Cooper’s most famous novels are the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring the adventures of the frontiersman Natty Bumppo, aka Leatherstocking. The Pioneers came out in 1823 and was the inaugural book in the series. It also addresses issues that underlie crucial parts of the passenger pigeon story. In the words of one scholar, “much that happens in [the novel] is related to conservation in the broad sense of man’s wisdom or lack of it in his manipulation of nature.”30
In the novel, early on a late-April morning in upstate New York, Elizabeth Temple, daughter of leading citizen Judge Temple, awakes to the chattering of purple martins as they fly about the small houses crafted for their use. As she listens, she hears the louder cries of Sheriff Richard Jones urging her to arise: “Awake! Awake! My fair lady … The heavens are alive with wild pigeons. You may look an hour before you can find a hole through which to get a peep at the sun.”31
As the morning unfolds, townspeople scurry about procuring whatever weaponry they can find, “from the French ducking gun, with a barrel near six feet in length, to the common horseman’s pistol.” For those without firearms, there are arrows propelled by both longbows and short bows. Then a horse-drawn cannon from a war fought long before is brought to bear on the massing pigeons. It is loaded with duck shot and discharged into the clouds of pigeons: “So prodigious was the number of birds that the scattering fire of the guns … had no other effect than to break off small flocks from the immense masses that continued to dart along the valley. None pretended to collect the game, which lay scattered over the fields in such profusion as to cover the very ground with fluttering victims.”
Various characters then discuss what they have just witnessed, and three different viewpoints emerge. One group supports the dual notion that nature’s richness is here solely for humans to exploit in any way and to whatever extent they see fit, and that the richness is inexhaustible. Supporting this position is Jones and the woodcutter Billy Kirby. Judge Temple represents the second view, that natural resources should be conserved for the future. (Commonly held today, this perspective was rare in Cooper’s time.) Natty Bumppo holds a third position. It is a combination of a hankering for the old days, before there were farms and settlements and lots of people who kill beyond their needs, with a belief that plants and animals were put here for human use but not gross waste. There is also a dollop of sentiment for the victims of wanton human depredation: “I wouldn’t touch one of the harmless things that cover the ground here, looking up with their eyes on me, as if they only wanted tongues to say their thoughts.” One hundred seventy years later, the debate between the first two perspectives rages still, and how it is resolved may well determine the future of life on this planet.
Junius Brutus Booth
By far the strangest example of sympathy for the bird was expressed by Junius Brutus Booth, one of the leading actors of the nineteenth century and even more famously the father of John Wilkes Booth. Junius Booth suffered from alcoholism and bouts of depression, so his homage to the passenger pigeon might represent more a manifestation of pathology than true sympathy. But it is also a fact beyond dispute that he possessed a remarkably deep affection for animals and nature. Booth, a vegetarian, maintained his remote Maryland farm as a refuge where all hunting was forbidden; not even reptiles could be harmed. He rambled for long periods through the forests of his estate, escaping the treacherous and discordant world of humanity, while gaining succor from the vitality of the land.32 This connection helped sustain him in his perpetual battle with the demons that lurked deep in his psyche. So in the end it is difficult to say exactly what motivated him to write his letter in January 1834.
Booth was in Louisville for an acting engagement when he wrote a local Unitarian clergyman, James Freeman Clarke, to secure a grave site for a recently departed friend. Clarke visited Booth’s hotel to discuss the request further and to provide any consoling that might be needed. When Clarke arrived, he found Booth reading to another man, but that third person remained mute throughout Clarke’s stay. Clarke relates what happened: “I asked him if the death of his friend was sudden. ‘Very,’ he replied. ‘Was he a relative?’ ‘Distant,’ said he.”33
Booth then changed the topic, suggesting that he entertain his guests by reading Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Shelley’s argument against the use of animal food.” He expounded at some length on his view that it was “wrong to take the life of an animal for pleasure,” eventually offering Scripture in support when Clarke admitted that he found Shelley unconvincing on this issue. After more discussion, Booth finally offered to show Clarke the deceased. Upon entering an adjacent room, Clarke was shocked to see that the object of Booth’s sorrow was a bushel of passenger pigeons! “Booth knelt down by the side of the birds, and with evidence of sincere affliction began to mourn over them. He took them up in his hands tenderly, and pressed them to his heart. For a few moments he seemed to forget my presence. For this I was glad, for it gave me a little time to recover from my astonishment, and to consider rapidly what it might mean.”
Clarke had no idea how to take this: Was it a hoax or a practical joke at his expense? He concluded that Booth deeply revered all life, a view he considered exaggerated but one worthy of respect, “as all sincere and religious convictions deserve to be treated.” Earlier in Booth’s stay, a large flight of pigeons had triggered the typical slaughter, and baskets filled with the birds occupied the stands of mongers throughout the city. Clarke quoted Booth: “‘You see,’ said he, ‘they’re innocent victims of man’s barbarity. I wish to testify, in some public way, against this wanton destruction of life. And I wish you to help me. Will you?’” Clarke declined, and when asked whether it was because he feared ridicule, he said that it was because he did not agree with Booth’s views. Booth wound up doing something less public than what he had originally intended but striking nonetheless: he commissioned a coffin for the deceased pigeons and had it transported in a horse-drawn hearse to a cemetery a few miles outside the city. He paid respects daily to his feathered relations, mourning with heartfelt grief.
Although Clarke refused the assistance that Booth sought, he may have been as understanding toward Booth’s wishes as anyone in Louisville: “I could not but feel a certain sympathy with his humanity. It was an error in a good direction. If an insanity, it was better than the cold, heartless sanity of most men.” Indeed, it was that heartless sanity of most men that drove the pigeon from the ranks of the living.
Anthony Philip Heinrich, a composer and musician of such virtuosity that he was dubbed the “American Beethoven,” was born in Bohemia. He was adopted by a wealthy merchant, who left him extensive property holdings and a thriving wholesale trading business. Heinrich threw himself into these various enterprises and traveled throughout Europe to advance their interests. His taste for travel prompted him to cross the Atlantic in 1805 to glimpse the United States. Although untrained, from an early age he also had an abiding passion for music, particularly the piano and the violin. His love for the latter became indelible when, on a trip to Malta, he purchased a Cremona violin, one of the most revered types of that instrument. He would never again be without it.34
Anthony Philip Heinrich. Wikimedia Commons
Unfortunately, those early years of affluence soon withered into poverty: his business became tainted by the unscrupulousness of others, and, more important, the Napoleonic Wars sapped the economic vigor of Europe. Heinrich made one last-ditch effort to reverse his fortunes by expanding his trade to United States. It might have worked but for the continuing slide of Europe, which led to a devastating financial collapse in 1811. Thereafter, he would lead a life of economic struggle and devoted himself to his music. But he never lost his energy and optimism.
In 1816 he was in Philadelphia, then the nation’s center for arts and sciences. He did not stay long as he was offered a paid position to direct the theater of Pittsburgh. The formal arts in America were just beginning, and the nascent efforts were not always impressive.
One observer described Heinrich’s new professional home this way: “Such a theater! It was the poorest apology for one I had then ever seen.” After a brief tenure in Pittsburgh, Heinrich headed to Kentucky, which was then the cultural center of the west. Heinrich was to stay in the state for five years, performing, teaching, and composing—all to great acclaim. An important period in his life was the several months he lived alone in a small cabin near the Catholic village of Bardstown, south of Louisville. He communed with nature, played his violin, and began composing. He forged many lifelong friendships while in Kentucky, including one with John Audubon, who lived in Henderson. In a dedication to two friends, he wrote, “These compositions … were drawn up in the wilds of America, where the minstrelsy of nature, the songsters of the air, next to other Virtuosos of the woods, have been my greatest inspirers of melody, harmony, and composition.”35
Heinrich traveled back and forth to Europe, spending a lot of time in London. He was widely recognized for his undoubted talents, as, for example, he was the first American composer to be included in a European encyclopedia of musicians. But his works were undeniably unusual. Reviewers acknowledged Heinrich’s genius, but as one British critic noted, the compositions “resemble nothing that was ever seen before, so unaccountably strange and odd is their construction.”36
On one occasion, Heinrich played a piece to President John Tyler and a few others in a White House parlor: “The composer labored hard to give full effect to his weird production; his bald pate bobbed from side to side, and shone like a bubble on the surface of a calm lake.” After a bit, the audience began fidgeting and Tyler interrupted, asking Heinrich to play instead “a good old Virginia reel.” Mortified, the composer rolled up his music and stormed out furious, cursing the president in German.37
Heinrich’s “supreme triumph” was the concert devoted to his works in Prague in 1857, when he was seventy-six years old. Three compositions were performed, the final and most successful being the “symphonic poem” The Columbiad; or, Migration of the American Wild Passenger Pigeons. The program notes list its nine movements plus an introduction: “Introduction. A Mysterious Woodland Scene, the assembling of the wild passenger pigeons in the ‘far west’ for their grand flight or migration; I. The flitting of birds and thunder-like flappings of a passing phalanx of American wild pigeons; II. The aerial armies alight on the primeval forest trees, which bend and crash beneath their weight …; VII. The alarm of hunters’ rifles startles the multitude. The wounded and dying birds sink tumultuously earthward; VIII. In brooding agitation, the columbines continue their flight, darkening the welkin as they utter their aerial requiem, but passing onward, ever onward to the goal of their nomadic wandering, the green savannas of the New World.”38
Heinrich’s biographer William Treat Upton says, “We cannot read it through without feeling its romantic power. The situations are admirably chosen and tersely, yet poetically, expressed.”39 The Columbiad was the perfect finale for this momentous concert. It had long been Heinrich’s dream to have his works performed in the capital of the country of his birth, and by musicians accomplished enough to master the complexity of his pieces, something not possible in the United States. Yet the grandest number of that memorable afternoon of music was devoted to that New World endemic, the passenger pigeon.
Suffering from ill health and impoverishment, Heinrich died in New York City four years later and was buried near John Audubon. Though never a popular favorite, Heinrich was an American original who found inspiration in the natural history of his adopted land. And like the pigeons he described in music, he is not nearly as well remembered as his life and work surely warrant.
Lewis Cross never forgot the flights of pigeons that coursed through his youth. Cross was one of four sons born to a pioneering couple who left New York to settle near Spring Lake, Michigan, in the late 1860s. The land proved to be unyielding so the family channeled its entrepreneurial efforts into producing butter-tub hoops out of the black ash that grew abundantly in the adjacent lowlands. With twelve hands devoted to the task and thirteen years of labor, they saved enough money to buy a new homestead at Deremo Bayou on the Grand River, several miles away. Here the longer growing season and more fertile ground enabled them to raise a variety of fruit, and their holdings grew to nearly a hundred acres. Not much is known about the elder Crosses, but it speaks well of them that each of their boys attended college, the state Normal School at Valparaiso, Indiana, now Valparaiso University.40
Cross began painting as a child and, after experimenting with different media, decided that he preferred oils and to a lesser extent crayon and pencil. He felt that watercolors required too much accuracy. The size of his works ranged from the small to canvases exceeding ten feet in width and length. When Cross talked about his art, he always emphasized that it was a hobby: “I paint because I like to.”41 He never aggressively marketed or exhibited his work, but he sold hundreds of paintings, most, presumably, to buyers in the area. One newspaper article notes that some of his work was shown by the local women’s club, which suggests that few in the larger world saw it.
Cross drew what he knew, mostly scenes depicting local history and the wildlife that used to abound. The best example of that was the passenger pigeon, of which he produced a number of paintings, all modeled after the single bird he shot and mounted decades earlier. He felt a sense of obligation to preserve a record of what he was privileged to have witnessed but was now gone forever: “There are not many of us left who remember the pigeons as they were then. Maybe some of my work is not artistic but it is historical … I can remember back to the 70s when the sky would be so filled with them that the sun would be obscured for as long as an hour. At other times, when the sun was in the right position, a flock would appear as a perfect rainbow, caused by their iridescent coloring.”42 One of his most striking passenger pigeon paintings and the actual stuffed bird on which they were based are well displayed in the Lakeshore Museum Center in Muskegon.
Like most of his contemporaries, he rejected the notion that humans alone could have wiped the species out, despite the killing he himself witnessed. He was more of the view that the birds were killed in a hurricane, perhaps, as they were headed to South America. But he did acknowledge that none of the reports of pigeons in new locations ever proved to be accurate.43
From 1910 to 1914, Cross designed and built himself a two-story mansion out of concrete blocks. Called the Castle, it was situated on family property overlooking Deremo Bayou. The papers pointed out that he never married and lived alone in his house. Perhaps had he lived today, he would have shared the house with another. He was not a hermit, however, as he offered art classes on the upper floor, which held his studio and a small gallery. Schoolchildren and high school art students were among the many visitors he welcomed. Cross did not smoke or drink, but attributed his good health and long life to work. Even as an octogenarian he was capable of painting his detailed oils without the aid of glasses. But when at last, at the age of eighty-eight, he could no longer live independently or perform the activities that had sustained him for so long, he took his twelve-gauge shotgun and entered the lost world of his subjects. Boys calling at his home for apples found his body at the foot of the stairs.44
Chapter 4
Pigeons as Provisions to Pigeons as Products
PIGEONS AS PROVISIONS: FOOD, FEATHERS, AND MEDICINE
When I can shoot my rifle clear,
To pigeons in the skies,
I’ll bid farewell to pork and beans,
And live on pigeon pies.
—DITTY COMMON IN 1850S
Although Jacques Cartier was the first European to see passenger pigeons, he was not the first one known to have killed any. (Perhaps he and his crew were sated by the casks of great auks that they had collected and salted earlier.) That honor falls to Samuel de Champlain, who tarried a few days during July of 1605 in Goosefare Bay off southern Maine: “Upon these islands grow so many red currants that one can hardly see anything
else; and there are also countless numbers of pigeons, whereof we take a goodly quantity.”1
The generations who came later would take ever more goodly amounts of pigeons. As amazing as was the abundance of the pigeons, the litany of slaughter dominates the history of this species. People killed them in virtually every way imaginable and for many reasons. And at times, seemingly for no reason at all.
The newly arrived Europeans looked at the masses of pigeons both with wonder and hunger. The new continent possessed fecundity beyond what they had ever seen, and the pigeons manifested the pullulation of life to the ultimate degree. They were easy to catch and were seemingly inexhaustible, albeit unavailable at any given location for months or even years at a time. But when they were in the vicinity, their presence provided a reliable source of food, the absence of which would have made some pioneering efforts even more difficult, if not impossible.
For example, a great crawling pestilence befell much of New Hampshire in 1781. The unidentified larvae “destroyed the principal grains that year,” eliminating both bread stuffs and silage for cattle and pigs. The lack of food became so severe the residents of several newer settlements considered pulling up stakes and leaving. But they were rescued by a bumper crop of pumpkins in Haverhill and Newbury, two of the older towns, and the arrival “of an immense number of passenger pigeons.” It would be nice to say that the pigeons arrived in the nick of time and devoured the offending arthropods like the California gulls that feasted on the locusts that plagued the Mormons decades later. But, in fact, the birds showed up “immediately upon the disappearance” of the insects. Although probably somewhat disappointed by the timing, the residents gave full credit to Providence nonetheless for sending the legions of pigeons in quantities that could not be exceeded, “unless [by] the worms which preceded them.” The Tyler family of Piermont took advantage of the new arrivals and in the next ten days caught over four hundred dozen. They invited their neighbors over for a picking bee. The helpers kept the meat of all the birds they stripped, and the Tylers acquired enough feathers to make four good beds. Pigeon meat preserved for the winter proved to be a critically important replacement for the lost cereal.2
A Feathered River Across the Sky Page 9
