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St. Joseph County, as its first county history records it in 1880
The baseline: The second chapter of Chapman's History of St. Joseph County (1880) is a natural history of the county — quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, fishes, botany — compiled within living memory of the first settlement, and it opens with a census of loss: "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. 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." The chapter's going-and-rare list continues through the gray fox, the catamount, the otter, the lynx, and "the beautiful Virginia deer," by 1880 reduced to a rarity in its own county; below them it counts what remained — opossum, raccoon, mink, muskrat, weasels, skunk, woodchuck, moles, mice, a gray rabbit "very rare," five kinds of squirrel including the flying squirrel, and two bats "common." Every later entry in this section is measured against this page: it is the county's own statement, made in 1880, of what the settlement generation found and what the first fifty years of settlement had already subtracted.
The birds, in the same chapter: Chapman gives the county's birds at the same survey depth. The golden eagle was "always rare but now no longer seen here"; the bald eagle "once quite common, now scarce," with preserved specimens in the county. The turkey-buzzard "has almost, if not quite, disappeared. It is still abundant further south." The wild turkey "has almost entirely disappeared," though "in an early day they were in abundance"; the prairie chicken survives under a warning, and the quail's fate is "only a question of a short time." Passenger pigeons "continue to make their semi-annual visits, but not in such vast numbers as years ago," roosting so thick that "acres of forest were so often filled at night" and the breaking of boughs "could be heard for miles" — after which the chapter borrows Audubon's famous account of an Ohio River flight of 1813, which is Ohio's record, printed there as a set piece and not as this county's. The water birds get their own entries below.
The smaller orders: Of reptiles, Chapman records two kinds of rattlesnake "numerous in the early settlement" — the banded or striped, and the prairie rattlesnake, the latter "still occasionally found"; the copperhead "always rare"; map, snapping, and soft-shelled turtles; and a bullfrog "as large as a man's head," whose "deep bellowing can be heard for a mile or more." Of lizards he is flat: "Lizards are never found in this county," the things called water lizards being newts. Of fishes — "the waters of this county are quite prolific of the finny tribe" — his list is treated whole in the fish entry below. The chapter is a period document and is printed as one: its taxonomy is 1880's (it lists both a "panther" and a "catamount," the period's two names for the cougar, as though they were two animals), and its abundance words are a compiler's, not a count. But it is a named, dated, county-specific record, and no later source contradicts its shape.
Sources:
- History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1880), Chapter II, "Natural History," pp. 340–344 — quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, fishes; read from the book's digitized text (the ldsgenealogy.com transcription of the archive.org scan; the transcription carries the site's notice that machine-generated text may contain errors, and the full page images stand on archive.org).