On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  The Bureau of Biological Survey—fourteen years younger than Fisheries and originally called the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy—was set up mainly to advise farmers on the control of birds and animals that destroyed crops. In 1896, the agency changed its name to the Biological Survey to reflect a broader mandate in surveying wildlife—notably migratory birds—and establishing the geographic distribution of species that didn’t always directly bear on agricultural output. But a decade later the bureau refocused its primary mission again on the control of agricultural pests—mainly birds and rodents that reduced crop production, and larger predators such as coyotes and wolves that threatened livestock. Survey managers were not ignorant of the fact that they were attempting to rebalance a natural order that had evolved over millions of years. After all, birds eat insects, which can also be harmful to crops, and coyotes and wolves eat gophers and mice. Whether nature could be made more friendly to modern man—that is, “controlled” through the selective culling of certain species—was unknown. They tried anyway.

  The Biological Survey advised farmers and ranchers on several means of reducing coyote and wolf numbers, including shooting, trapping, and poisoning. But the agency more strongly promoted the “comparatively simple” and more effective technique of locating dens in the spring and killing the litters before they dispersed. Detailed instruction was offered in a circular that explained the pros and cons of various control methods. Attempting to shoot wolves or coyotes, for example, was generally a waste of time—unless a rancher happened to locate a den with pups where he might have a clear shot at one or both of the parents as they stood outside the den in the early morning or at dusk. Hunting the animals from horseback was even less likely to produce results, though the bureau acknowledged this could be “thrilling sport.” Trapping and poisoning required careful attention. Traps had to be well disguised and either anchored in the ground or tied to a heavy rock that would exhaust a captured animal as it was dragged along over rough terrain. The preferred poison was strychnine, which was loaded into gelatin capsules available from druggists and then inserted into walnut-sized nuggets of beef suet—baits that could be set out along trails frequented by the animals. The rancher had to hope a wolf or coyote ingested a bait on an empty stomach, as the animal would then sicken and die in a matter of minutes—whereas if the poison was eaten after a full meal its action was slowed and the animal might travel a long distance and never be discovered. In 1907 more than 1,800 wolves and some 23,000 coyotes were destroyed across the country, a record. The Biological Survey estimated the economic value of livestock thus spared from predation at $2 million.

  At other times, the bureau had engaged in pest control efforts that even then must have seemed implausible. In 1922 one of the agency’s most experienced field agents undertook a bizarre experiment. Since the end of World War I, the bureau had been receiving inquiries from farmers about the possibility of reducing bird numbers through the use of poison gases developed for trench warfare. It was assumed that birds would be more susceptible to such toxic compounds and these could therefore be diluted to levels that would be safe for humans, livestock, and pets living near croplands. To increase the margin of safety, tests were undertaken to see if the gas could be applied to roosting areas, especially marshlands, which were usually somewhat removed from row crops. With assistance from the army’s Chemical Warfare Service, several compounds were evaluated at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. These included phosgene and chlorine gases, and dichloroethyl sulfide—mustard gas. The final report on mustard gas dryly summed up the whole effort: “Because of the dangers attendant with the distribution and subsequent exposure of ‘mustard’ gas in or near agricultural sections its use as a bird control agency must be greatly discounted.” It turned out that mustard gas persisted in vegetated areas for days or even weeks and could be lethal to anyone who merely happened to walk through an area after it had been treated. It was also dangerous to handle and could be applied only from airplanes. Plus, poison gas didn’t seem particularly more lethal to birds than it was for mammals. There was some hope for chlorine gas, which was fatal for birds at about one-sixth the dosage needed to kill a dog—but questions about how temperature and wind affected the dispersal of a “gas cloud” once it was loosed discouraged further testing.

  By the end of the 1920s, the Biological Survey boasted that its predator-control efforts in stock-raising areas of the western United States—with the assistance of a number of other federal agencies—had routed a host of animals whose numbers had been dramatically reduced. For wolves, the agency declared, “the end is in sight.” It was the same for cougars, lynx, and bobcat. Livestock depredation by these species was considered under control, and their ultimate eradication was thought to be “only a matter of time.” Eradication, which in plainer language meant local extinction, remained a continuing goal. Strangely, the bureau did not regard bears as predators, even though bears are omnivores and occasionally dined on cattle, sheep, and even horses, and had to be dealt with to a “limited extent.” Despite its best efforts, the bureau never did make much progress against coyotes. In 1927 federal sharpshooters and trappers killed thirty-eight thousand coyotes, and the agency estimated another fifty thousand succumbed to poisoning but were not found. This seemed to have little effect on the overall presence of coyotes.

  Less noticed but having a greater economic return were the bureau’s control efforts on “noxious” animals such as rats, mice, ground squirrels, and prairie dogs, which in 1929 were estimated to cause $300 million in annual agricultural losses. After spending years trying to find disease agents that could target rodents and small mammals, the bureau gave up on viruses and bacteria and concentrated on poisoning programs. These worked but often had the unfortunate side effect of increasing the populations of undesirable species in untreated areas adjacent to the poisoned ones.

  The Bureau of Biological Survey also engaged in efforts to conserve species—especially waterfowl, upland game birds, and wading birds prized for their plumages, all of which had been overexploited by market hunting and lax game laws. In colonial America, as early as the 1600s, there had been occasional efforts to regulate hunting through local ordinances. These usually involved temporarily closed seasons when game numbers appeared diminished, or prohibitions against overzealous pursuits such as nighttime hunting. These laws had little impact—in reality probably none—on game populations.

  In the early 1800s, John James Audubon, the pioneer and bird artist, spent several decades hunting and painting on the American frontier. Working on his masterpiece, The Birds of America, Audubon described a continent of unimaginable natural wealth. He believed that American birds lived in such profusion that hunting could never diminish their abundance. With a few exceptions—notably several now-extinct species including the Carolina parakeet, the passenger pigeon, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and the great auk—Audubon was mostly right, although plume hunting eventually decimated some species of wading birds, and market gunners did the same to waterfowl.

  Audubon—himself an enthusiastic hunter who posed the subjects of his paintings after first collecting them with his shotgun—gradually came to recognize that a threat to American wildlife much greater than hunting was the clearing of the forests and the conversion of land to agricultural use. Once, while traveling down the Mississippi River to New Orleans in 1820, Audubon had been amazed at the many acres of logs that had been floated downriver and were waiting for the sawmills at Natchez and points south. He realized that what he was seeing was the removal of a small part of the vast inland forest that harbored so many species of birds and animals. Audubon understood that American game had more to fear from sawyers and plowmen than it did from hunters.

  In fact, it was hunters and explorers shortly after Audubon’s time who first raised public concerns about wildlife conservation. The Boone and Crockett Club began organizing to promote sportsmen’s interests in the late 1800s. One of the club’s founding members was Th
eodore Roosevelt. In 1900, Congress passed America’s first wildlife conservation measure, the Lacey Act. The bill banned market hunting and the interstate transport of game, and ended the importation of exotic species. In 1903, at the urging of the American Ornithologists’ Union and the Audubon Society, then-president Theodore Roosevelt ordered the establishment of a federal bird sanctuary at Pelican Island on the east coast of Florida. He eventually added more than fifty game management areas around the country, precursors of the National Wildlife Refuge System.

  In the nineteenth century there had been a dawning awareness that human encroachment and exploitation could threaten wildlife. No species demonstrated this more dramatically than the American bison. Before European settlement of North America, some thirty million bison roamed the Great Plains, and smaller numbers were found even in the eastern forests, all the way to the Atlantic coastline. But by the middle 1800s, the bison was vanishing.

  Horses came to the New World with the earliest European explorers, and their eventual arrival on the Great Plains gave rise to a short-lived but intense equestrian hunting culture among the nomadic Indian tribes. The relationship between the American Indian hunters and the buffalo was mostly harmonious—although the Indians’ respectful dependence on the animal was sometimes violated. In the early 1830s—the exact date is in dispute—several hundred Sioux buffalo hunters near Fort Pierre in South Dakota reportedly killed 1,500 bison in a single day. They cut out the tongues and traded them for whiskey.

  But much greater depredations came at the hands of market hunters, both Indian and Euro-American, who shipped buffalo hides back east and down through the port of New Orleans by the tens of thousands, leaving the pale corpses from which they were stripped to rot on the plain. The destruction of the bison was also semi-official government policy. In the late 1860s, General William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War hero turned Indian fighter, encouraged commercial hunters in their pursuit of the rapidly diminishing herds in an effort to starve the Indians into submission so they could be removed to reservations. Uniformed cavalry troops were occasionally recruited for this purpose, too, and bison were sometimes fired on with artillery. By the 1870s, bison had all but disappeared from the southern parts of the Great Plains; a decade later it was the same in the North, where hunting excesses and drought brought the herds near to annihilation.

  As early as 1832, the artist George Catlin, who’d traveled widely across the American West, had written that the bison was “so rapidly wasting from the world that its species must soon be extinguished.” Catlin thought this might be prevented by the establishment of some kind of national park in the heart of the continent, where the buffalo and the Indian hunting culture could coexist in perpetuity. Decades passed, the buffalo dwindled, and nothing happened in the way of preserving natural areas. But in 1868, Congress approved Ulysses S. Grant’s decision to protect and manage the fur seal population in the Pribilof Islands off Alaska. Then in 1872, Grant signed an act setting aside more than two million acres of northwestern Wyoming and prohibiting “settlement, occupancy, or sale” of the lands within its boundaries, which from that time forward would be reserved as a “public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”

  The secretary of the interior was specifically charged with ensuring that there be no further disturbance to “timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders” within the park, which were instead to be maintained “in their natural condition.” Congress, mainly concerned with protecting hot springs and geysers from opportunistic developers, mentioned in passing that there should be no “wanton destruction” of wildlife in what was to be called Yellowstone National Park. But within a decade a few hundred bison, remnants of the herds from the grassland plains to the east, were being harbored within the park’s boundaries and Congress tightened wildlife protection measures at Yellowstone.

  The federal government had also been brought into the business of conserving natural resources in California, where in 1864 the U.S. government ceded control of the Yosemite Valley to the state of California with the stipulation that it be preserved in a natural state. In the early 1900s, Yosemite was returned to the federal government and incorporated into a surrounding national park. In the interim a group of students and professors at the University of California, whose interest in the region went beyond wildlife, established a conservation group they called the Sierra Club, the purpose of which was “preserving the forests and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” They enlisted the great naturalist and explorer John Muir as the club’s first president.

  In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt established the U.S. Forest Service, an agency within the Department of Agriculture whose business was to oversee the country’s rapidly expanding forest reserves. In a span of just four years, Roosevelt increased federal holdings of forest land from 63 million acres to more than 150 million. Field managers were needed to take charge of the government’s sudden investment in this natural wealth, and among the best and brightest of the young recruits was a recent graduate of the forestry program at Yale University, twenty-two-year-old Aldo Leopold. In the summer of 1909, Leopold reported for duty at his first Forest Service posting, the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory. Arizona was not yet a state, and the Apache National Forest was so rugged and remote that there were no roads through it.

  Though inexperienced—he bungled an initial three-month backcountry reconnaissance assignment—Leopold took to his work enthusiastically and in the coming years was promoted to several positions in the district. In 1915, worried about the vanishing game in the region, Leopold wrote a short treatise on the importance of conserving wildlife called the Game and Fish Handbook. At the time, the conservation movement had split between two opposing theories of proper resource management. On one side were the utilitarians, who believed that through “wise use” nature could be managed so as to maximize its productiveness, whether that meant planting and harvesting forests, or enforcing hunting laws and stocking game. On the other end of the argument were the preservationists, inspired by John Muir and the Sierra Club, who thought the only way to truly conserve wild lands and wildlife was to leave them alone—to set certain areas off to the side, permanently protected from human alteration. Like other recruits to the Forest Service, Leopold started out as a utilitarian. But he came to see that neither approach to conservation was perfect and that what was needed was a balance between wise use and preservation. In 1921, Leopold published a paper in the Journal of Forestry titled “The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreation Policy.” In so doing he introduced a new word into the vocabulary of conservation and offered a definition: “By ‘wilderness’ I mean a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two-weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.”

  Leopold was not the first to appreciate the attraction of the wilderness. It had long been the subject of philosophical inquiry—Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant both wrote essays arguing that people should not fear but rather adore the “beautiful and sublime” essence of nature, and eighteenth-century primitivists believed that the more civilized people became the less happy they were. The American wilderness had been irresistible to men such as Daniel Boone, whose “long hunts” out across the frontier had lasted years at a time, and Henry David Thoreau, who professed a preference for wilderness over the city—though he wasn’t entirely consistent on this point. The “wilderness” around Concord, Massachusetts, and at Walden Pond suited him, but when Thoreau traveled into the remote forests of northern Maine he was badly frightened by the “deep and intricate wilderness” that he thought could be endured only by men more like animals than other men. Such profound wilderness, he said, was “savage and dreary.”

  And yet it was that fearsomeness that made the wilderness so appealing to others—and all the more so as it disappeared. Theodore Roosevel
t thought that an America without an untamed frontier was a country bereft of the thing that had given it a national character. Wilderness, Roosevelt said, was needed to sustain among the citizenry “that vigorous manliness” he believed to be the most essential virtue—and that was at risk as the country became more settled. When Roosevelt helped organize the Boone and Crockett Club in 1888, it was as much for the purpose of self-improvement as it was about promoting a shared passion for big-game hunting in the wilderness.

  As more people came to live in larger, denser cities, the allure of wilderness increased. By the early twentieth century, the experience of wild places was seen as a restorative for agitated minds and city-bound souls—as it was thought to be by George Babbitt, the overfed, overstressed businessman in Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 satirical novel, Babbitt. After escaping to Maine on a fishing trip with a friend, Babbitt comes home thinking himself a changed man. He felt “converted to serenity” and was convinced he could stop worrying about his business affairs and instead have more “interests,” such as the theater and reading. Babbitt had, in fact, made only the most superficial contact with nature on his Maine sojourn, spending more time in the lodge playing cards and smoking cigars than he did fishing. But Lewis’s point was that we believe in the healing powers of the natural world—whether we really experience it or not.