Wisconsin Magazine of History

WISCONSIN MAGAZINE OF HISTORY The State Historical Society of Wisconsin • Vol. 59, No. 4 • Summer, 1976 \ ' "wK^ \\ V V \ ' ^^• JX M f f*m%^ -f^. THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN JAMES MORTON SMITH, Director Officers HOWARD W. MEAD, President GEORGE BANTA, JR., Honorary Vice-President JOHN C. GEILFUSS, First Vice-President r. HARWOOD ORBISON, Treasurer ROGER E. AXTELL, Second Vice-President JAMES MORTON SMITH, Secretary Board of Curators Ex Officio PATRICK J. LUCEY, Governor of the State JOHN C. WEAVER, President of the University DOUGLAS J. LAFOLLETTE, Secretary of State MRS. L. PRKNTICF. EA(;F,R, JR., President of the CHARLES P. SMITH, State Treasurer Women's Auxiliary Term Expires, 1976 THOMAS H. BARLAND MRS. EDWARD C. JONES HOWARD W. MEAD DONALD C. SLIGHTER Eau Claire Fort Atkinson Madison Milwaukee NATHAN S. HEFFERNAN MRS. RAYMOND J. KOLTES FREDERICK I. OLSON DR. LOUIS C. SMITH Madison Madison Wauwatosa Cassville E. E. HOMSTAD CHARLES R. MCCALLUM F. HARWOOD ORBISON ROBERT S. ZIGMAN Black River Falls Hubertus Appleton Milwaukee Term Expires, 1977 ROGER E. AXTELL WILLIAM HUFFMAN MRS. WM. H. L. SMYTHE CEDRIC A. VIG Janesville Wisconsin Rapids Milwaukee Rhinelander REED COLEMAN WARREN P. KNOWLES WILLIAM F. STARK CLARK WILKINSON Madison Milwaukee Nashotah Baraboo ROBERT B. L. MURPHY PAUL E. HASSETT MILO K. SWANTON Madison Madison Madison Term Expires, 1978 E. DAVID CRONON BEN GUTHRIE LLOYD HORNBOSTEL, JR. FRANCIS PAUL PRUCHA, S.J. Madison Lac du Flambeau Beloit Milwaukee ROBERT A. GEHRKE MRS. R. L. HARTZELL ROBERT H. IRRMANN J. WARD RECTOR Ripon Grantsburg Beloit Milwaukee JOHN C. GEILFUSS MRS. WILLIAM E. HAYES JOHN R. PIKE CLIFFORD D. SWANSON Milwaukee De Pere Madison Stevens Point Fellows VERNON CARSTENSEN MERLE CURTI ALICE E. SMITH The Women^s Auxiliary MRS. L. PRENTICE EAGER, JR., Evansville, President MRS. DONALD F. REINOEHL, Darlington, Treasurer MRS. GUSTAVE H. MOEDE, JR., Milwaukee, Vice-President MRS. DAVID S. FRANK, Madison, Ex Officio MRS. WADE H. MOSBY, Milwaukee, Secretary ON THE COVER: The University of Wisconsin class of 1876, photographed by Andreas L. Dahl on the eastern slope of Bascom Hill. Volume 59, Number 4 / Summer, 1976 WISCONSIN MAGAZINE OF HISTORY Published quarterly by the State Historical Society of Some Documents Relating to the Passenger Pigeon 259 Wisconsin, 816 State Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53706. Distributed to members as part of their dues. (Annual member The University and the Social Gospel: ship, $10, or 17.50 for those The Intellectual Origins of the "Wisconsin Idea" 282 over 65 or members of affiliated societies; family membership, /. David Hoeveler, Jr. $12.50, or |10 for those over 65 or members of affiliated societies; contributing, $25; business and Income Taxation and the Political Economy professional, $50; sustaining, of Wisconsin, 1890-19.80 299 $100 or more annually; patron, $500 or more annually.) Single W. Elliot Brownlee, Jr. numbers $2. Microfilmed copies available through University Microfilms, 300 Book Reviews 325 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106; reprint volumes available from Kraus Book Review Index 336 Reprint Company, Route 100, Millwood, New York 10546. Wisconsin History Checklist 337 Communications should be addressed to the editor. The Accessions 339 Society does not assume responsibility for statements Contributors 340 made by contributors. Second- class postage paid at Madison and Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Copyright © 1976 by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Paid for in part by the Maria L. and Simeon Mills Editorial Fund and by the George B. Burrows Fund. PAUL H. HASS EDITOR WILLIAM C. MARTEN ASSOCIATE EDITOR JOHN O. HOLZHUETER ASSISTANT EDITOR Passenger pigeons, approximately one-half life size, photographed by the Milwaukee Public Museum from a habitat group co?itaining three birds. The editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Nathan Kraucunas of the nmseum's vertebrate zoology department in obtaining this photograph. 258 Some Documents Relating to the Passenger Pigeon "Then the authors of all this devastation began to move among the dead, the dying, and the mangled, picking up the pigeons and piling them in heaps. When each man had as many as he could possibly dispose of, the hogs were let loose to feed on the remainder." JOHN JAMES AUDUBON (1812) INTRODUCTION green, his muscular breast a glowing russet or wine-red. While migrating he traveled sixty miles an hour; frightened, he could rival the swiftest teal or falcon. His red eye gazed HEY were the most numerous spe unflinchingly on a world full of mortal ene cies of bird the world has ever mies, and though his very numbers made him known. Each spring they flew northward, easy prey for men armed with shotguns, he three or four billion of them, darkening the was neither stupid nor easy to trap. sun like a Biblical judgment, seeking the The passenger pigeon was doomed by its great unbroken tracts of oak and beech where inherent urge to associate in huge masses, and they would nest, procreate, and endlessly mul by the fact that it laid but one egg annually. tiply. Such were their numbers, and the man Several million pigeons, often many times ner of their coming, that they inspired awe, more, would begin a nesting and would de even terror, among American colonists of the posit their eggs almost on the same day. For seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Later, thirty days thereafter, or until the parents as farms and hamlets sprang up in the clear normally abandoned their as-yet-helpless fledg ings of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, their ling, if either the adult male or female were vernal migrations signaled a carnival of shoot killed, the egg or nestling would likewise per ing, netting, clubbing, and nest-robbing—a ish. In other words, for every adult bird fortnight of joyous, unbridled slaughter that shot or trapped, another potential adult bird stocked to overflowing the larders of rich was condemned to die. When any wild species men and poor, red men and white, without in fails to produce sufficient young to make good the least seeming to diminish the fantastic its annual losses, it is headed for extinction. numbers of the birds. The passenger pigeon The passenger pigeon was a victim of arithme —a winged hyperbole, an invention of Walt tic. Whitman—was uncommonly well-suited to Though not, to be sure, without an unre brash young America, where everything was mitting assist from man. From colonial days bigger, more expansive, more numerous. until the last pitiable remnants were harried At rest or on the wing, they were strikingly from their roosts in the 1890's, the American handsome. The male bird was sixteen inches rites of spring centered around pigeon-killing, and a bit more from his beak to the tip of his not baseball. The "market hunter"—that is, slender, dartlike tail. His head and hack were the professional gunner or netter who fol slaty blue, his neck iridescent bronze and lowed the pigeons from the Virginias to Michi- 259 WISCONSIN MAGAZINE OF HISTORY SUMMER, 1976 gan's upper peninsula—worked hard and sent [Arlie William Schorger, research chemist, many millions of dead birds on the road to inventor, and ecologist, was born in Ohio in Boston and New York; the farmer and woods 1884. As a graduate student at the University man who cut swaths through the deciduous of Wisconsin he worked for the Forest Prod forests undoubtedly fixed limits upon the ucts Laboratory, and in 1917, a year after he population of a bird whose population seemed earned his doctorate in chemistry, he joined the C. F. Burgess Laboratories in Madison. limitless; yet in the last analysis it was the He later became president of the Burgess Cel casual shooter, the amateur sportsman, with lulose Company of Madison and Freeport, Illi his understandable preference for killing the nois. His first book xuas entitled The Chemis birds easily where and as they nested, who try of Cellulose and Wood—a title scarcely contributed most to the extinction of the suggestive of a lifelong interest in American passenger pigeon. It is grotesque, but not wildlife. But, as he later wrote, "deep, youth insignificant, that the last wild pigeon in ful impressions are not easily effaced." As a North America was killed by an Ohio boy boy, his uncle had showed him a field in north with a BB gun. ern Ohio where wild pigeons had once roosted, and been shot, until the ground was carpeted The documents reprinted below tell a with blue. Schorger made it his avocation to roughly chronological story, from the time of collect, organize, and eventually .synthesize all the greatest single nesting of passenger pigeons extant information about the passenger pigeon. ever recorded, in Wisconsin in 1871, to the He did so, first, by reading everything that dedication of a monument to an extinct spe had been written about the bird by ornitholo cies, also in Wisconsin, seventy-six years later. gists, naturalists, explorers, hunters, and early settlers and travelers; and then—having dis Two of the pieces are from Forest and Stream, covered that most of what had been written an early journal of hunting, fishing, yacht was inaccurate or at best contradictory—by ing, and related sports that contains an aston immersing himself, an hour or two at a.time, ishing amount of useful and interesting infor in the newspaper collections of the State His mation on upper- and middle-class recreation torical Society of Wisconsin, where he read in the late nineteenth century. Neither of hundreds of files over a fifty-year span for these excerpts is well known. A third fugitive references to the passenger pigeon. Thus he piece, concerning a futile search for the last spent his lunch hours, weekends, and much of passenger pigeon, originally appeared in a his spare time for more than twenty years.

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