A Feathered River Across the Sky

by Joel Greenberg

  Pigeons were important to many early settlers. An official report on the status of the Niagara Colony in 1785 credited wild pigeons and fish as being the principal food that sustained the residents through the summer until crops could be harvested. All the Crown needed to supply was a small amount of flour to each person. At Galt, Ontario, in 1832, when the combination of a summer-long drought and an August frost wiped out most of the crop, the locals were saved from starvation by netting or shooting hundreds of pigeons.3

  The residents of the young Plymouth Colony came to see the pigeons as a double-edged sword, or, in the words of John Winthrop, “the Lord showed us, that He could make the same creature, which formerly had been a great chastisement, now to become a great blessing.” In 1643, unusually chilly and wet weather reduced the corn crop alarmingly. And to worsen the situation, just before harvest time, the pigeons arrived (“above 10,000 in one flock”) and consumed most of what there was. Five years later, the pigeons made another appearance, but this time after the harvest was completed. In this instance, Winthrop proclaimed the birds “a great blessing, it being incredible what multitudes of them were killed daily.”4

  As the white presence in North America increased and no longer needed rescuing by hordes of passenger pigeons, the birds became less out-of-the-blue lifesavers and more a dietary mainstay. A traveler riding between Newport and Boston in September 1759 found that little other food was available and locals subsisted almost exclusively on pigeons. Masters fed servants pigeons with such frequency in places that the employees demanded clauses in their contracts restricting how often this sort of poultry was served. Alexander Wilson told of the times when passenger pigeons were not eaten merely once a day for days on end but were the starring ingredient for breakfast, lunch, and dinner over many days. At that point, he said, “the very name becomes sickening.”5

  The territory around Wells and Kennebunk, Maine, in the mid-1700s was rich in whortleberries, which drew the pigeons in “innumerable numbers.” Gunning them down was an exercise in democracy, for the pastime attracted everyone, including wealthy men in their prime, the elderly, children, women, and slaves. An accomplished shooter could bring in three hundred in a day. But the only way one could give away the surplus was by offering the birds fully dressed.6

  From the ruthless standpoint of the market, the ultimate manifestation of profligate slaughter is when the prey is killed in such quantities that the accumulated corpses are valueless. Two pence a dozen was the going price in Boston in August 1736, and many could not even be sold at that amount. About the same time, in Granby, Massachusetts, surplus birds were fed to pigs, a practice that was not uncommon at nestings and roosts. Of all the awful things that were done to passenger pigeons, the great passenger pigeon historian A. W. Schorger devoted a single sentence to this use of the bird: “The extensive feeding of pigeons to hogs is unworthy of comment.” At least those who did this relieved the hunger of their livestock. Not even that much could be said for what J. Benwell observed on his trip from Cleveland to the Ohio River in what was probably the 1840s: “We saw many carcasses of these birds outside the villages, such numbers having been destroyed, that the inhabitants could not consume them, and they were accordingly thrown out as refuse.”7

  The problem of too many dead pigeons was solved slightly differently at a nesting in Pennsylvania. There the surplus was plowed into fields as fertilizer. In this area, a widely held belief was that burying dead passenger pigeons in the garden resulted in more colorful flowers.8

  For those who could afford to be choosy about what they ate, questions arose as to the palatability of passenger pigeon flesh and how best to prepare it. G. W. Cunningham, writing in 1899, saw little culinary merit in the bird. He thought it was hardly better than a yellowhammer! Yellowhammer is an antiquated name for the northern flicker, a species of woodpecker that has a great fondness for ants. But the flicker did have its supporters, too, as expressed in that strange book of 1853 The Market Assistant, which is sort of a gustatory field guide to the birds. All the species that were stocked in the New York markets are discussed as to their suitability for the kitchen. Thomas DeVoe, the author, said that flickers were a seasonal specialty most often appearing in the fall, “when it is fat, and its flesh quite savory, but not so tender as the robin.”9

  As for passenger pigeons, DeVoe had decided ambivalence. Adult birds shot on the wing were “very indifferent eating, even if well and properly cooked.” Much better were the adults caught live and fed grain in coops. But best of all were the squabs, most delectable “when fat and fresh.” William Byrd also was not impressed with birds killed during migration, “though good enough upon the march, when hunger is the sauce, and makes it go down better than truffles and morels would do.”10

  A Kentucky author penned a memoir on passenger pigeons that eventually appeared in the Indianapolis Star newspaper. After two trials, he found the flesh “as tough as whit leather, about as juicy as a pith of a dried corn stalk, as digestible as rawhide and almost as hard to masticate as rubber.” This prompted a stout defense of the bird by C. G. M’Neill, who pointed out that one could say the same for beef or chicken if all you had tasted was an old bull and a four-year-old rooster. Another big fan of the bird as food was Etta Wilson, who averred that she “never ate a pigeon of any age that was not delicate and delicious.”11

  Numerous dishes featured the birds. Pigeon pie was one favorite, and stewed pigeon another. An 1857 guide to help Canadian settlers offers this recipe: “To make a pot pie of them, line the bake-kettle with a good pie crust; lay out your birds, with a little butter on the breast of each, and a little pepper shaken over them, and pour in a tea cupful of water—do not fill your pan too full; lay in the crust, about half an inch thick, cover your lid with hot embers and put a few below. Keep your bake-kettle turned carefully, adding more hot coals to the top, till the crust is cooked.”12

  Two recipes for stewed pigeon, one from Madison and the other from Chicago, are similar. In one the birds are stuffed with finely chopped bread and pork, while the other adds hard-boiled eggs to the mixture. Bard the birds with pork, place them in a tightly covered kettle with enough water to cover them, and put them into the oven until done. The real difference is in the sauces that finish the dishes. The Chicago ladies preferred mixing the pigeon gravy with the juice of one lemon, a tablespoon of currant jelly, and enough flour to thicken the boiled sauce. Perhaps in homage to one of her state’s principal industries, Mrs. Hobbins of Madison simply added butter and cream to her gravy.13

  Although not especially fond of passenger pigeon, George Sears, writing as Messmuk, recognized that one might be out in the woods where there was little else to eat. To make the best of the situation he suggested boiling the birds until they were tender and then taking them from the pot. Remove the breast meat, dredge it in flour, and then panfry as you would squirrels. The giblets and rest of the carcass should be stewed for a later meal. A Canadian observer from the 1770s reported that the pigeons “furnish soups and fricassees, which are usually dressed with a cream sauce and small onions.” One unusual preparation was contributed by M. W. Althouse of Toronto: “Hunters and maple sugar makers often cooked adult pigeons by roughly drawing and then enclosing the un-plucked carcass in wet clay which was then covered with the hot embers and wood ashes. When cooked the meat was removed from the covering of baked clay which kept with it all the feathers and most of the skin of the bird.”14

  People used pigeon flesh in all kinds of ways. As food for long voyages, roasted pigeons were kept wholesome by cramming them into barrels where they were covered with melted lard and mutton fat that would congeal to form an airtight seal. Most surplus pigeon meat, though, was salted, smoked, or pickled. A fancy variation on the last technique was employed by the mother of Charles Belknap when they lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan. By her hand, numerous pigeons wound up in earthen jars, where they were preserved with spiced apple cider and served to special guests: “The minister never had to
eat woodchuck in our house.” A couple from Illinois preferred to age and cure their meat, as a guest discovered when he was led to their attic, where many hundreds of dried pigeon breasts hung from the rafters on hooks.15

  From their pedestrian beginnings as food for fearless explorers and struggling pioneers, passenger pigeons followed their human predators up the social ladder to become important components of some of the fanciest meals served in nineteenth-century America. Charles Dickens had just turned thirty years old in February 1842, but his literary success, embodied by such novels as Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby, earned him accolades everywhere he traveled on his tour of the United States. When New Yorkers had the chance to fete the celebrated author, they staged a banquet that was “the finest civic pride could produce.” The meal was held in the venerated City Hotel, the grande dame of local hotels since it was built in 1793, and catered by one Mr. Gardener at the cost of $2,500. Sitting at the head chair was Washington Irving, just one of the many luminaries present. After working their way through the first course of soup and/or fish, and a second course of eighteen items (mostly meats labeled either cold, roasted, or boiled), they had the chance to explore nineteen more selections denoted as entrées. Sharing the spotlight with such dishes as Larded Sweet Bread with Sorrel and Stewed Terrapin were three pigeon creations: Stewed Pigeons with Peas, Stewed Pigeons with Mushrooms, and Pigeon Patties with Truffles.16

  Still a part of the gastronomic life of New York’s bourgeoisie, the pigeons soared to even loftier heights with the opening of what was arguably the country’s first truly great restaurant, Delmonico’s. When Rear Admiral Lessoffsky steered his fleet into New York Harbor in November of 1862, Secretary of State Seward wanted to show the administration’s heartfelt appreciation, for Russia was then the only major European nation publicly supporting the Union cause. It was also meant to impress Britain and France, who had not yet chosen a side in the war. While the venue was the Academy of Music, the food was Delmonico’s. As one of the many entrées, the Russian officers and their hosts could have enjoyed côtelette de pigeons à la macédoine, pigeon cutlets served with a medley of diced vegetables laced with butter. Lately Thomas comments that this meal demonstrates how “gastronomy can be made to serve two purposes simultaneously: in this case, to give delight to friends and to give potential enemies indigestion.” Four years later, President Andrew Johnson came to visit. From City Hall, where he was hailed by the mayor, Johnson and his party (which included his successor, General Grant) formed a parade that moved on to Delmonico’s through throngs of cheering New Yorkers. Each of the dinner courses was paired with a wine, and for the entrées the selected libation was Château Margaux ’48, which presumably went well with each of the six offerings, including ballotines de pigeons Lucullus, an amazingly rich dish of boned pigeon stuffed with foie gras and truffles coated in aspic and garnished with cock’s combs, cock’s kidneys, and more truffles.17

  Meat was not the only part of the bird that was valued. Fat and feathers were coveted as well. The fat was used as shortening and even in the making of soap. Two visitors to a large nesting on the Susquehanna River in northern Pennsylvania in 1810 said that millions of chubby squabs were reduced to oil, which was then packed in barrels and sent downstream on boats. Generally feathers were collected from birds killed for the meat, but sometimes the feathers were the primary product and the carcasses were discarded or fed to swine. Most of those who picked the feathers were women and children. In Coudersport, Pennsylvania, after one particularly large nesting, mother pluck-ers were hired at the rate of five cents for every dozen pigeons they processed. The greatest reward to the participants, though, was social, as it took on the air of a picnic where folks could gossip while earning a little money.18

  Beds and pillows stuffed with pigeon feathers enjoyed broad popularity. In the early years of Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, an acceptable wedding dowry had to include a pigeon mattress and pillows. Many people in various parts of pigeon range believed that these sleep articles provided eternal life. One critically ill lady in Ontario was moved from her bed of pigeon feathers to one of more mundane stuffing to hasten her end. In 1936, Alvin McKnight of Augusta, Wisconsin, related how he and his wife continued to sleep on a bed that they received in 1877 filled with the feathers of 144 dozen passenger pigeons. They were both in excellent health despite his age of eighty-four and hers of seventy-seven. They were beginning to believe that such beds would repel death and were prepared to test the proposition. The pigeon feathers, however, were no more able to grant immortality to the McKnights than they were to the species itself.19

  In the eyes of some, passenger pigeon parts held one more valuable property: medicinal. Dr. John Brickell, writing on the natural history of North Carolina in 1737, stated that the blood was effective in the treatment of the eyes and, when swallowed, “cures bloody fluxes.” He also had a good word for the dung, saying it could relieve most anything that ails, including headaches, pleurisy, apoplexy, and lethargy. How the physician administered the dung is left obscure. A Native healer from Quebec, on the other hand, treasured the gizzards, stringing them up to dry so she could use them to treat gallstones. The logic here was that the pigeons would at times ingest small stones, yet suffered no ill effect because the gizzard had the power to dissolve them. Therefore, if ingested, the gizzard would come in contact with the patients’ stones and make them likewise disappear.20

  THEY MADE GREAT HAVOC: ENEMIES OF AGRICULTURE

  Even in areas not yet converted to crops, some landowners feared that the pigeons would jeopardize their timber holdings and took measures to keep the birds away. The Niles (MI) Republican of April 25, 1850, published this singular report by a local settler: “I am completely warn down. The pigeons are roosting throughout our woods and the roost extends for miles. Our neighbors and ourselves have for several days had to build large fires and keep up reports of fire arms to scare them off. While I write, within a quarter of a mile, there are thirty guns firing. The pigeons come in such large quantities to destroy a great deal of timber, break limbs off of large trees, and even tear up some by the roots.”

  Alexander Wilson calculated that two billion passenger pigeons would consume almost 17.5 million bushels of mast a day. The vast amount of food that the species would need to sustain itself prompted one British ornithologist to wonder why “any farmer should ever dare to migrate to America.” The literature is mixed on whether the pigeons were a serious threat to agriculture. Farms in proximity to natural forage often escaped pigeon depredations. This would seem to be the case, for example, in the Wilderness District of Nicholas County, West Virginia, where “a vast multitude” of birds roosted in the fall of 1876. It has been suggested that heavy baiting by hunters at a nesting in New York might also have relieved the pressure on farmers. (Given the numbers of birds and how much they ate, this scenario becomes plausible only when accompanied by pigeon killing on a fantastic scale.) But things were apt to be different where hungry birds found themselves remote from native food sources. Then it was open warfare.21

  A Jesuit traveling up the St. Lawrence River to Montreal during 1662–63 commented on the huge numbers of pigeons: “This season they attacked the grain fields where they made great havoc, after stripping the woods and fields of strawberries and raspberries which grow here everywhere under foot.” But it was at a great cost to the pigeons, which were killed in such abundance that many corpses remained even after home consumption and the provision of servants. This surplus was either salted in barrels for winter use or given to dogs and pigs. Not long after, Baron de La Hontan reported, probably facetiously, that the pigeons were so loathsome in Canada, the bishop “has been forced to excommunicate ’em oftener than once, upon the account of the Damage they do to the Product of the Earth.”22

  Du Page County, Illinois, is just west of Chicago. It is today a place of suburban sprawl (which would have to include the older subdivision where I live), broken up by twenty-five thousand acre
s of forest-preserve land, plus assorted other tracts of open space. In February of 1852, the pigeons, called “pernicious varmints,” arrived in Du Page and harvested every seed many unfortunate farmers planted. An article describing the events compares blackbirds with passenger pigeons. They conclude that blackbirds, “as evil and dark-hearted as they are,” are still preferable to the pigeons.23

  Pigeons in southwestern Michigan would descend on the corn and wheat fields to consume acres of produce. In Pennsylvania the birds were particularly partial to buckwheat. So many pigeons foraged on grain in Eden, Wisconsin, in 1869 they forced the farmers to abandon their fields to seek shelter in their homes. The farmers of western Iowa had no better success in their struggles against the pigeons in the mid-1860s. A detailed account of their woes refers to the pigeons as “a perfect scourge [that] lit upon the fields of new-sown grain, and rolling over and over like the waves of the sea, picked up every kernel of grain in sight.” So the farmers tried again, but before they could harrow the freshly seeded soil, the pigeons would already have worked the ground. Some farmers were forced to try yet a third time. Nothing they did could keep the birds away, be it the shooting of guns, throwing of rocks, shouting, running to drive them off, barking dogs, or even killing vast numbers with poles.24