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Chapman's warning, and the two extinctions that followed it
Lead: Chapman saw both of these coming and said so in print. Of the prairie chicken, 1880: it is “the chiefest among the Grouse family,” and “if not carefully protected, must ere long follow the wild turkey, never to return.” Of the wild pigeon: the flights still came semi-annually, “but not in such vast numbers as years ago,” and his set-piece is Audubon's 1813 Ohio flight, daylight obscured for three days. Neither bird has a county monument; both have a state ending, dated. The county share of each is Chapman's eyewitness-grade chapter — written for this county — and nothing more specific was found: no Terre Coupee booming ground and no named Olive Township pigeon roost appears in the record reached, and this article does not invent either.
The prairie chicken's Indiana course, at published strength, is a long northwest-Indiana fade. The bird of the state's prairies numbered, in the Indiana Historical Society's account, in the hundreds of thousands in the 1850s–60s; the state's remnant clung to the Newton County prairies — Bogus Island and Beaver Lake country, the last headquarters — with counted remnants of 900 birds in 1942, about 250 by 1959, a last confirmed booming cock seen by DNR research biologist Robert D. Feldt on 3 April 1972 after a blank survey the year before: “To my knowledge, that was the last authentic [confirmed] prairie chicken sighting in Indiana.” Terre Coupee is the same tallgrass formation as the Newton County ground and Chapman's warning was written about this county's bird — but the documented last stands are Newton County's, roughly fifty miles southwest, and the extinction is printed as a state extinction with a county warning, in that order.
The passenger pigeon's dates are national and Indiana at once. A population in the billions as late as 1860 was nearly zero by 1900; the last verified wild passenger pigeon was shot near Laurel, in Franklin County, southeastern Indiana, on April 3, 1902; and the species ended with Martha, the last captive, at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914 — the text of the Indiana Historical Bureau's 2017 marker, installed by the Bureau with Indiana Audubon and DNR. Chapman's county chapter is the local half of that arc, and it is vivid: roosting woods where “acres of forest were so often filled at night with these birds that the breaking of boughs and the flying of pigeons made a noise that could be heard for miles,” and the communal slaughter that followed a roost's discovery. That passage is St. Joseph County testimony about a bird that crossed this sky; it is not a roost location, and no location is printed.
Sources:
- Chapman (1880), birds chapter, pp. 341–343 — prairie-chicken warning; turkey parallel; pigeon flights, roosts and Audubon 1813 account.
- “After the Boom: The Demise of the Indiana Prairie Chicken,” Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History (Indiana Historical Society, Spring 1992) — hundreds of thousands in the 1850s–60s; Newton County last ground; 900 (1942) to 250 (1959); Feldt's last confirmed sighting, 3 April 1972.
- Indiana Historical Bureau marker, “Passenger Pigeon Extinction” (ID 24.2017.1, Metamora, 2017) — billions in 1860, near zero by 1900; last verified wild bird near Laurel, April 3, 1902; Martha, Cincinnati Zoo, September 1, 1914.