/lit/ - Literature

As for the wildlife of the East, the turkey, prairie chicken, wolf, and elk were all driven out. So were the cougar and the woods buffalo. Strangely appropriate killer heroes now appeared in white folklore, such as the Pennsylvanian Aaron Hall who decimated the local panther population and in winter would festoon the premises of his cabin with their frozen carcasses. Another hunter of the same region was credited with having killed two thousand buffalo. The last of these creatures reported east of the Mississippi was a solitary vagrant shot in West Virginia in 1825, by which time the wilderness of the East was a faded and vaguely disquieting memory, perhaps most evidenced by its negative reminders: vanished forests, erosion, opened, parched lands, and small pockets of aboriginal slums where the demoralized fugitives who had somehow escaped deportation hung on surrounded by fields of white hatred.

As the inheritors rushed into the Mississippi Valley, the rage to clear and claim reached new levels. Into what Mark Twain with unconscious irony had called the "body of the nation" the whites now plunged their axes, plows, and other weapons, girdling and burning stands of oak and cypress at a rate that reached twenty-five million forest acres a year, and exterminating the wildlife in massacres. In Indiana Territory John Audubon witnessed one of these bloody spectacles, the victims of which were the passenger pigeons soon to be wholly exterminated. At sunset of a random day hundreds of settlers gathered in a woods known to be the roosting place of a huge flock. Armed with poles, torches, sulphur pots, firearms, and domestic hogs for the fattening, they waited for the winging in. Then the fearsome cry went up, "Here they come!" and the massacre commenced. In the glaring light of the torches the work went forward well past midnight as the heaps of dead birds mounted, and the din of the firing was so intense that Audubon could not distinguish the reports of even the nearest guns. In 1821 at New Orleans, Audubon witnessed a similar slaughter of golden plover.

In Hinckley Township, Ohio, on the day before Christmas 1818 five hundred men and boys from neighboring areas gathered to clear out pests. They marched forward into the forest blasting away, and when they came together at last they accounted for the lives of three hundred deer, twenty-one bears, seventeen wolves, and uncounted numbers of foxes and other small game.