A Feathered River Across the Sky
Page 30
The other two books are nature novels, of the type where the author tells the life history of a species through the story of one individual. The Last Passenger by James Ralph Johnson was published in 1956. According to the book’s jacket, he was born in 1922 and spent his career in the U.S. Marines. At the time of the novel, he held the rank of major and was teaching in an ROTC program at the University of Louisville. He had written two previous nature books for children. This slim book tells the life of Blue, a male passenger pigeon born in a huge gathering on the Ohio River. Blue wanders north to another large nesting near Petoskey, Michigan, but excessive disturbance by hunters forces the birds to flee northward, where they wind up nesting near Hudson Bay. (Too many nestings in a year for my taste.) In his meanderings across pigeon range he encounters a host of wildlife including Carolina parakeets, ivory-billed woodpeckers, and Labrador ducks; survives the impact of a diving peregrine falcon; finds a mate; spends time as a stool pigeon; and flies to freedom when shooters at a trap meet fail to bring him down. The manuscript was sent to Schorger, who gave his approval, and the New Yorker called it “a rare, unpretentious, and, in its way, singularly appealing work.”
Allan Eckert’s Silent Sky was published in 1965. The last passenger pigeon of this novel is also a male, one with a narrow splotch of white on his right wing. He was born in Michigan and would end his days at the hand of a child in southern Ohio; in death his eyes would be replaced with buttons. I think Eckert is a more accomplished writer than Johnson, and Eckert’s bird, spared a name, has fewer harrowing escapes. Although Eckert takes some liberties with the details, he works into his story more of the historical literature, including a passage on Roney’s account of Petoskey. More people were probably introduced to the story of the passenger pigeon through The Silent Sky than any other single source.
Eckert holds a rare place in American letters: he wrote mostly about natural history and Midwestern history, two realms usually far removed from popular culture, yet enjoyed a broad, national audience. Of his many books, seven were nominated for Pulitzer Prizes in literature. He also authored 225 episodes of the long-running nature program Wild Kingdom. His highly regarded play Tecumseh!—based on the life of the Shawnee prophet—has been performed in Chillicothe, Ohio, every summer since it premiered in 1973. I wrote him in the fall of 2011 to tell him about Project Passenger Pigeon and learned that he had died the previous July. His wife said he would have been interested in our effort, and I regret not having contacted him earlier.
From 2010 through 2013, at least four novels were published with major plot elements involving passenger pigeons: Quick Fall of Light by Sherrida Wood-ley (Spokane, WA: Gray Dog Press, 2010) is a superb science fiction novel dealing with a number of environmental themes; Post by Hilary Masters (Kansas City, MO: BkMk Press, 2011) is a funny satire connecting the disappearance of species with the impoverishment of culture (among other things); Chase the Wild Pigeons by John Gschwend Jr. (self-published, 2011), is an adventure novel about two boys in the Civil War trying to find their way back home; and One Came Home by Amy Timberlake (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013) is an admirable novel for young adults that combines mystery, adventure, and humor against the backdrop of the huge pigeon nesting of 1871.
Place Names
The website www.placenames.com makes it easy to find all the locations in the United States that have pigeon as part of their names. Given the low regard that most people hold for feral rock pigeons, the word pigeon in most geographic entities within the historical range of the passenger pigeon likely refers to this species (one exception is Pigeon House Corner, a populated place in Ann Arundel County, Maryland). Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, is probably the best known, but there are Pigeon Creeks throughout the eastern third of the country. Here is a sample of states and the number of towns, schools, churches, hills, creeks, and other places within their respective borders having appellations that include pigeon: CT—4; TN—26; KY—44; WV—38; GA—16; PA—32; WI—26; OH—20; MI—20; MO—17; IN—16; NY—13; MA—12; IL—12; LA—9; and IA—5. Margaret Mitchell lists a number of pigeon bays, lakes, islands, rivers, points, and even a rapids in Ontario and Manitoba.
White Pigeon, Michigan, and White Pigeon, Illinois, are actually named for a Potawatomi chief who saved a white settlement by alerting the inhabitants to an imminent attack. But his name does refer to the bird in question. Hunt-ingburg, Indiana, memorializes a nearby passenger pigeon roost that attracted hunters for decades. The name of Mimico, a Toronto suburb, derives from the nineteenth-century Mississauga word, omiimiikaa, denoting a place where wild pigeons gather. Ontario is the home of two other places based on Indian names: Omemee in Victoria County, and Omemea, an island in the Parry Sound area of Georgian Bay. (Variations of a similar word meaning passenger pigeon appear as o-me-me-wog in the language of the Potawatomi and omimi among the Cree and Chippewa.) There is one high-profile place named after the passenger pigeon, in Quebec: Île aux Tourtes (Passenger Pigeon Island) which is connected to Montreal by a high-traffic bridge (Pont de l’Île-aux-tourtes).
Poetry
Amos Butler ended his article on the passenger pigeon in his Birds of Indiana (1897) with these words: “Their passing away must fill the soul of every one, into whose life their migrations have come as an experience, with profound regret. I introduce the lines of a careful observer, a faithful interpreter of nature, my friend, Hon. B. S. Parker. His “Hoosier Bards” are the feathered songsters of our beloved State, and therein he has preserved his recollections of the Passenger Pigeon:
And windy tumults shake the ground,
And trees break down with feathered store,
And many swiftly pulsing wings
Are spread at once in sudden fright,
Till every fleeting minute brings
The noise of some delirious flight,
And all the air is dark with swarms
Of pigeons in their quest for food,
While autumn leaves in eddying storms
Are beaten by the feathered flood.
Written in the 1880s or 1890s is the poem “Wilda Dauwa” (Wild Dove) authored by the Reverand Eli Keller, who lived in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, and knew the birds well. It is written in Pennsylvania German and was translated by Alan Keyser at my request (via Rudolf Keller). It is presented here in English for the first time:
In olden times there were passenger pigeons
We saw them fly in spring time
In small flocks and charming large ones
What a great pleasure it was!
The boys in the fields a plowing
Would stop with their tired teams
And in full voice call “pigeons.”
You heavenly beautiful creatures.
And they flew away over mountains high,
Still higher over deep valleys,
So, we, with joy, just let them fly:
Thought to ourselves, “You may decide.”
We hear guns cracking here and there
Rusty iron long-time loaded.
The shooting is worth nothing—just noise,
Damaging the lazy shooters themselves.
Still finally the pigeons tired from flying
Set down with water rushing
In cool shade consider themselves lucky
There they call their “Eht” and listen.
How beautiful they are sitting in long rows,
And in high green trees and branches,
With little gray caps and tidy gray coats
With red and white vests!
They are now entirely gone these wild pigeons,
Eternally never to come back!
What yet remains of these beautiful blessings?
The spirit lays its treasures down.
One of the greatest contemporary authors of children’s literature is Paul Fleischman, a Newbery Medal winner and the 2012 U.S. nominee for the international Hans Christian Andersen Awards. In several of his poetry collections, he writes in two voices,
including “The Passenger Pigeon.” This poem appeared in his collection entitled I Am Phoenix: Poems for Two Voices (published by HarperCollins, 1985, and used here with permission from the publisher):
We were counted not in
thousands
nor
millions
but in
billions.
billions
We were numerous as the
stars
stars
in the heavens
As grains of
sand
sand
at the sea
As the
buffalo
buffalo
on the plains.
When we burst into flight
we so filled the sky
That the
sun
sun
was darkened
and
day
day
became dusk.
Humblers of the sun
Humblers of the sun
we were!
we were!
The world
inconceivable
inconceivable
without us.
Yet its 1914.
And here I am
alone
alone
caged in the Cincinnati Zoo,
the last
of the passenger pigeons.
Arts Etobicoke is a collective of artists active in West Toronto that has presented a wide range of innovative offerings to the community and region. In October 2010, they unveiled the Art Alley Mural Project, which helps celebrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 13 addresses the freedom of movement. The project uses both a painting and a poem by Toronto’s poet laureate Dionne Brand called “Article 13.” Although the passenger pigeon is not central to the poem, Brand uses the birds as both a symbol of place (mimico, the name of a nearby suburb, means “where wild pigeons gather”) and the freedom to migrate. But although the words refer to people, it is a pretty fair description of the bird itself, “tributaries of migrants / inalienable nomads,” making uncounted sojourns.
The novelist William Burroughs, a keystone of the beat movement of the 1950s, produced a unique collection of writings, much of it imbued with sardonic humor and unleavened bleakness. His poem “Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” is a litany of America’s flaws and begins: “Thanks for the wild turkeys and passenger pigeons destined to be shit out of thoroughly wholesome American guts.”
Drawing of Martha and accompanying text by unknown artist that graced a wall of the Stockholm, Sweden, subway. Many of the train stations there feature permanent and temporary art exhibits. Photo by Anna-Karen Granberg
Ski Country Limited Edition Whiskey Decanter with porcelain passenger pigeons, issued as a special collectable in 1983. It is based on the original artwork of David Malick. Courtesy of Garrie Landry
Paintings and Sculptures
The earliest European drawing of the passenger pigeon is one with a forked tail that appears in Louis Nicolas’s Codex canadensis, seventy-nine pages of text and pictures that depict the people and natural history of the eastern half of the United States and Canada. The work was prepared about 1700.
Mark Catesby is the painter of the first colored illustration of the species. There have been innumerable drawings since, manifesting a vast range of talent, styles, and settings, including trading cards; dishes; faux gravestones; advertising; puzzles; a subway wall in Stockholm, Sweden; a mural in the Dennison, Ohio post office; several postage stamps issued by such nations as Mozambique, Cuba, and Tanzania; and as tattoos on at least three people. I have already discussed Lewis Cross, whose passenger pigeon drawings may be unique in that he knew the birds from life and created his dramatized images specifically to remind people of their former multitudes. Some well-known contemporary painters who have incorporated images of the species in their work include Norman Rockwell, John Ruthven, Walton Ford, and Hunt Slonem.
A male passenger pigeon appears on one of the plates in the state dinner service that was commissioned for President and Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes in 1879. Mrs. Hayes selected Theodore Davis, who worked for Harper’s Weekly, as the artist to oversee the production of the dishes. He created images that represented native animals and plants, including the pigeon.
Sculptors have re-created images of the birds as well. Todd McGrain, for example, has made one that has been placed at the Grange Insurance Audubon Center, on the banks of the Scioto River south of Columbus, Ohio. Another artist is Rosalind Ford, who lives in Newfoundland and Labrador and creates textile sculptures of flocking birds including passenger pigeons.
Photographs
One of the most perplexing aspects of the passenger pigeon slaughter was the apparent absence of all photographic documentation: no photos of a guy with one dead pigeon, none of wagons filled with dead birds, none of barrels of pigeons being lined up along a railroad track or a Great Lakes dock, none of a bird or two hanging from the stalls of a game market, none of coops with live birds to be used for food or shooting contests, or of contestants in urban trap meets showing off their dead birds.
Schorger never published such a picture nor are there any in his papers. Scholars such as Garrie Landry, Stan Casto, and Stan Temple have searched for years without success. There is a photo in Mershon of a game market with dead birds, but none is clearly a passenger pigeon. A photo on the Internet shows a huge pile of bison skulls that is sometimes purported to be of pigeons. Garrie had a false alarm once when he read on eBay that a seller was offering a photo of dead passenger pigeons. He contacted the person and was allowed to examine the photo, but, alas, when he looked at the picture with a microscope, he could see that the alleged passenger pigeons had webbed feet, making them most likely teal or other species of small duck. Supposedly, too, a photographer was present at Kilbourn City (Wisconsin Dells) at the time of the 1871 nesting, but the story goes he was so appalled by the slaughter he deliberately refrained from recording it. This seems to be almost certainly apocryphal, but for whatever reason, the pictures he did take do not include passenger pigeons. And unfortunately the half-tone process that allowed newspapers to print photos had not yet been developed when the pigeons were still in the wild.
Finding a picture of newly slain wild passenger pigeons became an important goal of mine as I was convinced that such pictures must have been taken. I contacted hundreds of people and institutions throughout Canada and the United States in my search, but to no avail. A number of interested librarians and archivists joined the effort and continued their own investigations. But none of us struck pay dirt.
Then, on October 9, 2012, I received this remarkable e-mail from Destry Hoffard: “I saw in the recent issue of On Target! [newsletter] that you were looking for photographs that showed Passenger Pigeons in a trap shooting or hunting sense. I’ve collected vintage photos for years and only have two that might fill the bill.” He sent me copies, and sure enough they are indeed passenger pigeons, as the reader can see (photo insert). To my knowledge both are unlike any photos previously published. (Although, quite amazingly, on January 17, 2013, my colleague Susan Wegner spotted two versions of the same stereopticon card on two websites so obviously multiple copies are still in existence. That different companies featured the same shot suggests it sold fairly well.)
Destry recalls obtaining the stereopticon card about a decade ago at a postcard show in Toledo. There are more details associated with his acquisition of the tintype. He was in northern Michigan, on his way to Iron Mountain, when he stopped for lunch and noticed a small antiques shop nearby. Destry asked the proprietor if he had any old hunting photos. After rummaging about for a while, the owner emerged with a box of tintypes, out of which he selected one: “The light in the shop was bad and I didn’t really look too closely. He wanted the princely sum of $3 and it seemed like some kind of sporting scene so I just rolled the dice and bought it. It didn’t really dawn on me what it might show till I got it home
a few days later and began to study it with a glass.”
The stereopticon card is entitled “Small Wild Game of the Alleghenies” and depicts a string of gray squirrels, below which are a number of ruffed grouse and three passenger pigeons. It was produced as part of the “Stereoscopic Gems of American and Foreign Scenery” series by the Universal Photo Art Company (1880–1910), headquartered in Philadelphia. The use of the image represents the common practice of reissuing photos taken earlier. In this instance, the photographer was likely R. A. Bonine of Altoona, who took many photos on commission from the Pennsylvania Railroad Company during the 1870s.