5
Selling Nature
At first, the New World was home to great flocks and herds of wild animals, and its shoreline was crowded with birds, pinnipeds, whales, and fish. Subsistence hunters had used these animals for food and clothing for millennia, and people coexisted with an abundance of wildlife. Subsistence hunters are motivated by their family’s need for meat and skins, which is finite: they harvest wildlife to live. Market hunters, who kill and sell wild animals, are motivated by money. There is no upper limit to greed, and Europeans who moved to North America came from the same cultures that had already emptied Europe of wildlife.
Ownership is a cultural construct, and by the colonists’ reckoning, wild animals were owned by the person who owned the land. Although no one owned wildlife that lived on common land, these animals became private property after they were killed. The immense migratory flocks and herds of the interior were not attached to any single parcel of land. This meant wild animals were free for the taking. Commercial hunters slaughtered them en masse and sold them for cash. They nearly sold them all.
Furs and skins were among the first products extracted from the New World, with colonists buying furs that had been harvested and processed by people from local tribes. A dollar is called a buck because tanned buckskins and doeskins substituted for cash. Furs were valuable, light enough to be transported by canoe, and they were a product that did not degrade over time.
When Europeans took control of the landscape, the scale of the harvest changed. New immigrants systematically slaughtered all the wild animals and processed them into products that could be sold in cities throughout North America and Europe. Hunting for market is very different from hunting for sport: the point is to kill as many animals as possible in the shortest period of time. Commercial hunters harvest animals when the animals gather together to feed, breed, or migrate, and they kill all of the animals found in an entire area. Commercial hunting usually involves a team of specialists working together, with hunters, skinners, butchers, processors, and marketers doing different tasks.
Before railways were built, the seashore was the place to harvest animals for market. Cod was dried on Newfoundland beaches by the boatload, and sold throughout Europe and West Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil. The oils from sea mammals were another popular product. Seal, elephant seal, walrus, and whale oil could be boiled down on nearby beaches, barreled, and shipped to market to be used for lamps, lubrication, and industrial products, including soap, leather, oilcloth, and even margarine, which must have been a truly heinous substitute for lard. Baleen are the strips of keratin that hang like a curtain from the upper jaw of baleen whales, used to strain the water for small creatures like krill. In cities, baleen was sold for stays that stiffened corsets, hoops that kept skirts in a bell-like shape, light whips and canes, umbrella ribs, and hairbrush bristles.
It wasn’t hard to get into the oil business back then. It required a ship, crew, and iron try pots to render the blubber into oil, along with barrels to store it in. At first, whale oil was gathered from right whales that feed and breed near shore and float when killed. Their blubber was processed at a low simmer on nearby beaches and shipped back to Europe. The North Atlantic right whale was rare by the 1700s, when the first sperm whales were processed.
Sperm whales were hunted on the open ocean. Their blubber was rendered into oil in try pots onboard over a small fire fed mostly by whale scraps. Sperm whales had an additional product: their boxy heads hold an enormous cavity filled with about 500 gallons of spermaceti, a waxy oil with physical characteristics similar to jojoba oil.
Whalers would cut off the sperm whale’s head and empty the head cavity with a bucket. The spermaceti, often listed as sperm oil, was boiled and strained before being stored in barrels. Once ashore, spermaceti was chilled in the winter cold and pressed through a wool sack to separate the oil from the wax. The filtered sperm oil stayed liquid below freezing, making it an unusually useful industrial lubricant, while the wax was treated with alkali to form bright white mounds of a hard substance that feels oily but has no taste or smell. Spermaceti wax, called sperm wax, was used for fine candles, ointments, and textile finishing.
Tallow candles are smoky and smell like rancid fat. Beeswax candles are expensive. The suggestively named sperm candles provided a third option for lighting that was clean burning and brighter than tallow, but less expensive than beeswax. Whale oil, also called train oil, was boiled down from whale blubber and used in lamps and miners’ headlamps.
By the 1850s, killing and processing whales was the fifth-largest industry in the United States. Records from the New Bedford whaler Milton provide a typical account: The Milton left port in 1836, and returned three years later with a net profit for the voyage of about $100,000. The owners took about $65,000, while the captain received a one-seventeenth of the profit, or $5,882; the first mate one–twenty-second, or $4,545; the boatsteerer (harpooner) one–seventy-fifth, or $1,333; and the blacksmith one–one-hundred-and-fortieth, or $714. The best-paid seaman earned $800, while the worst-paid received $571 for about three years of work, a little over $15 per month. In 1915, the total value of the New England whaling industry in the 1800s was estimated to exceed $330 million, the equivalent of more than $8.1 billion in 2018 after inflation. Fortunes were made selling nature’s bounty for private gain, but not by the sailors or the hired help.
Seal oil was also a big business. Seals raise their pups in great rookeries, and were easily harvested. Fur seals were clubbed and skinned, and the pelts were salted and shipped in wooden casks. Seal oil, like whale oil, was used for lighting (for both streetlights and in homes), textile manufacturing, and leather tanning. In Newfoundland alone, sealers flensed and rendered the fat of roughly half a million seals a year between 1818 and 1862. In 1857, over 370 ships carried 13,600 people to work for the seasonal project of rendering fat Newfoundland seals into a salable product. Only cod was more important to the Newfoundland economy.
As an oil source, elephant seals (then called sea elephants) were even better than seals. They crowd onto beaches during breeding season, hauling themselves out of water for an interlude of sun and sex. They are unaggressive, unafraid, and very large. Laborers could set up their try pot on one end of the beach and systematically boil down the whole herd. The sealers lanced the elephant seals, clubbed them, stripped them of their blubber, and rendered the fat into oil on-site. Elephant seal oil was very high quality. “Clear, inodorous, and not liable to contract that rancid smell of which whale oil can never be deprived; when burned in a lamp it yields a bright and pure flame, without smoke, and without exhaling that infectious smell peculiar to most animal oils.” The main thrust of elephant seal hunting lasted fifteen years. In 1846, there were seals in abundance on islands and beaches of the US West Coast, and by 1860 they were too scarce to hunt.
A single colony of 300 to 400 northern elephant seals was found in 1880 at Bahía San Cristóbal, on the coast of the Baja in Mexico, and every single one was killed. The world population of northern elephant seals dropped to as few as twenty to one hundred individuals (today, there are over 150,000).
Walrus pods were also processed for oil, as well as for tusks and a widely appreciated hide. Walrus hide was used for harnesses and shoe soles, and made a high-performance rope that was cut in a spiral from the tail to the neck in a single unbroken piece that could stretch ninety feet. An 1880 monograph on pinnipeds says that all of the rigging on Norwegian and Russian ships had been made of walrus-skin rope. In the twentieth century, walrus hide was commonly used for pads on the tip of pool cues and doctors’ bags.
Whales play an important role in nutrient cycling in the ocean. A blue whale consumes about 8,000 pounds of krill a day, while a humpback will eat about 5,000 pounds of food. According to a 1998 analysis from Tokyo’s Institute of Cetacean Research, whales eat an estimated 280 million to 500 million tons of food each year. The world catch of fish has topped out at perhaps 90 million tons, so in 1998 whales consumed three to six times more marine resources than humans, and their population has increased since then. (Cetaceans and humans mostly consume different species.)
Pinnipeds are also big eaters. A harbor seal may consume a bare ton and a half of fish in a year, while a male walrus (who can consume 6,000 clams in a single meal) may eat more than twelve tons of food in a year. If ocean production was a zero-sum equation, reducing the population of whales and seals should increase the amount of seafood available for humans to harvest. Instead, marine mammals change the ocean ecosystem in ways that increase fish production.
Cetaceans move nutrients from deep water into shallow water by eating krill, fish, and squid from the depths and releasing their urine and feces near the surface. According to Joe Roman, a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont who studies marine mammals, whale and pinniped poop is a significant source of nutrients for ocean ecosystems. The urine directly fertilizes the phytoplankton (the primary producers in the ocean, equivalent to grass on land), while the nutrient-rich feces are consumed by zooplankton (secondary producers, like grazers). More phytoplankton and zooplankton means more food for fish.
When whales and seals die, they usually sink to the bottom of the ocean. This is an important pathway for carbon to be exported to the deep sea, an environment usually lacking in food bonanzas. When a whale falls to the sea floor, hundreds of organisms flock to the carcass. Scavengers, including hagfish, sleeper sharks, and many invertebrates, chomp away at the whale’s soft tissue, consuming forty to sixty kilograms per day. Deep-sea worms and crustaceans give way to a host of bone-munching microbes as the whale is whittled away to its component parts.
The natural life cycle of a marine mammal removes nothing from the ocean, while its existence actively sustains and enhances marine productivity. Finally, marine mammals cull fish stocks in a way that enhances school health, removing smaller, slower individuals and reducing fish numbers, lessening competition for food. (Humans prefer to take larger fish.)
Removing the top predators from an ecosystem can have unintended consequences. In the marine ecosystem, interrupting the nutrient cycles creates a top-down trophic cascade that can result in a number of secondary population collapses. Approximately 400,000 whales were harvested near the Aleutian Islands in the twentieth century, and marine biologists observed a number of marine populations collapse after the whales were gone. First Steller’s sea cows disappeared, and then northern sea lion populations collapsed. Then the smallest marine mammal, the sea otter, disappeared, and the sea urchin populations (that fed the otters) exploded. The offshore kelp beds were overrun by urchins, who ate the kelp down to its holdfasts: no more kelp. The kelp forest had acted as a nursery and hiding place for commercially important fish, where they lived until they were large enough to swim in the open ocean as part of the ocean fishery. The fish stocks near the Aleutian Islands collapsed, and Alaskan fishermen went bankrupt. Nutrient cycling is an important job, and when it slows down the ecosystem becomes impoverished. Removing millions of whales, seals, walruses, and sea lions has reduced the oceans’ productivity.
Many of the products made from wildlife were everyday items that had international markets. Everyone agreed that doeskin made the best gloves, while buckskin was good for britches and jackets. Buffalo skins made excellent robes, and tough buffalo leather was used universally for the drive belts of industrial machinery. Every good watchmaker lubricated his clocks and watches with oil made from porpoise jaws.
Oil was one common product that was harvested from sea life, while eggs and down were others. Many seafowl gathered together to breed in great flocks on beaches, making them prime targets for humans. Eggers would go through a seabird rookery and smash every egg they found, prompting the birds to lay fresh eggs that could then be gathered all together. A bounty, from the Latin bonitos, is a generous gift freely provided. The bounty of nature in the New World was that instead of raising chickens to lay eggs, you could simply gather fresh eggs from seabirds. An omelet sold in San Francisco in the 1890s was more likely made from the eggs of common murres, western gulls, or tufted puffins than chickens. Photographs printed between 1850 and 1900 used albumen prints, where the albumen from egg whites is used to bind the photographic chemicals to paper. The albumen for nearly all of the photographic paper during those decades came from albatross eggs from Laysan Island near Hawaii. If you have an old photograph, you also own a bit of albatross egg.
Down was also collected from the wild. Eider ducks pluck the down from their breasts to line their nests for the ducklings. For many centuries, people collected eiderdown from wild nests without killing the ducks. The wholesale destruction of eider duck nesting grounds came at about the same time as the seals were boiled down for oil, and soon eider ducks were killed indiscriminately for down and meat. As the dense flocks of eider ducks started to disappear, people started exploiting the great auk for down. This little flightless bird lived on rocky islets from Canada to Norway, including Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. It was about thirty inches high and eleven pounds with the black-and-white coat and upright stance of a penguin, and no fear of humans. As more great auks were killed for down, their eggs became increasingly rare. Many British and European egg collectors tried to buy a great auk egg before it was too late to get one. There may have never been more than twenty breeding grounds for the great auk, and eggers made return visits to the same colony to collect eggs on consecutive days. The last auk in Scotland was killed on an island in 1844; the last auk in Iceland was killed on an islet the same year.
Until the railways were laid, hunters were largely restricted to shipping furs, hides, oils, and down. By 1910, the United States had more than 230,000 miles of rail, and wild animals from all over the country could be sold as meat.
With reliable rail transportation, the oysters that lay in shoals of millions upon millions could be harvested on the East Coast and sold in the interior. Trains transported tons of bivalves to inland towns and cities, and the increased sale volumes spurred the oyster industry to improve its tools, vessels, packing containers, and shipping. Tongs had been used to harvest oysters since the 1700s, in dugout canoes with wide, flat bottoms. As the 1800s progressed, instead of hand-harvesting oysters with tongs, people rigged dredges to drag from flat-bottomed sailboats, or skipjacks. Eventually steam engines were used on boats to pull up the dredges.
Before the railroads expanded, most oysters were canned. An article in the New-York Tribune from January 9, 1857, describes how oysters were made into money in New Haven: “There are the openers, the washers, the measurers, the fillers, the packers, each of which performs only the duties pertaining to its own division.” According to the reporter, “The oysters are taken directly from the vessels to the places occupied by the openers,… who earn from $5 to $9 per week. An expert … will open 100 quarts per day, but the average is not perhaps over 65 quarts. The standard price is, I think, 2½ cents per quart. This work gives employment to many hundreds.” The oyster shuckers were often from Eastern Europe; after the Civil War, African American women were often hired as shuckers.
From the opening room, or shucking room, the oysters are taken to the filling room. The oysters are poured into a large hopper pierced with holes, then rinsed and drained. A keg is filled with one person holding the hopper over the keg, while another measures and pours. Two or three men could fill 2,000 kegs a day.
Oysters were first canned in Baltimore, close to the oyster beds where newly freed slaves provided plenty of labor for hire. Soon the oysters were steamed before they were shucked, in twenty-bushel lots. After being steamed and shucked, the oysters were washed in cold water and sent to the fillers’ table. The cans were filled, weighed, and hermetically sealed with a cap soldered over the hole. After boiling the cans in pots of water to sterilize them, the cans were cooled, labeled, and packed.
The railways allowed oysters to be sold fresh. Thousands of miles of rails were laid after 1860, and the Atlantic oyster business surged above 20 million bushels a year. Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, St. Paul, and Minneapolis all enjoyed fresh oysters on the half shell. By 1870, Maryland alone produced more than 10 million bushels a year at a value of $4 million or more. Oysters were the most valuable fishery in the United States in 1880, when the first complete survey of the oyster industry showed a harvest of 22,195,000 bushels. The largest dealers shipped oysters to as many as one hundred dealers in fifty cities. From 1875 to 1890, Maryland harvested more oysters than any place on Earth.
Americans were enveloped in a great oyster craze. Oysters were pickled, roasted, fried, scalloped, and fricasseed; there were oysters in stews, stuffing, soups, patties, and puddings; oysters for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. “No evening of pleasure was complete without oysters; no host worthy of the name failed to serve ‘the luscious bivalves.’”
In every town were oyster parlors, oyster cellars, oyster saloons, oyster bars, houses, stalls, and lunchrooms. New York City had over 850 oyster establishments by 1874, and by the early 1900s, New Yorkers were consuming about 500,000 bushels of oyster per season, about two meals a week of oysters for every person in the city. However, after the turn of the twentieth century, the oyster beds were depleted, oysters became linked with typhoid, and the oyster craze was over.
Moving millions of bushels of oysters from shoals to the hinterlands changed water quality and the calcium cycle. Oysters are biological filters that remove suspended particulate matter from the water. They are filter feeders that eat phytoplankton, or free-swimming algae. As they eat, water quality improves. Generations of oysters settle on top of each other, building reefs that provide habitat for many species of fish and crabs.
Harvesting the oysters removed a significant amount of hard-bottom habitat from the bays and created a bottom-up trophic cascade. More phytoplankton was available (since oysters no longer ate it) and the food web shifted, resulting in an increase in zooplankton (which also eat phytoplankton) and their jellyfish predators. Water quality degraded, since fewer oysters means that less water was filtered. Oysters also remove nitrogen from the water, so plant growth increases when they are gone.
Finally, oyster shells contain quite a lot of calcium. Calcium is a necessary nutrient for plants and animals, originally found in sedimentary rock. Weathering and rainfall moves calcium from land into the ocean, and it is the fifth most abundant nutrient in seawater. Once an atom of calcium weathered from rocks has reached the ocean, it is commonly said to take a million years for that atom to return to land. Unless, of course, it is part of the millions of bushels of oysters harvested and sent by rail to the oyster-eating cities of the United States. The oyster harvest sped up the calcium cycle, and made ocean-based nutrients available for agricultural application.
The railways also allowed market hunters to harvest animals far from the seashore. Wildfowl that gather together to migrate or breed are well suited to market hunting, and the mass harvest of birds like passenger pigeons, geese, ducks, and curlews required only a railway system to transport the meat, and a telegraph system to let the commercial hunters know where the flocks were.
The most astonishing victim was the passenger pigeon.
Passenger pigeons were once the most populous birds in North America, numbering perhaps 3 to 5 billion birds in total that traveled in multimillion-bird flocks. It is hard to imagine the power represented by birds that travel in groups of hundreds of millions or more. Alexander Wilson, called the father of American ornithology, was in a riverside cabin when he “was suddenly struck with astonishment at a loud rushing roar, succeeded by instant darkness, which, on the first moment, [he] took for a tornado, about to overwhelm the house and everything around in destruction.”
But his companions calmly replied, “It’s only the Pigeons.”
A Wayne County, New York, resident wrote in 1854, “There would be days and days when the air was alive with them, hardly a break occurring in the flocks for half a day at a time. Flocks stretched as far as a person could see, one tier above another.”
Passenger pigeons did not appear every year. They roamed about the eastern forests in huge flocks, eating acorns, hickory nuts, beechnuts, and chestnuts; worms and insects; grains, berries, and fruit. Many nut species have indifferent harvests most years, and occasionally produce bumper crops. The roving hordes of pigeons were able to exploit these random excesses of resources. In the eastern part of the country, flocks of passenger pigeons could be found in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Columbus, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, and Montreal, among other places.
When passenger pigeons nested and raised their single chick, their nesting site could cover many hundreds of square miles. The birds were so densely clustered that there could be dozens of nests in a single tree, and branches would break from the weight of them. The droppings would pile up inches deep under the trees, killing the understory shrubs and groundcover. After a nesting season, the pigeons left behind land that was covered with broken trees and a layer of manure, primed for clearing and planting.
Passenger pigeons were not welcome visitors, as a rule. A flock of pigeons could clean out a wheat field or an orchard in just a few hours. When farmers cast their seed to plant their fields, passenger pigeons might drop by and eat nearly every grain. Seed drills became a necessary tool to protect the grain from passenger pigeons. The pigs that fed on forest mast—acorns and other nuts—had nothing to eat after the birds passed through (except pigeons: surplus passenger pigeons were often fed to pigs).
There was a benefit to having these hungry birds visit town, though. The birds were fast fliers with a well-developed breast muscle, and anyone could kill as many as they wanted. People used shotguns, of course, and could take down a handful with every shot. Some hunters used their bare hands or clubs. A flaming torch could be used to dazzle the birds with light after they had settled into their nests at night; the startled birds would drop to the ground helpless and ready to be gathered in sacks. Entire roosting sites could be set on fire, leaving heaps of scorched birds two feet deep.
Netters had astonishing hauls. At an 1851 nesting near Beekmantown, New York, netters caught 1,200 birds in a single net. During the 1878 Petoskey, Michigan, nesting, a three-person team caught over 50,000 pigeons in their nets. (Some netters used pliers to crush the skulls of the birds caught in the nets, and others would “grab a pigeon by the leg and toss it into his mouth headfirst, then chomp down on the skull.”)
An adult pigeon weighed a bare nine to twelve ounces. Young pigeons, or squabs, weighed even less than the adults, but were very tender. The squabs were fed on mast regurgitated from the crops of both parents, and were sometimes so fat that they split when they fell from their nests. Pigeon pie made from squabs was a favorite, as was pigeon stew.
Jessup Whitehead’s 1893 cookbook, Cooking for Profit: A New American Cookbook Adapted for the Use of All Who Serve Meals for a Price, provides a recipe for passenger pigeon pie that requires eighteen birds for the dish.
Pigeon or Squab Pie
Take 18 squabs, pick, singe, open down the back, draw, and divide in halves; wash and dry them and flatten with the cleaver. Pepper, salt and flour them on both sides. Melt ½ pound of butter in the baking pan the pie is to be made in, lay in the squabs and bake them light brown. Pour into the pan about 2 quarts of broth or water and continue the baking. When done sufficiently thicken the gravy, add walnut catsup or a little Worcestershire sauce and salt and pepper, cover with a short crust and bake twenty minutes longer.
Even at eighteen pigeons per pie, there were far too many pigeons to eat fresh. Most of the pigeons harvested were salted, smoked, or pickled and packed in barrels. For ship food, roasted pigeons were packed into barrels and covered with melted lard or mutton fat that congealed to form an airtight seal. The fat squabs could be rendered into oil that was used as shortening and to make soap.
By 1851, regional markets had been fully established and great nestings were few and far between on the East Coast. Pigeons nesting near Plattsburgh, New York, were harvested by at least four different companies who shared the nesting ground. “It would be impossible to give an accurate account of the whole number taken; but four companies engaged in catching and purchasing, the writer knows, forwarded to different markets not less than one hundred and fifty thousand dozen.” That’s 1.8 million birds, dressed by people paid five cents per dozen to process them.
National markets for the birds were established as the railways expanded into pigeon range. The railway station agents made it their business to telegraph the news when pigeons came to town, and professional pigeon hunters bird-dogged the flocks.
A large roost settled in southern Missouri in early 1879, and was relentlessly pursued by hunters. The birds drifted north between eight and twelve miles a day, and when the birds settled to rest, the hunters scattered throughout the tract with shotguns and coordinated their fire into the trees. The carcasses were collected in the morning and delivered to the nearest railway station. “From here shipped every day from seven hundred to a thousand dozen pigeons (8,400 to 12,000 birds), bringing into the county $600 to $800, net cash per diem. The birds are sent to Boston and New York, where they sell at $1.30 and $1.60 per dozen.”
Feathers were generally collected from birds killed for meat and used to stuff beds and pillows. “In 1936, Alvin McKnight of Augusta Wisconsin related that he and his wife slept on a pigeon feather bed they received in 1877 filled with the feathers of 144 dozen passenger pigeons”; 1,728 pigeons were plucked for a single comforter.
People who harvest a million birds here and a million birds there become very skilled at killing, processing, transporting, and marketing their prey. And eventually commercial hunters will process their last million.
The second-to-last great nesting of passenger pigeons occurred in 1874. The birds arrived in Shelby, Michigan, in early April, and occupied an area twenty miles long and four to seven miles wide. The chicks arrived in two weeks, and birds passed continuously overhead gathering beechnuts and worms that might be twenty-five miles away. Locals from the small town of Shelby spent the entire day shooting to take 250 to 300 birds, but these locals were joined by 600 professional netters. One lucky netter took 1,848 pigeons in a day. In thirty days, 900,000 pigeons were shipped from Shelby, pumping $50,000 into the local economy.
The last great nesting of passenger pigeons was in Petoskey, Michigan, in 1879. The register of the Rose Hotel showed that pigeoners arrived from Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Texas. The pigeoners established packinghouses and wagons with teams for hauling out dead birds. Locals were hired for these jobs and were trained to trap and kill the birds. Any boy could get a job plucking pigeons, and between locals and professionals there were 2,000 people harvesting and processing pigeons. The pigeoners stretched out alongside the birds for forty miles. They killed birds from dawn to dusk, hauling out wagon after wagon of birds for fifty days, with daily shipments to Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, and many other cities. That was the last multimillion-bird flock of passenger pigeons, though the stragglers were continually harvested for the next decade or so. These gregarious birds did not successfully breed without a crowd, and the last lonely passenger pigeon died in a zoo on September 1, 1914. It’s the only time that we knew the exact date a species became extinct.
Passenger pigeons spread seeds wherever they flew. Three to five billion individuals moving around their favored food may account for the predominance of nut trees in antebellum forests. Passenger pigeons moved around billions of pounds of nutrients as well. The accumulated droppings from the roosting areas acted as a nutrient reservoir for the surrounding forest. The broken branches and dead understory were fuel for forest fires, and roosting areas were more likely to burn. The patchwork of meadows and forests made by wildfires enhanced ecosystem productivity by providing a variety of habitats and increasing the amount of edge, that fruitful zone between two ecosystems. Removing billions of passenger pigeons from the landscape slowed down seed dispersal and nutrient cycling, and decreased the complexity of the forest landscape.
Ducks and geese were also aggressively harvested. The punt gun was a large muzzle-loading shotgun that was developed to harvest waterfowl on a commercial scale. It was like a duck cannon, and weighed as much as 200 pounds. Punt guns were ten to twelve feet long with a bore as large as two inches that was loaded with up to two pounds of shot (compared to the ounce-plus of shot used by modern duck hunters). Each gun was tailor-made, but by definition punt guns were too heavy to hold. The recoil was so great that they had to be mounted directly on the bow of a small flat-bottomed boat, or punt. A single shot at a flock could kill fifty birds, and to aim the gun, you had to move the boat. If you used your punt gun as part of a coordinated effort, you could set off the fusillade at dawn and spend the rest of the day processing 500 duck carcasses. Punt gunning was so successful that by the late 1870s, many states banned it.
To process ducks for sale, the carcasses were gutted, scalded, plucked, and chilled in salted ice water. “A flour barrel is the best thing to ship them in. In packing keep the feet straight back and turn the head back under the wing,” instructed an 1897 handbook. Crushed ice is layered on top of the ducks, with a layer of burlap on top, fastened with a hoop and the promise that “ducks dressed and packed in this manner can be shipped 400 miles.”
Eskimo curlew is another migratory bird that was lost to market hunters. Like passenger pigeons, Eskimo curlews traveled in an enormous flock of millions. They migrated 6,000 miles every season between the arctic tundra of northwestern Canada to the wetlands of Patagonia in South America, areas that were rich enough to feed their multitudes. Eskimo curlews were about twelve inches long and ate berries, insects, and snails. They nested in the arctic tundra, where the short summer and long days create a local explosion of insects and calories. The outpouring of insect hatches fed the nestlings during the period when their parents were largely surviving on fat stored during their slow journey north. The whole flock, including the youngsters, then flew 3,000 miles to the east coast of Canada to fatten up in Labrador and Newfoundland. According to naturalist Farley Mowat, hundreds of thousands of square miles of heathland are carpeted with a low bush that bears juicy, pea-sized berries that ripen in July. Curlew berries (Empetrum nigrum) were so delicious that the curlews’ modest tan-and-brown plumage would be stained all over with rich purple juice. They became “wonderfully fat,” so plump that when they were shot in the air they often split open when they hit the ground. Curlews were shot in Labrador, where the guns of the 1870s could routinely kill thirty birds with a single shot. Every Newfoundland family started the winter with several barrels of curlews packed in salt or their own rendered fat. The Hudson’s Bay Company packed tens of thousands of curlews in tins that were shipped to London and Montreal as a gourmet specialty item.
As a rule, curlews were safe on their 3,000-mile trip across the Atlantic from Labrador to South America unless the flock was blown onto the East Coast of the United States, where the plump little fowl were called doe-birds or doughbirds and shot until the bullets ran out. When the flock hit South America, it may have scattered and regrouped in the Argentinian pampas and Patagonia.
In the spring, the curlews went up the west coast of South America, across Central America and the Gulf to arrive in Texas in March. They fattened up on insects and snails during their leisurely trip up the heart of North America, and reached Kansas and the Dakotas in April before crossing Canada to the northwest coast, where they laid eggs and waited for the coordinated hatch of nestlings and insects.
Curlews were easy to kill, and people who lived on the Mississippi flyway liked to kill them. When the flights were heavy, hunters filled wagons with them. In 1872, the first railway carload of spring curlews preserved on ice reached New York City, where they sold for a fancy price. And that was the end of the curlews.
In southern Texas, enormous flocks of curlews disappeared after 1875. The last great flocks in Kansas were seen in 1879; curlews disappeared from Nebraska in the 1880s; the flock was gone from Labrador by 1886. It is possible that a handful of Eskimo curlews survive—a flock of twenty-three was seen in Texas in 1981, and individuals have been sighted nine times since then, most recently in Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, in 2006—but the curlew nation has been gone for more than a century.
All these migratory birds have a common ecological function: they move phosphorus from the ocean to the center of the continent. The phosphorus cycle is said to be the slowest nutrient cycle: the element weathers from rocks, moves into the soil, where it feeds plants, and eventually ends up in the ocean, where it drifts to the bottom sediments that, over time, upwell to become mountaintops. These geological processes take eons, and yet every plant and animal needs phosphorus to carry out basic life functions. No surprise that there’s a whole other phosphorus cycle running on air and water delivery: seabirds eat fish and fly their phosphorus inland. Likewise, salmon and other anadromous fish collect phosphorus in the ocean and move it inland to fertilize the forests. When the migratory birds disappeared, so did the flow of phosphorus that had enriched the forests and central plains.
The Rocky Mountain locust disappeared about the same time as the Eskimo curlews, with the last big swarms in 1873 and 1877. The Rocky Mountain locust used to form biblical swarms of grasshoppers that stripped lush fields down to stubble. One famed swarm in 1875 is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest concentration of animals ever calculated: some 3.5 trillion insects weighing millions of tons covered an estimated 198,000 square miles, greater than the area of California.
The gigantic biomass of a swarm was well matched to the appetites of million-bird flocks, and these insects disappeared at the same time as the curlews and passenger pigeons were destroyed. It was thought that perhaps farmers, with their drainage schemes and flooded fields, interrupted the life cycle of the locusts and led them to extinction. Perhaps it was the loss of nutrients. Perhaps the Rocky Mountain locust was simply in its solitary phase, and swarms would form again in the right conditions. After more than a century of speculation, the Rocky Mountain locust was formally declared extinct in 2014, based on DNA evidence.
The buffalo was another species that was nearly harvested to extinction by commercial hunters. The aboriginal buffalo herds may have numbered 60 million or more. By the 1840s, the American Fur Company was buying 100,000 tanned buffalo robes a year from various Plains tribes for four dollars each, and shipping them down the Mississippi. When the railways and telegraph were laid and buffalo products could be easily transported, the harvest expanded. William “Buffalo Bill” Cody worked as a hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railway between 1867 and 1868, and killed nearly 5,000 buffalo in 18 months to feed the 1,200 men building the railroad. The men dined on tongues and tenderloins, and this interlude marked the beginning of the great buffalo sale.
The Union Pacific Railroad and its branch in Kansas crossed the western limit of the buffalo range in 1868, and railways ran from the East Coast to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. In the next sixteen years, nearly 60 million buffalo were killed.
Market hunters killed the buffalo for hides and tongues. Tanneries paid as much as three dollars a hide for fresh hides, and twenty-five cents per tongue. Armed with powerful, long-range rifles, a single hunter could kill as many as 250 buffalo a day.
Buffalo tongues were sold in fine restaurants across the country. Buffalo leather drive belts for machinery were an industrial standard, and the bones were ground for fertilizer. Soon buffalo hunters had year-round work.
By the 1880s, as many as 5,000 hunters and skinners were involved in the buffalo trade. By 1884, the herds were gone. In Kansas, dealers paid $2.5 million to buy buffalo bones to be used in various carbon works around the country. It takes about a hundred carcasses to make a ton of bones, and the price was about eight dollars a ton. Kansan dealers bought the bones of 31 million buffalo.
The buffalo were replaced with cattle, another grazer, so the nutrient cycles were not interrupted. But the water cycle did not fare as well. Buffalo act delicately by the waterside: they walk down to drink, carefully watching out for wolves, and they leave. Cattle will spend all day in a stream, churning the riparian edge into a muddy wasteland. In drier states where public land is leased for cattle grazing, as much as 98 percent of the streamside vegetation has been stripped by cattle, degrading water quality and removing the riparian edge, the most productive fraction of the landscape.
Fish were also industriously harvested. Sturgeon, for example, were among the most common fish on the Atlantic seaboard as late as the 1850s. Then it was discovered that American sturgeon eggs made caviar that was almost as good as Russian caviar. The swim bladder of the sturgeon is used to make isinglass, which can be used for a flexible waterproof window in a surrey, to make a very pure gelatin used in desserts, and to clarify wine and beer. Females filled with eggs were particularly valued. Nets, guns, harpoons, and even bombs were used on the big spawning runs with such attention that in 1890, the harvest from the Delaware River alone was more than 5 million pounds. By 1920, sturgeon were rare.
Alligators once maintained dense populations throughout their range, seen on the banks of every southern waterway; their sluggish forms were often mistaken for stranded logs. Alligators were rarely killed until the Civil War, when the Confederate Army outfitted some of its soldiers with alligator shoes and saddles. The demand for skins did not end with the war. In 1884, a government report on the fisheries stated, “Alligator hunting is growing less and less successful in Florida as the game diminishes in numbers. From simply being a pastime it has become a regular business, and thousands upon thousands of these creatures are now annually slaughtered for their hides and teeth.… At the rate the alligator family is now disappearing, not many years will elapse before the supply will be wholly exhausted.”
Elegant slippers and boots, suitcases, pocketbooks, and music rolls provided a robust demand for skins. In addition, there was a steady market for live baby alligators less than six inches long that were sold as pets for home aquariums, and “for curious mementoes to be sent to distant friends.”
In 1922, Karl Schmidt of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History wrote that “steady hunting during the past 60 years, the robbing of their nest for eggs, the capture of large numbers of newly hatched young for ‘souvenirs’ and wanton slaughter by so-called sportsmen, have decimated the species to such an extent that few places are now left where it can still be said to be abundant.”
Mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, mollusks, and even insects were eradicated from the landscape during the late 1800s. Whitetail deer and turkeys were gone from most states east of the Mississippi River. Commercial crews had emptied the shores, forests, and plains of wildlife, shipped them by rail to market, and sold them. Even many songbirds were heavily hunted for food.
The forests were stripped out as well. During the 1800s, the United States was home to the largest timber-exporting ports in the world. As with market hunters, the loggers’ only real barrier was the transportation system: if there was a way to get timber to the water, an area was logged.
Until 1850, small local sawmills supplied most of the wood used throughout the United States, and the trees often came from farm woodlots or from clearing for agriculture. The industrial cutting of forests for export was pioneered in Maine, which became the world’s premier timber source for about twenty years because of geographical factors that allowed trees from the middle of the state to be inexpensively transported to the coast. The western tablelands were relatively flat, creating straight rivers that were linked together with lakes. The rivers had high spring flows from snowmelt, and the granite bedrock channeled the snowmelt directly into the streams. This provided forceful spring floods that pushed the logs to the mills. Trees were cut and trimmed in late fall and winter, when snow provided a low-friction surface for horses or oxen to skid the logs to the nearest river. Once the ice melted in the spring, loggers floated the logs downstream on swollen spring flows to sawmills on the coast. The rivers brought newly cut lumber downriver, where a fleet of vessels carried it to cities on the eastern seaboard, the Caribbean, and South America. The sawmills provided off-season jobs for Maine farmers, while the lumber camps provided a market for their beans and potatoes.
Bangor, Maine, near the mouth of the Penobscot River, was the world’s largest timber port in the 1830s, when a few big businessmen were vying for control of Maine’s forests. They bought up whole townships, built sawmills, and competed over the construction of dams and canals, redirecting water to serve their needs. In Maine, industries based on processing the state’s natural resources—including wood, ice, granite, lime, slate, and fish—created fortunes for a few businessmen, while poorly paid laborers did the work.
Technological advances allowed forests to be harvested more efficiently. Steam engines allowed loggers to cut trees farther away from water and still haul them to the riverside. With circular and band saws, trees were processed with less waste. Maine forests were soon felled, and by 1840 the seat of the lumber industry moved to upstate New York and Pennsylvania. In 1850, New York State forests produced a billion board feet a year, moving the lumber down the Erie Canal and the Hudson River. By 1860, the center of timber production had moved to the Great Lakes, but 3,376 vessels still docked at Bangor and loaded more than 200 million board feet of lumber. By 1880, the Great Lakes region dominated logging, with Michigan producing more lumber than any other state. The lumber from the Great Lakes region was sold in New York City, which became the largest lumber market in the world.
The population of the United States tripled between 1850 and 1900, reaching 76 million. Rural communities were able to use local wood, but cities used large quantities of lumber that had to be brought in from remote forests. The people who settled the treeless prairies needed wood for houses, barns, fences, outbuildings, and fuel. Farm fences had to be made of wood or stone before the invention of barbed wire in 1867, and the prairies are stoneless. By 1850, there were about 3.2 million miles of wooden fences in the United States, which is enough to build a fence to the moon (or back) thirteen times. The railways added over 230,000 miles of track in the next sixty years, using as much as a quarter of the country’s total timber production.
As the distance between consumers and forests increased, logging and milling wood became large-scale, industrial operations. Between 1850 and 1910, lumber production rose from 5.4 billion board feet to 44.5 billion board feet annually. The country’s forests were cut and sold for private profit.
Forests clean the water, through filtration, transpiration, and protective streamside vegetation. When forestland is changed into farmland, the waterways carry less water and more silt, there are fewer places for animals and birds to live, and the soil is more likely to move from the land into the waterways. Half of the forestland east of the Mississippi is now used as farmland, and land that once improved water quality now degrades it.
Wild animals and old-growth forests are the embodiment of nature. When Europeans moved to the New World and built railways, they transformed nature into money by selling the animals and trees. A few families got rich and built enduring fortunes, including the Astors (furs) and the Weyerhausers (forests). But money is fluid, and will flow to the next opportunity. Natural resources are more fragile. The harvests of the buffalo, passenger pigeons, curlews, and oysters were one-time events, and these animals never returned.
The American landscape was altered by their removal; more subtly, nutrient cycles were disrupted, sometimes permanently. A plant living on the Plains is less likely to enjoy phosphorus dropped by a migratory bird. Oysters no longer filter the water in the nation’s bays and estuaries, and the fisheries are lacking the nutrient boost provided by whale feces. Half of the eastern forests have been removed, and those that remain are less likely to be pocked with meadows. By simplifying our local environment and harvesting the living pathways used by nutrients that life depends on, we degraded our waterways, forests, and fields.
Those early days of easy harvest carried a lesson: without regulation, people emptied the water, land, and skies of animals. By the end of the 1800s, there were no catamounts or wolves east of the Mississippi. The eastern elk was extinct, moose had disappeared, and deer had been gone from New England forests for more than a generation. Nature was admired for her scenic beauty, but forests were not valued as habitat, and wild animals were not seen as a fundamental element of a forest ecosystem. Eastern forests remained empty scenery for more than fifty years.