Most of the pigeons, though, were consumed at the camp and were generally boiled. To round out the meals, many would enjoy the delicacy of potatoes smeared with squab fat. The potatoes were purchased from the one white settler in the area who raised them next to his log cabin.
As rail expansion drove up the demand and prices for lumber, local landowners began objecting to the Seneca cutting down trees in the name of squab collection. Willie Gordon related an incident where mounted sheriff’s police confronted his group, threatening to arrest them if they felled any more trees. But one of the elderly men, Jesse Logan, reminded the officers of the treaty that gave the Seneca the right to hunt, fish, take pigeons, and fell timber wherever they might be in twenty-two counties of New York and Pennsylvania. Another member of the group agreed to return to the town of Cornplanter to secure the treaty documents. He was on foot and so it took him two days to make the round-trip. Confronted with the evidence, the officers offered a compromise that the Seneca accepted: “If the Indians would leave the big trees so that the timber would be spared and just cut down the smaller ones, this would satisfy them.”
A majority of the squabs not consumed on-site were sold to the dealers who were always in attendance. Lydia Bucktooth said her family joined the hunt mainly for the fun of it. As they traveled by boat and foot, lugging all of their camping and cooking gear was a huge chore; not being able to bring anything back anyway, they took advantage of the opportunity to make a little extra money by selling their birds to the traders. Alice White and her kin, on the other hand, traveled in a large oxcart capable of transporting barrels full of squabs. When they arrived back home, her generous father gave the birds to neighbors who had been unable to make the trip. Then there were those like Willie Gordon, who slogged home carrying ash-splint baskets hanging from straps across his back and shoulders and packed with dressed squabs.
William Fenton and Merle Deardorff, who so meticulously reconstructed these final hunts through the words of their informants, failed to specify the years that these events occurred. But human life spans being what they are, the happenings could not have been any earlier than the 1860s. The authors do say that these narratives are “the last shreds of Cornplanter Seneca ethnology.” They are also the last depictions of what to the Seneca was “a regular event in the annual round of getting a living.” This link between a people and a bird started before recorded time and would only conclude with the decimation of the latter. Living for one became more difficult; living for the other impossible.
Chapter 3
A Legacy of Awe
March 26, 1780. At the Sunrise Services of Easter the brightness of the lovely morning was suddenly eclipsed by the passing overhead of countless multitudes of wild pigeons flying with their wanted swiftness from south to north.
—BERNARD ADAM GRUBE, ENTRY IN CHURCH DIARY, LANCASTER COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
The two ships under the command of Jacques Cartier left Saint-Malo in Brittany bound for Newfoundland on April 20, 1534. Cartier hoped to find what inspired most explorers of the time: treasure and a Northwest Passage to Asia. He certainly failed in the latter and did not acquire any of the gold and jewels that were implied by the former. His most interesting cargo were the two young Iroquois he brought back with him and would return to their homeland on his second voyage. History has granted him laurels for being the first European to discover the St. Lawrence River, with help from his soon-to-be passengers, and to explore the islands and coastline of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
On July 1, 1534, his party sailed south along the west coast of Prince Edward Island looking for a good harbor. None existed, but it was easy to access the shore anyway, as the water was not deep nor the shore steep: “We landed that day in four places to see the trees which are wonderfully beautiful and very fragrant … The soil where there are no trees is also very rich and is covered with peas, white and red gooseberry bushes, strawberries, raspberries, and wild oats like rye … There are many turtle-doves, wood-pigeons, and other birds.”1 Since only two kinds of pigeons inhabited eastern Canada, the “turtle-dove” is likely the mourning dove, and the “wood-pigeon” the passenger pigeon. This quote thus establishes Cartier as the first European to record the existence of the passenger pigeon.
A small sample of early accounts will give an inkling of what pigeon flights were like in the eastern part of the continent. Ralphe Hamor published a “true discourse” on Virginia in 1615 that tells of “wilde Pigeons (in winter beyond number or imagination, my selfe have seene three or four hours together flockes in the aire, so thicke that even they have shadowed the skie from us).” A Dutch chronicler writing about New York noted that passenger pigeons were the most common bird on Manhattan Island during the 1620s and, when massed in the air, “shut out the sunshine.”2
The numbers that would come together to feed and roost exceeded what seemed possible. Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather writes of a pigeon roost established in December, an unusual time of year for the Salem, Massachusetts, area. Their presence was explained by a large crop of acorns left uncovered by snow. “At their lighting on a place of thick Woods, the Front wheel’d about, the Flanks wheel’d inward, and Rear came up and pitch’d as near to the Center, as they could find any Limb, or Twig, or Bush to seize upon. Yea, they satt upon one another like Bees, till a Limb of a Tree would seem almost as big as an House.”3
Mather sent two passenger pigeon papers to the Royal Society of London, of which he was the first member from the United States. While he was the first writer to discuss pigeon milk, the substance fed to squabs that enables them to grow so quickly (information he received from local tribes), he also believed the birds migrated “to some undiscovered Satellite, accompanying the Earth at a near distance.” The reason, he believed, that pigeon nests were so loosely constructed was to cool off the eggs, which, given the unusually high temperature that he attributed to them, would otherwise burn up. Perhaps because of such views as the last two, the Royal Society never published Mather’s papers in full.4
John Josselyn, visiting New England in 1638 and 1663, provided his take: “I have seen a flight of Pidgeons in the spring and at Michaelmas when they return back to the Southward for four or five miles, that to my thinking had neither beginning nor ending, length, or breadth, and so thick I could see no sun.” Around 1659, in September, the Reverend Andrew Bernaby was leaving Newport, Rhode Island, when the pigeons caught his eye: “I observed prodigious flights of wild pigeons: they directed their course southward, and the hemisphere was never entirely free from them. They are birds of passage, of beautiful plumage, and are excellent eating. The accounts given of their numbers are almost incredible.”5
In fact, writing a hundred years later about Florida, William Stork found passenger pigeon numbers so incredible, he refrained from elaborating, apparently feeling no one would believe him anyway. Such restraint was perhaps justified, for the annals tell of a Captain Davy, who was in Philadelphia in the mid-1700s when a huge flight of pigeons took hours to cross over the city. At some point thereafter he went to Ireland and talked of what he had seen. His listeners were so incredulous they called him a “whopping liar” and referred to him ever after as “Captain Pigeon.”6
What the Irish dismissed as malarkey, some of those North Americans who had witnessed pigeon flights with their own eyes went in the other direction: they attached to the unusual numbers meanings, and meanings that went well beyond the prosaic lessons of natural history. They sought signs that would predict the future, and generally with regards to pigeon flocks, the divinations spelled trouble. In 1675 Virginians saw “three prodigies in that country, which, from th’ attending Disasters, were Look’d upon as ominous presages.” The first was a comet that moved through the sky every night for a week; the second involved “Swarms of Flyes about an inch long … rising out of Spigot Holes in the Earth,” which were possibly periodic cicadas. And then there was the third: “Flights of pigeons in breath nigh a Quarter of the Mid-Hemisphere, and of th
eir Length was no visible Ends; Whose Weights brake down the Limbs of Large Trees whereon those rested at Nights; This Sight put the old planters under the more portentous Apprehensions, because the like was Seen … in the year [1644] When th’ Indians Committed the last Massacre.” To many, these omens seemed to be fulfilled a year later with the outbreak of Bacon’s Rebellion, whereby a group of Virginians led by Nathaniel Bacon first defeated marauding Indians and then eventually became so furious with the sitting governor—he had called them traitors—they drove him from office and burned down the capital, Jamestown.7
Another series of large flights over Philadelphia in the hot summer of 1793 also evoked fear in many, as they saw it as a sign of bad air and forthcoming evil. Sure enough, beginning in August, the city was seized by a yellow fever outbreak, one of the worst epidemics in American history. Of a population of fifty-five thousand, between four and five thousand died, and many fled, leaving the city struggling to survive.8 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized the events in his classic poem of lost love, Evangeline:
Then it came to pass that a pestilence fell on the city,
Presaged by wondrous signs, and mostly by flocks of wild pigeons,
Darkening the sun in their flight, with naught in their craws
but an acorn.
The most familiar accounts of passenger pigeons belong to the preeminent bird students of the early nineteenth century, Alexander Wilson, called the father of American ornithology, and John James Audubon, America’s most famous ornithologist. The bulk of their observations take place in Kentucky, Wilson’s in 1810 and Audubon’s in 1813. If you have read anything about the species, you have probably read an excerpt of varying length from one or the other or both. William French in his Passenger Pigeons in Pennsylvania writes that these two ornithologists did such an admirable job describing nesting colonies that no one thought it worthwhile to try again. Fortunately, that is not true, but such is the stature of their work.
A poet in his native Scotland, Wilson’s skills with language come through in his portrayal of the birds in flight:
The appearance of large detached bodies of them in the air, and the various evolutions they display, are strikingly picturesque and interesting. In descending the Ohio by myself, in the month of February, I often rested on my oars to contemplate their aerial maneuvers. A column, eight or ten miles in length, would appear from Kentucky, high in air, steering across to Indiana. The leaders of this great body would sometimes gradually vary their course, until it formed a large bend, of more than a mile in diameter, those behind tracing the exact route of their predecessors. This would continue sometimes long after both extremities were beyond the reach of sight; so that the whole, with its glittery undulations, marked a space on the face of the heavens resembling the windings of a vast and majestic river.9
As difficult as it is for people of today to imagine the kinds of numbers evoked by these old accounts, it is even harder to conjure up the power represented by birds that travel in groups of hundreds of millions or more. Wilson was on the river on another occasion and paddled to shore to buy some milk from a farmer. As he stood inside the cabin chatting, an amazing thing happened: “I was suddenly struck with astonishment at a loud rushing roar, succeeded by instant darkness, which, on the first moment, I took for a tornado, about to overwhelm the house and everything around in destruction.” But his companions remained cool and calmly replied, “It’s only the Pigeons.”10
Audubon was gifted not only in his ability to create memorable pictures in paint, but in prose as well. Here he describes how a flock prepares to alight:
As soon as the Pigeons discover a sufficiency of food to entice them to alight, they fly around in circles, reviewing the country below. During their evolutions, on such occasions, the dense mass which they form exhibits a beautiful appearance, as it changes its direction, now displaying a glistening sheet of azure, when the backs of the birds come simultaneously into view, and anon, suddenly presenting a mass of rich deep purple. They then pass lower, over the woods, and for a moment are lost among the foliage, but again emerge, and are seen gliding aloft. They now alight, but the next moment, as if suddenly alarmed, they take to wing, producing by the flapping of their wings a noise like the roar of distant thunder, and sweep through the forests to see if danger is near.11
Many who witnessed the passenger pigeon hordes refer to the hours when the sun was blocked by the bodies of the birds. Audubon seems to provide the most detailed account of an instance when massive flocks created a dusk lasting for days. In 1813, Audubon resided in Henderson, Kentucky, a town rising from the banks of the Ohio River. On one particular fall day he embarked on a trip to Louisville, 122 miles away. Just on the other side of Hardinsburg, about halfway to his destination, the pigeons began flying “in greater numbers than I thought I had ever seen them before … I traveled on, and still met more the farther I proceeded. The air was literally filled with pigeons; the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.” The volume of birds coursing southwest never abated over the hours it took him to reach Louisville by early evening. Nor did they for three days running.12
Audubon and Wilson had a feud dating back to March 19, 1810. Wilson was peddling subscriptions for his multivolume masterpiece, American Ornithology, when he visited Louisville with a “letter of recommendation” to Audubon. He later wrote about that visit: “[I] neither received one act of civility from those to whom I was recommended … Science or literature has not one friend in this place.” Years after Wilson had died, Audubon provided his own account of the encounter: He generously shared his own paintings with Wilson and even invited the visitor on field outings and to dinners with friends. When Wilson left town, he didn’t even say good-bye to Audubon or the others who had welcomed him.13
Wilson was the older man and had started his monumental project to illustrate all the birds of North America before Audubon did. Although Audubon was by far the more accomplished painter, Wilson was the better scientist. This conclusion is bolstered by what each man wrote in response to passenger pigeons. Wilson calculated the size of one huge flight he witnessed as containing 2,230,272,000 birds. Audubon’s figure for a large flight that he saw some years later totaled 1,115,136,000. It is not credible that Audubon independently arrived at an amount that was exactly one half of Wilson’s.14
On another point, Wilson wrote that the pigeons laid one egg, while Audubon placed it at two. Wilson was surely correct, although each was apparently relying on secondhand information. And even Audubon’s gorgeous drawing of the species mistakenly depicts a female perched on a branch passing food to the male on a lower branch. In reality they would have been next to each other, and the female would have been the recipient of the food.15
John Audubon’s connection to the pigeons may have extended even beyond his own death in 1851. A strong tempest hit the Hudson River valley one fall night in 1876. Struggling in its clutches, a flock of tousled passenger pigeons finally found respite in the trees overlooking Audubon’s grave site in the Trinity Church Cemetery in upper Manhattan, between Broadway and Riverside Drive. They stayed the night and most of the next day, foraging on the broad lawn as they sought to recover from their rough flight. Gardeners attending to the grounds in the morning swept clear the leaves, pigeons, and other debris deposited by the winds. Finally, come evening, most of the pigeons lifted off and headed out across the river in an elongated string. Those few that stayed soon became fodder for wandering cats. In concluding the story, John French asks if “in the eternal verity of things … some spiritual compass drew these storm-tossed and much persecuted birds toward the then unmarked resting place of their friend … and there found surcease for their sorrows”? Well, the answer is “of course not,” but the question is a pretty one, and if the account is true (no source is given), it provides a touching postscript to the relationship between
America’s most celebrated ornithologist and its most remarkable bird.16
Taking the mantle from Audubon and Wilson as the species’ premier observer, Simon Pokagon studied the bird in various parts of the Midwest during the critical period from 1840 to 1880. Producing language every bit as vivid and important as his predecessors, Pokagon was one of the most extraordinary commentators to have contributed to the passenger pigeon literature. He was the last chief of the Pokagon Band of Pottawatomie, a group who once held dominion over much of northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, northwest Indiana, and southwest Michigan. In 1833, his father sold the band’s holdings to the federal government for three cents an acre. Despite having consummated the transaction on terms so favorable to itself, the federal government withheld full payment, and it took Pokagon decades to recover the money that was owed. Pokagaon kept a foot in both the white and Indian cultures and was an impassioned advocate for the rights of his people. His effectiveness was enhanced by his superb abilities as an orator and writer.
Simon Pokagon. Wikimedia Commons
Some of the loveliest and most instructive words devoted to the passenger pigeon came from his hand:
It was proverbial with our father that if the Great Spirit in His wisdom could have created a more elegant bird in plumage, form, and movement, He never did. When a young man, I have stood for hours admiring the movements of these birds. I have seen them fly in unbroken lines from the horizon, one line succeeding another from morning until night, moving their unbroken columns like an army of trained soldiers pushing to the front, while detached bodies of these birds appeared in different parts of the heavens, pressing forward in haste like raw recruits preparing for battle. At other times I have seen them move in one unbroken column for hours across the sky, like some great river, ever varying in hue; and as the mighty stream, sweeping on at sixty miles an hour, reached some deep valley, it would pour its living mass headlong down hundreds of feet, sounding as though a whirlwind was abroad in the land. I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America and regarded the descending torrents in wonder and astonishment, yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven.17
A Feathered River Across the Sky Page 7
