The Petoskey Massacre

As great and beneficent as America is, Petoskey was small and a mean place in the North Woods where chores turned to labor for children who died young or became adults at an early age. It must have been 1889, because I was sixteen years old. It was the second pigeon harvest since the arrival of the peninsula railroad, and the scale of the Colonel’s spring-time operation spoke to the success of the prior year’s undertaking. In a forest clearing, near the crooked lake, dozens of wagons were loaded with hundreds of empty barrels, all waiting in readiness for the crop. Four armed men stood by the Colonel protecting the man and his payroll. There were carters and coopers by the score, and tally men in suits, carrying notch-knives, black notebooks and ink pens. Local women and girls carried baskets and nets; their hands would bleed and callous with the gathering, picking and pickling.

The Colonel, a big man in a canary-yellow suit, explained that we were doing the Lord’s work at five or more dollars a barrel.

“Boys! Store your guns with my man or your weapons will encumber you in the slaughterhouse,” said the Colonel, who spoke to us boys as men, and to the men as partners in a great enterprise.

“What does he mean by slaughterhouse?” said Iggy, my best friend, under his breath, not wanting to appear ignorant.

“You men with experience, come see me now, we’ll have you at the business, and you boys”, the Colonel pointed at me and Iggy. “Go see my foreman, o’er by the draft horses, he will tell you what to do.”

“All you need is a pole and common sense if you want to make the quota,” said the foreman, eying Iggy and his gun with disapproval. “Does the Indian boy understand?”

Iggy was a better scholar than I, both of the Bible and of Mathematics; I’d forgotten that he was Odowan, but the foreman was a veteran of the Indian wars and had a sharp eye for a half-breed.

“The weapon is not mine to give up,” said Iggy.

“Suit yourself, but you will need both hands for the money you earn, or you will go hungry.”

We signed contract papers and received our poke-poles and were given instructions to follow unsmiling men into the woods. “Do as they do and you boys will be alright.”

Our footfalls were silenced by mellow loam, snow lay clumped in shadows and hollows.

“They called it the place where the light shone through the clouds”, said Iggy. His grandfather, an Odowan chief, hunted these woods with the bow and arrow. It was a sacred place once, he said. Maybe not any more.

The sky was scarcely visible through naked beech, oak and maple bearing a strange winter fruit, which in abundance spread as a vast bronze and feathered canopy in the morning light, cooing and clucking, alert to our presence. A broken twig or a sharp intake of breath, the merest infraction, spurred restlessness and unease, ripples of commotion.

“Upon God’s green footstool, it is a visitation of the heavenly host!” I said to Iggy, who was staring wide-eyed at the birds, fearful of the sound of his own voice amidst such a vast and alien multitude. “What brings them to Petoskey, I wonder?”

“Tis on account of the shack,” he said, gesturing at the torn-up carpet of rotting leaves. “Sweet beechnuts, two years or more preserved, and acorns of last year’s abundance”.

“The Colonel says the colony exceeds Manhattan in size and outnumbers the population of our entire United States, and he says they are drawn to the northern woods by divine providence at a time of need. He said that they are nomads and a scourge in the great plains, where their migration darkens the sky for days on end”.

“But in such numbers, fat as butter balls, it is far more than pot-hunters and snarers can ever need” said Iggy.

The need was great. Lumber prices had plummeted, fish stocks in the bay were depleted. The winter was long, and it was harsh, the backwoodsmen and their families were hungry, the churches full on Sunday mornings of grieving parents and empty of alms. Iggy’s family were among the hardest hit.

“It is not just our backwoods need that they serve,” I said. “Jerked or pickled, they fetch ten dollars a barrel, and we can sell the older toms for fifty cents a bird to the shooting clubs in Grand Rapids. It is the market, Iggy, it speaks with price of the needs of towns and cities in the South and East of which we know nothing, except that they are full of open mouths, empty bellies and there are pockets filled with cash.”

Thwack! Thwack! In the distance, a crew were jarring downy squabs from their hasty nests. The trees shook and a multitude of pigeons serpentined into heaven. In the distance, shot guns fired, speaking loudly of the multiplicity of avian hazards, raising aloft an enormous murmuration.

Iggy and I stopped beneath a part of the forest, as good as any other site because abundant with roosters, two hundred or more per tree, upon beech boughs that bent under their weight. “Let’s to it, then,” I said, which caused a rustling of feathers to spread out in every direction.

I toppled nests with my pole. Iggy hit the bows of the smaller trees with a stick of lumber, spooking the adults and jarring the squabs from the flat nests, which fell like chestnuts freed of their burr, plopping and thudding here and there on the dank earth, fattened and unable to take wing, they staggered and stumbled about the ground.

“Best not to trample them underfoot, lest they spoil or get mushed into the mud”, I said, pushing nests off the low hanging branches of the larger beech trees, “leave the killing to the women and children”.

Within minutes, the ground was a moving carpet of squabs, staggering and stumbling like drunkards, and we had no choice but to trample the chicks beneath our feet.

The Colonel blew his horn, calling the women to work, and they arrived in the thickets carrying baskets at their hips, into which they pitched the baby birds. Among the first of the women was my girl, my Virginia, younger than me by a year. When she saw the size of the kill Ginni threw her basket to the ground and clasped her hands to her face in horror. She was quick to laugh, quick to cry.

“This cannot be the way, can it?” pleaded Ginni, “there must be thousands of the pathetic little things. Are they not God’s creatures too?”

“This is no time for sentimentality, we need the money.” I was only sixteen and of a practical mind. Ginni and I were betrothed.

“But why not just take what we can for our own needs? Why must we feed the Republic?”

“A penny a dozen, Ginni… just here there is the better part of a thousand? Think what we can do with the money.” We had enough already to buy a train ticket to Detroit or Chicago, and leave Petoskey. “How great is God, how great and abundant is our country?” I said.

“There are two roosts each year,” said Iggy. “If we stop now, the surviving birds will breed again before they migrate south.”

“What will you do with the money, Iggy?” I asked.

“Reckon I might follow the pigeons south, see where they go in the winter.”

September 1st, 1914.

Virginia and I came to the city of Detroit from the small town of Petoskey, Michigan, with little more than our train tickets and the clothes on our backs, and it is in Detroit that we built an American life, exchanging labor at the factory for freedom from want.

“Martha is dead”, said Ginni, who is a sentimental woman, easily muddled by what she reads. I assumed she meant the wife of our long-dead first President, and thought to correct her civics and reprimand her foolishness, but Ginni thrust the newspaper at me across the kitchen table. “Martha was the last of them; now they’re extinct, ne’er again to darken the skies, and it is our fault.”

“Such nonsense!” I said angrily, “more of the birds left the woods than ever arrived. You cannot place the blame at our door, and ‘tis but a wild pigeon, and useless in every realm.” I flushed at my words, vaguely appreciating that in the realm of heaven it is not utility by which we are measured.

Tears welled in Ginni’s blue eyes which she turned toward the window. “It was a bitter business.” she said. “Do you remember?”

It was not a bitter business, not then, not to a sixteen year-old boy. Only later, in its remembrance did it become bitter. “There were millions in the north woods and then there were none!” I said. “Perhaps they flew south to Mexico or to the Bahamas?” I imagined Iggy, an old man now, feeding the pigeons in a warmer clime.

“Unseen, and in numbers too great to measure?” said Ginni of the vast flock. "They would have smothered the Conch islands as they did the North Woods of Michigan.

It seemed far-fetched, but then again everything about their one-time existence did.

Ginni took the newspaper back from me so that she could take a closer look at the small grainy photo of Martha.

“It says here that Martha was 28 years old.”

“Which means she survived Petoskey.” I said, taking comfort in the knowledge that it was not my fault that the Passenger Pigeons were gone for good.