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 their 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
Every afternoon [the pigeons] came sweeping across the lawn, positively in clouds, and with a swiftness and softness of winged motion, more beautiful than anything of the kind I ever knew. Had I been a musician, such as Mendelssohn, I felt that I could have improvised a music quite peculiar, from the sound they made, which should have indicated all the beauty over which their wings bore them.
—MARGARET FULLER, ON THE ROCK RIVER NEAR OREGON, ILLINOIS, 1843
Unlike such natural spectacles as the geysers of Yellowstone or the herds of bison grazing across the rolling grasslands of the Great Plains, one did not have to travel to remote districts to see passenger pigeons. In their movements across the eastern half of the continent, these birds cast deep shadows over Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, Toronto, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Chicago, Louisville, and other cities. The pigeons did not appear everywhere every year, and their abundance ebbed over the decades from east to west as the forests upon which they depended gave way to agriculture and economic development. But as long as there were large flocks, most anyone had the chance to experience the intense emotions evoked by this bird. For most of the Midwestern cities, this chance lasted through the late 1860s and early to mid 1870s.
Philip Hone, mayor of New York City from 1826 to 1827, assiduously maintained a diary for thirty-one years, leaving to future generations a detailed glimpse of that time and place. Through reading and listening to friends, he had long been familiar with the aerial splendor of passenger pigeons on the move, but he did not get to see the sight himself until November 4, 1835, while in Mattawan, New York: “They came from the west, and crossing the valley where I was, passed the top of the mountains and went to the south and east. The air was filled with them; their undulation was like the long waves of the ocean in a calm, and the fluttering of their wings made a noise like the crackling of a fire among dry leaves or thorns. Sometimes the mighty army was scarcely visible in the bright blue sky, and in an instant a descent of astonishing rapidity brought them so low that if we had been provided with guns, it would have been literally ‘every shot a pigeon.’” He was pleased to have finally observed the spectacle, in part because he would thereafter be able “to talk ‘pigeon’ with Audubon, in his own language.”18
The residents of Columbus, Ohio, reacted to a large flight of passenger pigeons not with wonder but fear. One warm spring morning in 1855 the people of that city were going about their usual routines when they first noticed “a low-pitched hum” that slowly engulfed them. It grew louder, as horses and dogs began fidgeting. Then just within the limits of vision, wispy clouds appeared on the southern horizon: “As the watchers stared, the hum increased to a mighty throbbing. Now everyone was out of the houses and stores, looking apprehensively at the growing cloud, which was blotting out the rays of the sun. Children screamed and ran for home. Women gathered their long skirts and hurried for the shelter of stores. Horses bolted. A few people mumbled frightened words about the approach of the millennium, and several dropped on their knees and prayed … Suddenly a great cry arose from the south end of High Street. ‘It’s the passenger pigeons! It’s the pigeons!’ … And then the dark cloud was over the city … Day was turned to dusk. The thunder of wings made shouting necessary for human communication.” When the flock had finally passed almost two hours later, the town looked ghostly in the now-bright sunlight that illuminated a world plated with pigeon ejecta.19
The many pigeons that flew over Cleveland in early March of 1860 provided an opportunity to perform a unique and cruel experiment. The owner of one of the local fireworks houses decided to see how the birds would react to hissing skyrockets in their midst. He launched several heavy missiles into a large group of birds, causing the flock to divide and scatter in various directions. Some landed and wandered about in seeming panic. The explosion of one projectile just below a flock caused the birds to rise until they were no longer visible. Many of the birds that opted for the ground were caught by boys. No mention is made that the rockets caused any direct avian fatalities, but all those present “enjoyed the sport as peculiarly original and well worthy the Spirit of the Times.”20
Chicago is a good place to look at the pigeon flights over time. Being on the southern end of the only Great Lake on a north/south axis made it a particularly advantageous location to observe bird migration. Over the nineteenth century, the city grew at a rate matched by few if any others. From 1840 to 1870, the population increased from 4,470 residents to 298,977. By 1890, it would exceed a million.
A newspaper story from September 17, 1836, reported that within the past several days “our town was swarming with pigeons, the horizon in almost every direction was black with them.” Nineteen years after that, yet another article claimed “a flock of pigeons, over six miles in length,” crossed the city’s skies. The species was still considered a “very abundant” migrant and nester in small numbers up to 1876. Another observer gives May and June of 1881 as the last time “they were at all abundant in Cook County,” where the city is located.21
The last big pigeon flight I know of in the region appeared in the spring of 1871 over the South Shore Country Club, a marshy area that back then was just southeast of Chicago, as it had not yet been annexed by the city. A hunting party arriving there that spring learned that ducks were largely absent but the jacksnipe were plentiful. In less than an hour they had bagged “as many birds as the right kind hunters care to kill.” After a leisurely lunch of roast snipe and ample libations, the men headed back. The driver suddenly pulled to a stop and pointed to a dark cloud heading quickly toward them. One of his passengers readily identified the cloud as wild pigeons and exhorted the driver to accelerate so they could be close enough to do some unexpected shooting. But it was not to be, as when the flock spied Lake Michigan, it headed east and away from the hunters.22
According to Henry Eenigenburg, who lived next to the Calumet marshes on Chicago’s southeast side, the fall of 1871 marked the end of the passenger pigeons as a common nesting species at the south end of Lake Michigan. The birds, he said, used to nest in the white pines that were still common in the Indiana Dunes. (These were clearly not in the huge nestings that occurred elsewhere but in the smaller configurations that few observers seem to have described in much detail.) But virtually no rain fell that summer, so that by September the entire region flanking Lake Michigan was a tinderbox. On October 8 the flames erupted and burned for several days. Peshtigo, Wisconsin, lost 1,152 people, and four square miles of Chicago became ash and rubble. Eenigenburg claims millions of pigeons also perished, which is doubtful, but the habitat that attracted them did suffer. Perhaps worse than the impacts of the fire itself was that little standing timber, particularly the highly coveted white pine, would survive the rebuilding of Chicago.23
If the laudable quest for survivors of the species proves not forlorn, we trust our boasted humanity will hold the protection of this beautiful bird to be a most sacred trust—an attitude rarely taken in the day of its abundance.
—ALBERT HAZEN WRIGHT, 1911
In the extensive passenger pigeon literature prior to the 1870s, many marveled at their numbers and movements and admired their beauty, although these sentiments were often uttered as the author participated in helping bring about the bird’s extinction. Most statements of affection or appreciation were published only after the pigeons had disappeared. Although people kept live passenger pigeons as food, targets, and flapping decoys, for a bird so abundant, hearty, and innocuous (at least as individuals), there are surprisingly few mentions of them as pets. But the exceptions do exist, and they stand out as tiny islands in the sea of carnage.
Thomas McKenney was a Quaker, a pious man whose career became entwined with the treatment of Native people. Although he lamented that they were not being treated with the humaneness and justice they deserved, he also supported President Jackson’s brutal Indian-removal policy, which with respect to the Cherokee even countermanded a Supreme Court decision. Despite McKenney’s inconsistencies, his impulse toward the humane seems to have been stronger than that of most and stoked by his faith.
During the summer of 1826, McKenney left Washington, D.C., to become part of a delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Fond du Lac, then a post of the American Fur Company that would later become Duluth, Minnesota. He and his party of forty-three met with the Chippewa in a successful effort to get them to open some of their land to mining. As the armada of voyageur canoes headed back from Fond du Lac, they broke into small groups, traveling at different speeds and taking slightly different routes. At six in the morning of August 14, McKenney’s boat and its companion were within sight of Keweenaw Point. The wind strengthened, Lake Superior foamed, and the crews struggled to keep their vessels on course. At that moment, a solitary bird, laboring to stay above the chop, was seen first heading toward the other canoe and then began following McKenney’s. With a final burst of energy, it reached the upper yard, where it landed. As one of the paddlers raised his oar to strike the waif, McKenney grabbed his arm to stop the blow.24
The exhausted bird was handed to McKenney: “It was too feeble to fly. Its heart beat as if it would break. I took some water from the lake with my hand, into my mouth, put the bill of the little wanderer there, and it drank as much as would have filled a table spoon … It seemed to have sought my protection, and nothing shall cause me to abandon it.” He looked about for a suitable container for the bird and placed it in a mocock (a kind of box) that had been given to him as a gift. He went on to speculate: “This is a member of the dove family, and the ‘travelled dove’ of the voyage. Is it a messenger of peace?—Why did it pass one canoe, and turn and follow another? Why come to me? None of these questions can be answered. But of one thing this poor pigeon is sure—and that is, of my protection; and though only a pigeon, it came to me in distress, and if it be its pleasure, we will never part.” A few hours later, the party stopped to rest. McKenney noticed three Indians pounding corn between two rocks. They accepted his offer of tobacco for some of the corn, which he then fed to the bird, which gulped it eagerly.
The published account of this trip appeared a year later and included this touching footnote: “The pigeon called by the Chippeways Me-me, and by which name, it is called, is yet with its preserver—tame, and in all respects domesticated. It knows its name, and will come when called.”
Another writer, identified only as F., tells of his journey through the Great Lakes in July of 1847 on the vessel St. Louis. The passengers comprised a distinguished group that included writers, editors, politicians, and clergy. They departed Chicago on July 7 bound for Green Bay, as they lazily made their way toward Buffalo. After stops in Milwaukee and Sheboygan, the boat continued northward until they reached the first opening to Green Bay. Dawn was breaking, the sun tracing wispy clouds in polished gold: “Everything around us was so calm, so bright so peaceful.” The aura of tranquillity was suddenly enhanced by the appearance of a bird that symbolized peace like no other: “Peace’s chosen emblem, with an arrow’s speed, flew over us, and alighted not on a lovely lady’s bosom, but on one of the iron rods extended between the smoke-pipes.”25
F. waxed lovingly on this dove, not a “lumpish ungraceful” domestic rock pigeon, but “something far prettier: —a blue, free, fleet wild pigeon—a thing like Cora, untameable, and given to wild flights, but of a truly gentle disposition.” Everyone on board took pleasure in the presence of the tired bird, hailing its appearance as a happy omen. John Smith, a fellow voyager familiar with the Great Lakes, explained that birds of all kinds were often found floating on the deep waters of Lake Michigan, and on occasion gales and deep fog claimed even passenger pigeons, otherwise noted for their speed and endurance.
As the passenger pigeon maintained its post, concern mounted among the observers that the heat of the pipes would prove untenable for the bird. Its drooping wings and an open bill eventually drove a sympathetic editor to grab a fishing pole; he wished to save the visitor by dislodging it from its torrid perch. Smith reached out and stopped him, however, pointing out that fatigue posed a greater threat to the bird than the heat. If it was otherwise, the pigeon would surely have left on its own. Sure enough, with the elapsing of half an hour and the increasing proximity to shore, the bird “launched into the air and sought the pleasant green-wood shade.”
From Pennsylvania come tales of property owners objecting to the felling of their timber to get at passenger pigeons. They had no interest in the birds, however, but were merely attempting to halt the wanton destruction of their valuable property. Unique in the passenger pigeon annals is the short memoir written by Richard W. Wharton of Joaquin, Texas. His maternal great-grandfather John Clinton Payne immigrated to the United States from England in 1841. He wanted to see the frontier so he moved west from Virginia and settled down near Shelbyville, Texas, three years later. Through cabinetmaking and farming, he eventually amassed holdings in excess of seven hundred acres, some of which was old-growth forest and some an open area called the Old Prairie.26
While growing up in England, Payne developed a lifelong affection for birds. Fortunately, Payne’s property held extensive tracts of maple and water oak (probably Quercus nigra), which drew large flocks of passenger pigeons in the fall. Unlike most landowners, he aggressively protected the pigeons on his land: “On one occasion, he caught two poachers with a sack of pigeons. With the three hired hands with him, they surrounded the poachers. My great-grandfather confiscated the birds, gave the two poachers a brief, intense sermon on the evils of poaching, issued them a diploma along with a few bruises.”
The experiences of Joseph Dodson of Kankakee, Illinois, also stand alone in the relations of passenger pigeons and humans. Dodson became known for the birdhouses he built and sold, including his ninety-room, 490-pound purple-martin mansion. In his eighties, he wrote his recollections of growing up in Alton, Illinois, where the Illinois River joins the Mississippi. Pigeons by the millions streamed over their house, and hunters killed them in tremendous quantities. The Dodson family, repelled by the slaughter, sent young Joseph out with a small basket to collect injured birds. He searched the thick grass and shrubs where crippled pigeons had eluded the killers. Joseph returned home with as many as he could carry. His parents had built a wire coop to hold the birds while they mended. Over time, the Dodsons became pioneering wildlife rehabbers, gaining proficiency in repairing wings and legs. If a bird lacked both eyes or had both wings or both legs broken, they would have no choice but to euthanize it. But often injured birds would recover and be returned to the sky over which they were masters.27
A far more famous writer also had parents who would never kill passenger pigeons. Gene Stratton-Porter was one of the most popular novelists during the early 1900s. Her bread and butter were maudlin novels such as Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost. But she also very much wanted to write natural history, which her publishers permitted from time to time to keep her happy. Some of these books include Moths of the Limberlost and What I Have Done with Birds. Much of her work was set in the Limberlost, a thirteen-thousand-acre wetland in northeastern Indiana where she believed she saw a passenger pigeon in 1912. But of greatest concern here is what she wrote of her parents. Her father was a farmer and a Methodist minister who hunted quail but felt more solicitous toward the pigeons for religious reasons, probably not unlike Thomas McKenney. The Strattons had twelve children, whom they sternly admonished to never shoot at either of the two native doves: “He used to tell me that they were among the very oldest birds in the history of the world … and he explained how the doves and the wild pigeons were used as a sacrifice to the Almighty, while every line of the Bible concerning these birds, many of them exquisitely poetical, was on his tongue’s tip.”28
One time Stratton-Porter visited some neighbors who were in the midst of dressing freshly killed pigeons: “I was shocked and horrified to see dozens of these beautiful birds, perhaps half of them still alive, struggling about with broken wings, backs, and legs, waiting to be skinned, split down the back, and dropped into the pot-pie kettle. I went home with a story that sickened me.” Her father once again renewed his prohibition against any family member’s shooting any dove. To his theological concerns, he added the very material warning that if there was no cessation in the killing, the birds might disappear. Stratton-Porter acknowledged this was merely a precaution, for “that such a thing could happen in our own day as that the last of these beautiful birds might be exterminated, no one seriously dreamed.”
Gene Stratton-Porter. Courtesy Indiana State Museum
James Fenimore Cooper, often considered America’s first significant novelist, was the also the earliest writer to articulate “an American environmental conscience.” Biographer Wayne Franklin calls Cooper’s account of the passenger pigeon slaughter a defining moment, his initial call “to his fellow citizens—and the world—to imagine a better way of being on the earth.” His daughter Susan Fenimore Cooper was one who did heed the call, as she would distinguish herself by becoming the first American woman to publish a book on nature when her Rural Hours appeared in 1850. (She, too, wrote a bit on passenger pigeons.) Another was Henry David Thoreau, whose work was in large measure inspired by the writings of Cooper.29
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
