erie.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This oil melange was waste from U.S. Steel. It is shown on the Grand Calumet River, a Lake Michigan tributary where even worms could no longer survive.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Another problem was natural pollutants such as the red clay delivered by the Big Iron River in Michigan.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On the Canadian shore, a slaughterhouse pipe was the best place to try to catch what fish were left.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Detroit River flowed into Lake Erie.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

“Beside the deep, clear waters that inspired Longfellow to write “By the shore of Gitche Gumee,” a waterfall of taconite tailings from the Reserve Mining Co.’s plant at Silver Bay, Minn. spilled into Lake Superior at the rate of 20 million tons a year.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Looking like a giant glob of beer foam, pulp wastes from the Hammermill Paper Co. stained Lake Erie’s Pennsylvania shore. The white mess was penned by a dike built of old tires and oil drums, but residue seeped through to foul open waters.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In 1968, Lake Erie’s Sterling State Park had been dangerously polluted by septic-tank wastes for eight years, but despite warning signs the state of Michigan still permitted swimming.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

White Lake, a five-mile-long catch basin on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore, was covered by sewage-fed weeds.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At Green Bay, Wis., paper mill refuse helped turn the municipal beach into a marsh: there had been no swimming there for 25 years.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The beach at Whiting, Ind., 20 miles from Chicago, had been closed for ten years in 1968; Whiting had a problem in common with other lake communities: it had only one sewer system for human refuse and storm waters.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lake Michigan’s big polluters were steel mills and refineries, some of which were clustered along the Indiana Harbor ship Canal, an oily caldron running through East Chicago.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A city sewer dumped into a Great Lake.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On the U.S. side of Niagara Falls, nearly raw sewage—71 million gallons a day—gushed into the Niagara River. To the fury of Canadians, it then poured into Lake Ontario.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Disturbing Photographs Show Pollution in the Great Lakes Before the Clean Water Act appeared first on LIFE.

Just look at Chi Chi.

As LIFE explained in its June 16, 1958, edition, which featured photos of 130-lb., 1.5-year-old Chi Chi, she had been acquired in Beijing by animal dealer Heini Demmer. From her cage in Frankfurt, Germany, she was then in the middle of what the magazine called “a small international trade crisis.” Zoos across the U.S. put in bids to acquire the rare creature, but a “U.S. embargo forbids all trade with China, and the Treasury Department refused to make Chi Chi an exception.” And on top of all of that, her keepers had run low on bamboo and had to try feeding her wheat and rice with sugar.

She ended up settling down halfway at the London Zoo, when the British bought her for $28,000. Because she’d been deemed “enemy goods” by the U.S., “British children can thank the Cold War that they are privileged to visit her,” LIFE joked in 1964.

But she continued to cause panda-monium throughout the 1960s. The London Zoo had been trying to set her up on a blind date with the only other captive panda living outside China at the time, An-An, who had been sent to the USSR as a token of Sino-Soviet friendship in 1959. (Both pandas were variably identified with and without their hyphens throughout the years, and An-An occasionally appeared as Ang-Ang.) But the Russians “frowned on any East-West fraternizing,” LIFE reported in the July 15, 1966, issue, so it took years to make the meeting happen. Eventually, the knowledge that panda rarity and the continuing Cold War would make it nearly impossible to acquire another panda from China, both sides agreed to temporarily put their differences aside for the sake of panda breeding.

However, despite living through the historic period of sexual revolution and women’s liberation that was the 1960s, it seemed as though Chi Chi could not care less about sex. The Nov. 11, 1966, issue of LIFE detailed the “honeymoon” in Moscow that was finally arranged for the 9½-year-old “spoiled” “spinster” and the 9-year-old “bachelor” panda who loved bubble baths. The attempt at inspiring a courtship was a disaster. “Unaware of the purpose of her visit, he flew at her in anger ‘like an arrow,’ as the Russians put it and bit her on the right side,” LIFE reported. “Though he behaved impeccably thereafter, Chi-Chi never forgave him.”

Though some humans at the time were making a conscious effort not to reproduce too much, in order to address fears about overpopulation, Chi Chi’s problem was a different one. And, in a strange twist, it turned out she was more interested in human males than male pandas. As her keeper at the London Zoo, Dr. Desmond Morris, told LIFE, “One night [during her trip to Moscow], Chi-Chi started bleating, a sure sign of interest. Imagine my surprise when we discovered she was bleating not at An-An, but at me. From that moment on, I knew it was all over. Chi-Chi was humanized.”

Or maybe Chi Chi was just more comfortable in her own digs. Two years later, An-An was allowed to pay a visit to Chi Chi in London. A photo spread in the Dec. 6, 1968, edition captured the two cavorting at one point in front of a crowd of up to 40,000 people, as the magazine reported. When she wasn’t chewing An-An’s ear, he could be seen climbing up and down poles in her enclosure. Their fling was only supposed to be just a little over two months long, but the Russians let their panda stay a while longer.

As LIFE put it, “Love might yet conquer all.”

Though the attempt to mate Chi Chi and An-An was ultimately unsuccessful, the international cooperation fostered by the animals did not pass unnoticed.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Chi Chi munched on wheat, which she held in her unique six-clawed paws.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Heini Demmer, Chi Chi’s owner, lifted her from a packing box.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi enjoyed attention from her owner.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi, at a year and a half old and 130 pounds, was expected to become a full-grown 200 pounds by age three.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi climbed in her cage.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi from China, 1958.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi from China walked on a stone wall, 1958.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi, 1958.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi, 1958.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Giant panda Chi Chi looked out of her cage, 1958.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Heini Demmer with his giant panda Chi Chi.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Chi Chi, 1958.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Giant panda Chi Chi looked in her cage.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Giant panda Chi Chi took a nap.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post This Adorable Panda Was at the Center of a Cold War Conflict appeared first on LIFE.

That image was one of the few photographs printed in color for a story LIFE ran that September about the Grand Canyon and its geology, history and wildlife and, last but not least, its appeal to tourists. The couple of color images that made it into the magazine, however, represented just a slice of what LIFE kept to itself or printed in black and white; a few of those unprinted images can be seen here. Grand Canyon National Park was established in 1919, and by the time that article was published, about a half a million visitors made their way there each year. Today, that annual count is ten times higher, with a whopping 5 million tourists exploring one of America’s greatest natural wonders. 

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Havasu Falls, at the canyon’s western end, are in the Havasupai Indian Reservation, which could be reached by a 14-mile horseback trip from the South Rim. The Indian name, Havasupai means “people of the blue-green water,” derived from the brilliant color of the lime-impregnated water of Havasu Creek.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grand Canyon National Park, 1947.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grand Canyon National Park, 1947.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grand Canyon National Park, 1947.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grand Canyon National Park, 1947.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grand Canyon National Park, 1947.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grand Canyon National Park, 1947.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grand Canyon National Park, 1947.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grand Canyon National Park, 1947.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post The Grand Canyon: Stunning Color Photographs From 1947 appeared first on LIFE.

LIFE magazine took seriously its mission to cover all aspects of life, from major world events to the everyday joys of children. In keeping with the spirit of the latter category, Allan Grant—who could more often be found photographing the likes of Grace Kelly and Paul Newman—spent a fall day in 1953 in Rockland County, N.Y., preserving this autumnal pastime for future generations.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Running away from a soft bombardment of leaves thrown at him by playmates, Stewart Blickman scampered out of a leaf pile to momentary safety.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From a low-hanging branch still carrying its leaves, Heather Heid picked three for silent scrutiny.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Royal Heid endured a shower of leaves that he had just tossed into the air.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Confident of her brother Vernon’s care, Mary Eagle submitted expectantly to afternoon burial.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Paul Fry piloted a magnolia leaf across a pond.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dragging their feet, Raymond Burghardt and Ellen Bassett scuffed through leaves blown against a fence.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A disintegrating crown of leaves was about to be dumped by Vicky Blickman on unsuspecting Paul Bassett.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Leonard and Michael Sullivan and Edward Coates used fallen leaves as gliders.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Autumn leaves floated on the water, 1953.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Combining play and a seasonal chore, Doyce Waddell stirred a pile of burning leaves.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Relive Your Childhood With These Photos of Kids Enjoying Autumn Leaves appeared first on LIFE.