Chapman's Natural History of the County, 1880

CHAPMAN (1880), CHAPTER II · THE BASELINE EVERY LATER RECORD IS MEASURED AGAINST

The book and the chapter: the baseline is the History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, published by Chas. C. Chapman & Co. of Chicago in 1880 — the subscription county history of the settlement generation, its text now held whole at the Internet Archive (Cornell University Library copy). Its second chapter is a natural history of the county as its settlers found it, and it closes, significantly, with the animals: "Quadrupeds–Birds–Reptiles–Fishes–Plants." Its author writes after the clearing, not before it, and his first sentence is this section's first fact: "Of the species of native quadrupeds that once roamed the flowery prairies and wild forests of this county, but few of the smaller remain, and none of the larger. Of the latter we cannot even find a specimen preserved in taxidermy." By 1880 the county's big fauna is already memory, and Chapman writes it down as a survey of a disappearance in progress — which is exactly what makes the chapter a baseline: every claim in the articles below is measured against what he could still list.

The quadrupeds: gone entirely by his writing, in his own roll: "The buffalo which grazed upon the verdant prairies has been driven westward. With or before it went the beaver, elk, badger, panther, black wolf and black bear." Become very rare: the gray fox, the catamount, the otter, the lynx, "the beautiful Virginia deer," and a working list of the small furred economy — opossum, raccoon, mink, muskrat, the common weasel and the small brown weasel, skunk, woodchuck (his Maryland marmot), prairie mole, the common shrew mole, meadow mouse and deer mouse, and the gray rabbit. The squirrels he gives a family's attention: gray timber squirrel, fox squirrel, chipmunk, the large gray prairie squirrel, the striped and spotted prairie squirrels, and the flying squirrel; and the dark-brown and reddish bat are "common." Read as a census of 1880, the chapter says the county's remaining wild mammals were the small, the nocturnal and the water's-edge kind — the large herbivores and every big predator already past tense.

The birds, in six companies: Chapman sorts the county's birds the folk way — birds of prey; the scratchers; the doves; the swimmers; the waders; the perchers and climbers — and the losses head each list. Of the raptors: "Most raptorial birds have disappeared from this region. Prominent among these are the golden eagle, which was always rare but now no longer seen here; the bald eagle, or properly the white-headed eagle, once quite common, now scarce." The hawks stand eight or nine species with names half-settled; the turkey buzzard has "almost, if not quite, disappeared"; the owls remain a full house — barn, screech, long-eared and short-eared, barred, and the snowy owl the rarest. Of the scratchers comes the chapter's most quoted warning, given its own article below: the wild turkey "has almost entirely disappeared," and the prairie chicken "must ere long follow the wild turkey, never to return" unless protected. Of the doves, the wild pigeon still comes twice a year "but not in such vast numbers as years ago," roosting so thick that "the breaking of boughs… could be heard for miles." The swimmers — the ducks, geese and swans of the marsh country — "formerly frequented this county in large numbers, have almost disappeared," though his duck list runs sixteen kinds deep and both the American swan and the trumpeter stand on it. The waders he mourns by their cause: "cultivation has drained their favorite haunts" — the whooping crane never seen now, sandhill cranes still stopping on their journeys, herons, bitterns, a glossy ibis, the long-billed curlew. The perchers close the survey in their dozens — the ruby-throated hummingbird, "the only one found in this State," whippoorwill and nighthawk, kingfisher, martins and swallows, waxwing, the finch and sparrow suite, the blackbirds and orioles, jay and crow, and seven woodpeckers — the small-bird county of 1880, substantially the small-bird county of today.

Reptiles and fishes: the reptiles are a settler's practical list: two rattlesnakes, the banded or striped and the prairie, the latter "still occasionally found"; the copperhead "always rare"; and the harmless company — water, garter, bull, milk and black snakes and the blue racer. "Lizards are never found in this county," he rules, the water lizards of report being newts; turtles are the map, the snapping and the soft-shelled; the bullfrog runs "often as large as a man's head," its bellowing "heard for a mile." The fishes are the chapter's last list and this section's baseline for the creek and river articles: the game family, none over four pounds here — black bass, goggle-eye, crappie (his big black sunfish) and two common sunfish; the pike family — pickerel of five to twenty-five pounds, and the gar pike; the suckers — buffalo, red-horse, white sucker, two black suckers, mullet; the catfish — channel, mud and two small species, one to thirty pounds, the bullhead "yet abundant"; and the small fry — chub, silver-sides, the fresh-water herring, the minnows. Against this survey the second county history is a control, not a rival: Timothy Edward Howard's History of St. Joseph County (Lewis Publishing, 1907; preface dated at South Bend, 1 January 1908) carries no natural-history chapter of Chapman's kind — its second chapter's animal matter is the Parkovash, the Indian camps and fishing resorts of the portage ground, history rather than survey. The Story of Granger section therefore stands on Chapman alone, dated 1880, county-sized, and candid about being an elegy: the rest of this section is the hundred and forty-six years of record that ran off his page.

Sources:

1. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Chicago, 1880), Chapter II, "Natural History — Quadrupeds–Birds–Reptiles–Fishes–Plants," pp. 340–345 in the printed pagination: read first-hand in the Internet Archive text (Cornell copy), including the contents listing that seats the chapter; all Chapman quotations in this section are from this reading.
2. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, 2 vols. (Lewis Publishing Co., 1907), contents and preface (South Bend, 1 January 1908): Chapter II's fifth section, "The Parkovash, Indian Camps and Trails," with its camps-and-fishing-resorts and trails subsections — the second witness, carrying no systematic fauna survey.