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Every later record in this section is measured against one printed page-turn: Chapter II of Chas. C. Chapman & Co.'s History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Chicago, 1880), "Natural History — Quadrupeds — Birds — Reptiles — Fishes — Plants," pages 340–344. It is not a survey in the modern sense — no transects, no counts, no named observer behind most lines — and it prints as exactly that: a county naturalist's compiled list, dated 1880, against which presence and absence can be tested because it says, species by species, what was gone, what was rare, and what was common in that year.
The quadruped paragraph is the baseline's hard edge. "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." Gone by 1880, in his order: the buffalo, and "with or before it" the beaver, elk, badger, panther, black wolf and black bear. Already "very rare" in 1880: gray fox, catamount, otter, lynx, "the beautiful Virginia deer," opossum, raccoon, mink, muskrat, the two weasels, skunk, woodchuck, prairie and shrew moles, meadow and deer mice, and the gray rabbit. Still listed without alarm: five squirrels (gray timber, fox, chipmunk, large gray prairie, striped and spotted prairie, and the flying squirrel — six forms as he counts them) and two common bats. That single paragraph is the Story of Walkerton section the rest of this section hangs on: when a modern record says a deer herd, an otter or a beaver is "back," Chapman's page is what "back" means — back from rare or absent in 1880.
The bird list runs by the period's orders — Perchers, Birds of Prey, Climbers, Scratchers, Swimmers, Waders — and its value is likewise in its warnings, which the lost-birds article below takes up whole: the golden eagle "always rare but now no longer seen here," the bald eagle "once quite common, now scarce," the turkey-buzzard "almost, if not quite, disappeared," the wild turkey "almost entirely disappeared," the prairie chicken marked for extinction unless protected, the wild pigeon still visiting but "not in such vast numbers as years ago," the whooping crane "always rare, is now never seen," and the swimmers and waders already retreating as "cultivation has drained their favorite haunts." The reptile list keeps the prairie rattlesnake "still occasionally found" and the copperhead "always rare"; the fish list is short and is carried whole in the fish article below. Read whole, the chapter's pattern is plain and is printed as this section's finding: by 1880 the large fauna of St. Joseph County was already a memory list, the game birds were already in declared decline, and what remained abundant was the small, the nocturnal and the marsh-bound — fifty years after first settlement, a generation before the marsh itself was drained.
Sources: Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), Chapter II, pp. 340–344, read whole first-hand, November 2026. Closure: DUG — the baseline is printed from the chapter itself, and every later article in this section cites it as the 1880 line.