A Pleasant Bit of Natural History: “Knocking About the Rockies” by Ernest Ingersoll (1883)

 book review, Books, Landscape History, Natural History, Prehistory, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Sep 192022
 

The next fortnight was not productive of many adventures or noteworthy incidents, though it contained plenty of hard work. Our track led across into the head of the San Luis Park, and so on down to Saguache — a Mexican town near the Rio Grande. There was a pleasant bit of natural history picked up along here, though.

The plover of these interior valleys does not seem to care for marshes, like the most of his race, but haunts the dry uplands. It is closely related to the golden plover, and is named in books Aegialitis montanus. A flock of these plovers dropped down on the plain one day, and I determined to get them for dinner, if possible. Jumping off my horse — who would stand stock-still wherever I left him— I approached to where they had dropped, and finally caught sight of one by distinguishing the dark dot of its eye against the light-tinted surface of the ground. Even then I really could not follow with my eye the outline of the bird’s body, so closely did the colors of the plumage agree with the white sand and dry grass. I shot it ; then found another, shot that; and so on until all were killed, none of them flying away, because their ” instinct,” or habit of thought, had taught them that when danger threatened they must invariably keep quiet ; movement would be exposure, and exposure would be fatal. I and my gun formed a danger they had had no experience of, and here their inherited “instinct” was at fault. When I had shot them I was unable, with he most careful searching, to find all the dead birds.

Ernest Ingersol’s early book, Knocking About the Rockies, chronicles two trips he took into the Rockies (1874 and 1877), accompanying scientific and surveying expeditions. His flair for natural history (he would go on to write a dozen works in the “nature” realm, one previously covered in this blog, with several more awaiting reading) led me to this book and his subsequent one about travels by train through the Rockies (The Crest of the Continent, 1885). I eagerly anticipated observations and reflections on the wildlife of the region. And he delivered well, including several allusions to Thoreau. What I had not reckoned on was that many of them would take a culinary turn. Here, “a pleasant bit of natural history” includes identifying a new bird species and then shooting it for dinner. Or not even dinner. Maybe just as a specimen to observe more closely, or possibly just because his gun is handy?

Climbing a high point back of our tents, which were in the midst of a sage-brush flat, close to the river, I had a queer little bit of good luck one evening. It was just at nightfall, and as I reached the top a large owl came swooping down and perched on a crag some distance off. Drawing my revolver, I held it up and walked slowly nearer, expecting neither to get within range nor hit the bird if I fired; but he let me get so near that at last, about thirty yards off, I blazed away, and down came the owl. Rushing up, I could see him lying in the brush a little way below; but it was some time before I got courage enough to reach down and take hold of him, for a bite or talon-grasp from a wounded owl is no joke. He proved to be stone-dead, and it was a long time before I found out the bloodless wound, the bullet having gone in at the base of the skull and out of the open mouth, without tearing any of the feathers. He was a fine barred or “cat” owl, about two feet long.

I am sure the owl did not appreciate this “queer little bit of good luck”.

It is easy, in hindsight, to condemn this behavior in a would-be naturalist. Of course, the great bird illustrator John James Audubon shot all his bird specimens, too, attaching their lifeless bodies to branches in order to draw them. While one or more cameras accompanied these expeditions — several of the illustrations in the book are engravings from photographs — photography had not advanced enough yet to make close-up images of wildlife possible. The understood technique for close study of animals was to shoot them first. This was slowly changing, as birders began carrying opera glasses into the field instead. And Ingersoll, himself, would rein in his hunting proclivities in his later volumes. Finally, it is to be noted that, in order to travel light and save money, the expeditions carried little food, intending that protein needs be satisfied with hunting and trapping.

Now that we have gotten that aspect of this book out of the way, we can sit back and enjoy some lovely late 19th Century prose about the wilds of the Colorado Rockies (including some delightful geological terms). Here is Grand Lake as seen (more like imagined, actually) from a mountaintop, sounding truly grand indeed:

From this pinnacle, in daylight, there is visible a picture of blue mountains whose sharp, serrated outline indicates a portion of the main range in front of Long’s Peak. Among those immutable yet ever-changing bulwarks lies a lake in a circle of guardian peaks whose heads tower thousands of feet above it, and whose bases meet no one knows how far below the surface of its dark waters. It is Grand Lake, a spot taboo among Indians and mysterious to white men. The scenery is primeval and wild beyond description: Roundtop is one mountain at least that has suffered no desecration since the ice ploughed its furrowed sides. The lake itself lies in the trough of a glacier basin, and its western barrier is an old terminal moraine, striking evidences of glacial action occurring on all sides in the scored cliffs and lateral moraines that hem it in. Its extent is about two miles by three, and its greatest depth unfathomable with a line six hundred feet in length. The water is cold, and clear near the shore, but of inky blackness in the middle. In the reflection usually pictured upon its calm bosom all the cloud-crowned heads about it meet in solemn conclave; but not seldom, and with little warning, furious winds sweep down and lash its lazy waters till the waves vie with each other in terrible energy.

Ingersoll clearly had a passion for climbing peaks and gazing out upon the landscape from their heights. Here, he waxes religious in extolling the glories of just such an experience:

However interesting it might prove, time forbids even to suggest all that meets the eye and is implanted in the memory while one is sitting for two or three hours on a peak of the Rocky Mountains — the surprising clearness of the air, so that your vision penetrates a hundred and fifty miles; the steady gale of wind sucked up from the heated valleys ; the frost and lightning shattered fragments of rock incrusted with lichens, orange and green and drab and white; the miniature mountains and scheme of drainage spread before you; the bright blue and yellow mats of moss-blossoms ; the herds of big-horned sheep, unconscious of your watching; the hawks leisurely sailing their vast aerial circles level with your eye ; the shadows of the clouds chasing each other across the landscape; the clouds and the azure dome itself; the purple, snow-embroidered horizon of mountains, “upholding heaven, holding down earth.” I can no more express with leaden types the ineffable, intangible ghost and grace of such an experience than I can weigh out to you the ozone that empurples the dust raised by the play of the antelopes in yonder amethyst valley. Moses need have chosen no particular mountain whereon to receive his inspiration. The divine Heaven approaches very near all these peaks.

Not that Ingersoll found every experience on his travels filled him with awe and wonder. Here, he expresses quite different sentiments in a dark spruce forest in the mountains:

What a sombre world that of the pine-woods is! None of the cheerfulness of the ash and maple groves — the alternation of sunlight and changing shadow, rustling leaves and fragrant shrubbery underneath, variety of foliage and bark on which to rest the jaded eye, exciting curiosity and delight: only the straight, upright trunks; the colorless, dusty ground; the dense masses of dead green, each mass a repetition of another; the scraggy skeletons of dead trees, all their bare limbs drooping in lamentation. The sound of the wind in the pines is equally grewsome. If the breeze be light, you hear a low, melancholy monody; if stronger, a hushed kind of sighing; when the hurricane lays his hand upon them the groaning trees wail out in awful agony, and, racked beyond endurance, cast themselves headlong to the stony ground. At such times each particular fibre of the pine’s body seems resonant with pain, and the straining branches literally shriek. This is not mere fancy, but something quite different from anything to be observed in hardwood forests. There the tempest roars; here it howls. I do not think the idea of the Banshee spirits could have arisen elsewhere than among the pines ; nor that any mythology growing up among people inhabiting these forests could have omitted such supernatural beings from its theogony.

But do not conclude that the gloom of the pine-woods clouded our spirits. So many trees had fallen where our tents were pitched that the sunshine peered down there, and at night the moon looked in upon us, rising weirdly over a vista of dead and lonely tree-tops. Then, too, the brook was always singing in our ears — absolutely singing! The sound of the incessant tumble of the water and boiling of the eddies made a heavy undertone, like the surf of the sea; but the breaking of the current over the higher rocks and the leaping of the foam down the cataracts produced a distinctly musical sound — a mystical ringing of sweet-toned bells. There is no mistaking this metallic melody, this clashing of tiny cymbals, and it must be this miniature blithe harmony that fine ears have heard on the beach in summer where the surf breaks gently.

While Ingersoll viewed these mountains, forests, and grasslands with rapture, he also saw what would soon be. Observing extensive grasslands at the feet of the mountain peaks, Ingersoll remarked that “Here are the future pastures for millions of cattle, and they are sure to be occupied.” I find it strange that for all the natural beauty he witnessed, he seemed resigned to (or even somewhat enthusiastic about) a future in which the Rockies would be dramatically modified — and the bison would nearly go extinct.

The Most Delightful Things in Existence: “Little Beasts of Field and Wood” by William Everett Cram (1899)

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Natural History  3 Responses »
Jul 302022
 

As obscure nature authors go, William Everett Cram (1871-1947) is one of the most enigmatic. I know that he was an author and illustrator, identified in a long list of credible nature writers identified by Theodore Roosevelt during the Nature Faker Controversy (stay tuned to this blog for more about that). I know that he illustrated Witmer Stone’s American Animals, published in 1902. He also illustrated Charles Conrad Abbott’s Bird-Land Echoes(1896), which likely explains why Cram dedicated his own first book, Little Beasts of Field and Wood (1899) to Abbott. Cram would go on to publish a sequel with still more “little beasts” more than a decade later, and then Time and Change (described by one bookseller as “farming essays”) more than a decade after that. I know that he spent most of his life in New Hampshire, and that, as of August 15th, 1899 (when he penned the preface to his first work), he was living in Hampton Falls, along the coast just north of Seabrook.

I was intrigued by this title, though the book’s small size, cover design, and title made me fear at first that the work was aimed at children. Even given a potentially greater vocabulary of youngsters about 125 years ago compared to now, this book still strikes me as primarily geared for older youths and adults, however. Though it is a collection of animal profiles like those of Ernest Thompson Seaton, it is a far cry from his children’s tales (expect reviews of his work in the future, also). He opens the work with this keen observation:

To my thinking, the small beasts that still inhabit our woods have been altogether too much neglected by the student of nature, though really much nearer to us and much more easily comprehended than birds, when you have once succeeded in finding them. For that they are more difficult to observe than birds is undeniable.

Indeed, having read now in excess of 60 nature books, I can attest to the fact that most of the attention is usually given to birds and/or plants. Many of the animals in this book, such as otters and muskrats, rarely receive any attention whatsoever from other writers. Most of them received plenty of attention from trappers, though; in the case of minks, for instance, Cram noted that their wild numbers fluctuated inversely with how much their pelts were in style at the time. Indeed, Cram himself clearly hunted and trapped quite a few of his subjects. The book is entirely illustrated by him, and many of the animal poses suggest that they were drawn from dead specimens rather than live ones. Interestingly, Cram never mentions using an opera-glass (as the birders at the time largely did). He does speak frequently of reading animal tracks, and he also reports animal sightings relayed to him by other trappers. His own dedication to careful, patient observation is attested to by his noting that Thoreau himself saw few foxes, while Cram encountered them frequently. (He discounted the possibility that they were less abundant in Concord half a century earlier, though I would think that question merits further research.)

As I noted earlier, I found Cram enigmatic from the start. I sought to get to know him through this book, and for most of it, he remains quite aloof. His prose is consistently clear, but without sparkle; its workmanlike quality evokes most field guides I have viewed. So we will skip over most of the volume to its very last chapters, where he finally comes to life in reporting on the ways and habits of squirrels. Perhaps this is, in part, because squirrels were more commonplace about the home than, say, weasels would have been. And perhaps they are more endearing by nature. Whatever the cause, his fondness for squirrels (relative to foxes, in this case) is evident from the two images below. The one on the left is of a fox bringing food to its young; note in particular the manner and expressions of the pups. Compare that with the right-hand image, of a mother red squirrel stripping seeds from a pine cone while her two adorable offspring look on expectantly.

In one of my favorite passages, Cram notes about the red squirrel’s diet that it “seems to include pretty nearly everything that is ever eaten by any of our native animals. I have known them to find their way into the pantry of a farmhouse, and sample everything available, appearing to be par- ticularly well pleased with the custards.” I don’t know about Cram, but that is certainly a fondness I can identify with, myself.

But Cram saves his confessions of delight for the flying squirrels. While he notes that they seem to act “wholly upon instinct and without displaying the slightest symptom of intelligence”, he still confesses that “for all that, there are no more attractive or winning creatures in the woods. They never exhibit any marked symptoms of fear, but just cuddle up on a knot or projecting piece of bark only a few feet away, looking as if they would like nothing better than to be taken in the hand and petted.” He follows this declaration with a charming story from his grandparents (the first and only time they appear in this book):

I remember hearing my grandmother tell how one winter evening she was sitting before the fire, when my grandfather came home from the woods and taking off his coat threw it across a chair near the fireplace. Presently a flying squirrel crawled out of one of the pockets, sailed across the room to where she sat, and nestled contentedly in her hair, which she wore in a great fluffy mass piled high above her head. I cannot recall the sequel of the story, which was undoubtedly interesting, at all events to those chiefly concerned in it. No one ever knew exactly how the squirrel came to be in the coat, but it was supposed that a family of them must have been disturbed by the choppers in the woodlot and that this one had taken refuge in my grandfather’s pocket, probably bereft of what little wit it ever had by the noise of chopping and the crash of falling trees, and glad to find any retreat away from so rude a world. Perhaps it was only half awakened from its winter’s sleep, and dozed off again as soon as it found itself finally ensconced in the depths of the pocket, to be aroused later by the heat of the fire. I cannot help wondering what finally became of it, and just how much of an impression the adventure made upon its sleepy little brain, or whether it took it all as a matter of course, to be forgotten as soon as it was fairly back in the trees again. Perhaps I have run across some of its descendants in the woods or caught them in box-traps without mistrusting that their ancestor and mine had once been on such very intimate terms.

By the final paragraph of the book, Crum’s neutral tone has vanished completely:

It is now several years since I have seen a live flying squirrel, though there is no reason to suppose that they are any less abundant than formerly. I have rapped on hollow trees and pried into decaying logs and stumps on every occasion without discovering the sleepy little chaps I was in search of. But this sort of thing goes largely by chance after all, and to-morrow I may happen on them where I least expect it. I remember once climbing to a crow’s nest in a tall pine while the old birds wheeled and scolded overhead. When rather more than half-way to the top, I reached the place that I had seen from the ground, but was disappointed to find only a last year’s nest heaped up with dry leaves and pine-needles in such a way as to show that it had already been appropriated by squirrels. On investigation, I founds instead of red squirrels as I had expected, four or five little flying squirrels about half-grown. I only saw them for a few seconds at most, as they scrambled away in all directions and disappeared completely. But in those few seconds I became aware that young flying squirrels are simply the most delightful things in existence. And I still look forward to the time when I shall discover another family of them, without the slightest fear of being disenchanted.

In closing, a word about this volume. It bears only one small mark from its past: impressed into the back of the frontispiece is the single word, Gorman. Alas, it is not sufficient for tracking down the previous owner.

Jesus Was a Pantheist: “Walks in New England” by Charles Goodrich Whiting (1903)

 book review, Books, Day Hikes, Environmental conservation, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Jun 262022
 

If you happen to search this book by the title on Amazon or any purveyor of used and/or new books, you are likely to encounter quite a few hiking guides to New England. This is not one of them. The author, Charles Goodrich Whiting (1842-1922), lived and worked in the Springfield, Massachusetts area, and clearly spent many hours out-of-doors. Yet while he writes fondly of the natural landscape (particularly its botanical elements), he does not report on any actual walks he has taken. The frontispiece photo shows him taking a break on a hike up Mount Tom; a brief statement about the photographs (in stunning sepia) mentions “constant companions” that I assume accompanied his hikes; but only once does he report on an actual walk. Even then, all we know is that he and several others climbed the south side of Mount Tom one autumn, walking along the ridge and finding 56 wildflower species in bloom (the first BioBlitz?). Otherwise, there is an endless cavalcade of brief essays (few more than four pages) describing seasonal offerings, mostly plants in bloom at a given time. Blended into the volume are many poems, some enchanting (works of Emerson, Whitman, and Longfellow) and others less so (his own). The third ingredient of this book is a pious Christianity that sees the natural world through a highly positive, somewhat transcendental lens. If not obsessed with the question of death, Whiting certainly brings it up frequently, reminding the reader (and himself) over and over that it does not exist. The essays themselves are arranged in an arc of the seasons, from late winter back through to midwinter. Whiting was an editor for the Springfield Republican newspaper, and author of a Sunday column, “The Saunterer.” The essays in Walks in New England were likely compiled from several years’ worth of his columns. As a result, there is a fair bit of repetition; the same wildflower appears in bloom across multiple essays. One essay may speak of particular weather conditions, but the next essay might be from another year altogether. As a work of phenology, it could have been improved, at the minimum, by an indication of the original publication dates of each piece.

Did I mention that my copy of this book, once in the library of C. J. Peacock, had many uncut pages in it? Apparently, I am the first one to have read it from cover to cover in nearly 120 years.

Now that I have thoroughly disparaged the book, I will argue that it is one that bears closer scrutiny: his Christianity would hardly be called conventional, for one. And for another, his outlook on human civilization and its environmental impacts seems far more ecologically aware than I would have suspected in 1903.

“Jesus was a pantheist…he knew no space where God was not,” Whiting declared. And while the gnostic, pantheistic Jesus is recognized in some circles today, it was certainly not the conventional perspective on his nature at the time Whiting lived. There are glimmers of this Jesus in the four gospels of the New Testament; but mostly this is the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian scripture excluded from the New Testament as apocryphal. The 77th verse from that gospel reads, “Jesus said, ‘I am the light that shines upon all things. Indeed, I am all things. Everything comes from me, and everything returns to me. Whenever you split a log or turn over a stone, you can find me there.'” But Whiting’s spirituality does not stop there. Consider these passages from his book:

Let us open our eyes, our ears, our hearts to the great current of life, of which we are but a part, — how small a part or how great we cannot yet imagine…

The universe, from least atom to greatest concourse of atoms, from the simplest sensitiveness to the furthest reaches of man’s soul, is all one living being, of which man no less surely and no more truly than the amoeba is the expression…

All life is one; we are one with tree and shrub and flower, one with squirrel and bird, one even with the sinuous serpent…

On a mountain top dwells the vast Oversoul, and man accepts his place, and is silent…

Although Whiting cannot help but single out a serpent, this one is beneficent, a vital part of creation in which “everything in Nature has its value.” But alas, like Eden, this garden universe in which we exist as part of all that is also has a serpent in the darker sense. Where that evil arises, how harm can come from a part of all that is (a fragment of God?) is unaddressed. But it is there, and it is us. After another lovely passage about the beauty of Nature, Whiting interjects, “So goes on the life of earth, only interfered with by man, who does his worst to ruin and obliterate this constant impulse of life.” A few pages later, in a different essay, Whiting again disrupts a peaceful forest landscape to add social commentary: “…and as one drinks of the cold spring beneath the hemlocks, he partakes of the greatest blessing of Nature, the pure essence of her life, distilled through clouds and suns, and filtered through the channel of the holy earth, where as yet man has not arrived to delete and pollute with his many inventions.” Finally, here is one more passage of condemnation, with the added thought that what we do to nature we do ultimately to ourselves: “As for man, only he introduces a breach in the order of being, and destroys tree and flower and bird without respect to their offices, despoiling himself the worst of all.”

At various points, Whiting identifies several ways that humans have adversely impacted nature. One is deforestation; there are repeated references to “the woodsman’s axe”, and Whiting notes that almost all trees in the region are no older than 30 years. Another is air pollution, “the soft coal smoke that hangs over the valley,” an inevitable by-product of industrialization, and entirely unregulated at the time. The steam railroads, meanwhile, were sparking many fires along their routes. Yet another destructive force is the hunter:

Now all the forest regions would be full of squirrels, rabbits, foxes and others of their kin, — of grouse and woodcock, too, — were it not for the hunters, who almost outnumber the game. The woodland on our western hills abounded in these charming creatures, 40 years ago, but now there are probably more gray squirrels in Springfield streets than there are on Mount Tom or Mount Holyoke. It is probable that city protection may yet be the only means to preserve them.

But the worst of the hunters were those going after birds, mostly for the millinery trade. The result had been not only the decimation of many bird species but an ecological impact too, as Whiting explains:

In the state of Nature all these [insects] are kept in subjection by the birds, but since of late years the birds have been slaughered by wholesale to make women’s hats hideous, the balance is lost, and hence we have plagues of elm beetles, cottony louses, and gypsy and brown-tailed moths. Thousands of varieties of insects have found their proper food on trees from time immemorial, and might continue to do so without reminding us of the Plagues of Egypt, were it not for the women who want birds and feathers of birds on their hats… Why do they proclaim themselves murderers?

Dutch Elm Disease, spread by the elm beetle, arrived in the United States. Could it be that the depredation of birds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries helped enable this beetle to spread the blight more rapidly than otherwise would have been the case? Beyond this intriguing prospect, I have to admit that I am quite impressed by Whiting’s grasp of how food chains work, way back in 1903.

Finally, Whiting also appears to have decried in humanity what we would refer to today as a limited grasp of sustainability.

What has man been given reason for? Apparently, to make a dollar to-day. forgeting that generations are to come after him to whom this dollar will be valueless because long since expended, and whom his destruction of the very sources of life has left us poor indeed…

What the earth is to render, what society is to become, when we are gone, — these things are not sufficiently regarded by the present generation.

Wow. That sounds frightfully like our present situation. It is quite depressing, really. Whiting felt the same way. After a few pages indicting humanity for these crimes against Nature, he announces, “Let us try to escape from these difficult and dispiriting thoughts,” and returns to his descriptions of field and forest scenes. As T.S. Eliot would later observe in Burnt Norton, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Finally, about C.J. Peacock (not to be confused with J. Alfred Prufrock, also from T.S. Eliot): it turns out that another book from his collection ended up in the holdings of the University of Prince Edward Island, which happens to have established a program called Book Lives. It traces, wherever possible, the life stories of those who originally owned the books. In this case, C.J. Peacock was born in 1834 in Yorkshire, England. He apprenticed to become a draper (a very different “man of the cloth”) but ended up working as a dentist in Scarborough, England. He retired in 1911, but it is not known when he died or how his book made its journey back across the Atlantic Ocean.