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The 1820s–1850s, as the county histories record them
The baseline: The first written descriptions of the confluence country describe an animal abundance that the rest of this section is measured against. The 1889 Valley of the Upper Maumee River, Brant & Fuller's history of Allen County, records the settler Castleman counting forty-five deer at one time in a single drove on the Little Prairie, and deer standing in the Maumee in numbers to escape the mosquitoes, "with only their heads protruding above the surface," while hunters floated down on them in pirogues. Of the same years it says plainly: "Deer abounded… There was a profusion of smaller game, and the hunting of bears was a common thing."
One farm's testimony: The same history's sketch of William M. Muller of Cedar Creek Township, who came to the county in the 1830s, states that when he arrived Allen County "abounded with bears, wolves, deer, turkeys and snakes"; that wolves were so numerous he carried a pitchfork on visits to neighbors as a weapon of defense; and that he twice met bears at close quarters — one that stood up to receive him on his way home from work, and one in a hollow tree after wild honey. The principal food of his household, the sketch says, was venison, wild honey, and corn bread.
Inside the future city: Griswold's Pictorial History (1917), in the biographical sketch of a man born in 1837 on a farm in Washington Township, then three miles north of the Fort Wayne city limits, preserves the same world at the city's edge: howling wolf packs around the house, bear tracks seen on the way to school, a female bear with two cubs seen near Maysville by the man's brother, and "lots of deer on Goshen Road, then just a winding trail through the woods." The memoir is a grandson's-generation recollection printed in 1917, and it is carried here as that — testimony, not a survey.
The water side: West of the city lay the wetland the Little River Wetlands Project calls the Great Marsh — some 25,000 acres in Allen and Huntington counties along the Little River — which, in the Project's words, settlers found "teeming with wildlife." The marshes and the three rivers carried the waterfowl, muskrats, mink, and fish that the fur trade and the first markets were built on. What the baseline does not include is as important as what it does: no account reached places bison herds or elk in Allen County itself. Those animals belong to Indiana's record, and they are handled below as exactly that.
Sources:
- Valley of the Upper Maumee River, with historical account of Allen County and the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Vol. I (Madison: Brant & Fuller, 1889) — the Castleman deer count and Maumee hunting account; the William M. Muller sketch, Cedar Creek Township.
- B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana (1917), Vol. II biographical sketch (Washington Township, b. 1837), as excerpted on the Allen County Genealogical Society's A-surnames page (acgsi.org).
- Little River Wetlands Project, project-area description (the 25,000-acre Great Marsh), via the Society's Little River Wetlands Project page (acgsi.org).