Passing of the Pigeons
The Once Mighty Passenger Pigeon
During a family dinner with some of my closest relatives, my eccentric uncle proposed that the extinction of the passenger pigeon was an attempt at Native American genocide. Like allowing the wholesale slaughter of the plains bison, the unregulated market hunting of the passenger pigeon was meant to force native populations onto reservations. Knowing how underhanded the federal government's dealings were (and still are) with the tribal nations, it seemed like a reasonable assumption. The policy makers of the time knew, or hoped, that the endless flocks of passenger pigeons could be thinned down to the point that the tribes who relied on the huge roosts for meat, eggs and oil would have to settle on the reservations and live on government assistance. They probably didn't feel that the pigeons could be driven to extinction, but if so, then all the better to control the wild savages that complicated their efforts to exploit the natural resources of the Indian territories.
After looking into this subject, I've come to the conclusion that nothing in history is ever so "cut and dry" and that such a simple explanation is at least narrow minded if not far-fetched. Early accounts and archeological evidence do support the fact that Native Americans relied heavily on the flocks, and pre-contact bird numbers show they must have had a minimum impact. It’s also true that the free-for-all slaughter by the early settlers and market hunters combined with non-existent or un-enforced hunting restrictions to wipe the pigeons out for good. However, based on these facts alone, we cannot conclude that there was a conspiracy to drive out the Indians by killing off their wild game stocks.
This report from around 1650 gives us an idea of the Natives dependence on the pigeons. Adrian Van der Douk, in his Description of the New Netherlands, "The Indians, when they find the breeding places of the Pigeons, frequently remove to those places with their wives and children to the number of two to three hundred in a company, where they live a month or more on the young Pigeons which they take after flushing them from their nests with poles or sticks."
Another early report claims the Native took a dangerous toll on the flocks, "Among the wild enemies of the Pigeon, indeed the most dangerous of them, was the Indian who levied upon the flocks wherever he found them. The populous roosts of the Southland he invaded at night, and, firing the under-brush, killed the birds by the thousands. Large numbers were caught around the numerous licks in simple traps. But it was at the great nestings that the tribe settled down to a continuous banquet, and during which it gathered a bounteous harvest of savory produce."
Whatever the size of the harvests, the Native Americans had lived with the pigeons for ages without wiping them out and these roosts were enormous! Some large roosting sites were reported to have "covered an area five miles by twelve with up to ninety nests in a single tree" and that "branches broke and whole trees were toppled by the sheer weight of roosting birds, often standing on top of each other, and leaving a pile of droppings several inches deep under the trees." Pre-contact bird population is estimated at between 3 and 5 billion pigeons, certainly enough birds to go around even after settlers from the east started hunting them.
As settlement increased, so did hunting pressure that peaked when the railroad came into an area and made large-scale market hunting possible. Of course, anywhere a flock roosted, everyone in the near-by towns would take the day off to shoot as many as they could just for fun as well as for food. Once a town was connected by rail to the markets in the east, money gave them a reason to kill even more. By this time the demand for passenger pigeon back east was made greater by the loss of the flocks there. On July 23rd, 1860, 235,200 birds were sent east from Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1876, Oceana County Michigan sent a total of 1,600,000 back east that year.
Michigan was one of the last places where large flocks had been seen. This report from April 8th, 1873, in "Saginaw in Michigan there was a continuous stream of passenger pigeons overhead between 7:30 in the morning and 4 o'clock in the afternoon." Last great nesting of Passenger Pigeons is considered the 1878 roosting in Petosky, Michigan. The birds that survived the slaughter at Petosky finally left and disappeared to the North, never to be seen again. The last record of a passenger pigeon in Michigan was of one shot in Wanye County on September 1st, 1898. The very last passenger pigeon in captivity was "Martha" (named for Martha Washington), a 29-year old female that died in the Cincinnati zoo on Sept. 1, 1914.
It would appear that the demise of the passenger pigeon was due to greed, ignorance and a lack of hunting regulation and yet there are some indications that genocide against the Native American was at least a popular justification for the slaughter of the great flocks. The extinction of the passenger pigeon coincides with the near extinction of the plains bison. In 1896 General Sherman is quoted as saying, "Every buffalo dead is an Indian dead". In General William Tecumseh Sherman's letter to John Sherman, on Sept. 23rd, 1868, he writes, "…But the more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war. For the more I see of these Indians the more convinced am I that they have all to be killed, or be maintained as a species of paupers." It is evident that the popular belief at that time was that what was bad for the Indian was good for the white man, but the extinction of the passenger pigeon was really about the money and carelessness with natural resources. Once the pigeon was gone, the market ceased to exist and the local market hunters were out of a job they may have believed would never end.
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Jesse James's Mom a Morley Schoolmarm?
Zerelda Samuel pictured with missing right arm
Could it be that the notorious western outlaws, Frank and Jesse James's very own mother taught school in Morley at the end of the 1800's? If true, this is an exciting addition to the wild-west flavor of 19th century life along the Muskegon River. After doing research on the boomtowns and western-like landscape of the prairies, this information only helped complete a picture of western Michigan as a piece of the old west in the mid-west. I had no reason to disbelieve what I had read in the "Morley Centennial 1869-1969" publication found at the local libraries.
Unfortunately the facts just don't correspond to the details of the story that is quoted as follows. "Mr. (Darius) Blair liked to tell of the days when he attended school in the old Schoolhouse in the Bell school district. One of his teachers was the late Mrs. (Ben) Samuels, mother of the notorious bandits, Frank and Jessie James. Mrs. Samuels' left arm had been amputated above the elbow, said to have resulted in injuries sustained as a spy in the Civil War . . . Mrs. Samuels died about 1887, . . . She is buried in the Higbee Cemetery."
There may still be a controversy about the final resting place of Jesse James, but there is no doubt where his mother was buried. It is well recorded fact that Zerelda Samuel (not Samuels), the mother of Frank and Jesse James, died at 86 years old on a train while in route to Oklahoma City in 1911. Her body was then shipped to Kansas City and interned at Mount Olivet Cemetery, Clay County, Missouri.
Perhaps there was a different "Mrs. Samuels" buried at the Higbee Cemetery. Checking the cemetery records show no one, male or female, with the surname of Samuel or Samuels, buried at Higbee Cemetery. Interestingly, I found one woman buried there that might be related to our storyteller Mr. Blair, her name is Sarah Blair, born 1819 died 1887, the same year this other "Mrs. Samuels" supposedly died. OK, maybe this "Mrs. Samuels" moved to Morley later in life but wasn't buried at that particular cemetery or she had been buried there and then moved.
Still not ready to give up, I checked on who was the teacher at the Old Bell School and found out that a Margaret Quigley taught in 1862 when the school was first opened. Perhaps "Mrs. Samuels" taught there after Mrs. Quigley. This other "Mrs. Samuels" couldn’t be the real Zerelda Samuel as she never left the homestead in Missouri to teach school in Morley. In her later years she "divided her time between the homestead and the farm of her son Frank in Oklahoma."
Most sources said Zerelda Samuel had three husbands; first was Rev. Robert James, second was Benjamin Simms (who was killed in a horse accident in 1854) and her third and last husband was Dr. Rueben Samuel. Perhaps she used the name “Ben” in reference to Rueben or maybe there was some confusion between Simms and Samuel.
The only part of the story that comes close to the historic accounts is how she lost her arm but even this Morley version is far from factual. Most accounts claim that in 1875 Pinkerton agents laid siege to the Samuel home trying to capture Frank and Jesse who weren't there at the time. During the shoot-out, a device similar to the Molotov cocktail was thrown through a window, where it hit Mrs. Samuel, taking most of her arm and killing her nine-year-old son, Archie Samuel. Every picture I found of Zerelda after losing her arm shows that it is her right arm, not the left arm that was missing.
After researching every possible angle to prove that some aspect of this story is based on historical fact, I've come up empty handed. The Morley tale has the date of her death wrong, the cemetery is wrong, her last name is wrong, the missing arm is on the wrong side and there's no proof in the least to support that Mrs. Samuel ever visited Michigan, much less teach school in Morley. I hate to say this, but this is one of those big yarns that got into the history books. I'd love to be proven wrong somehow and I invite anyone with information on this subject to
contact me.
Note to the Reader:
I wasn't going to put this story in the Michigan Chronoscope, but I decided to do so after seeing the "Sesquicentennial Celebration of Big Rapids / Mecosta County" Issue IX (a section of the Pioneer Newspaper), and reading an article entitled "A Legend That Never Dies" (pg 15) that once again puts forth this tall tale. This article offered some new information as follows.
A registry book for an unnamed "former hotel" in, or near, Reed City Michigan had a June 6th, 1880 entry for Jesse James and two of his known associates name Texas Jack and Jake Wolverstine. Although "experts" were said to have validated the signatures, the registry book, found in 1972, disappeared with an antique dealer from California. No proof there, just hearsay talk about some unsubstantiated and missing evidence. Conventional history has the James brothers pulling off crimes down in Kentucky during 1880 and then further south the following year.
A letter, written by one Nina Bently in 1937 to her cousin in Morley claims that "Mrs. Samuels" taught at the Bell school, lived in the Higbee settlement, and "tells of her return from Jesse's funeral" in April 1882. However, most sources say that Jesse was buried in the front yard of the family farm in Missouri and that Zerelda would allow tourists to view the grave for a quarter and even sold rocks from his grave. One source claimed that she lived on the family farm in Missouri and then moved in with her brother in Kansas City in late April of 1882.
The Morley Centennial 1869-1969 publication may have been somewhat misleading when it offered this local man's story as quoted and with out any follow-up, but The Pioneer Newspaper should have dug a little deeper. The subtitle of this story "Infamous criminals visited their mother near Morley" is stated as if it were proven truth. By regurgitating the Morley Centennial story and supporting it with new unproven information, this shallow report is helping to perpetuate a false history that comes at the expense of real history as well as at the expense of the Pioneer Newspaper's credibility. The staff writer who wrote this article obviously didn't check out the facts and certainly had no consideration for the surviving members of the Cole, James, and Samuel families in Missouri. It makes me wonder what benefits can be gained by the local people who keep plugging this legend that I wish would finally die.
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