184 THE PASSENGER PIGEON IN PENNSYLVANIA 



of pigeons in the big hemlocks at the head of Young 

 Woman's Creek, that county, when he peeled bark 

 there in the spring of 1892. Jonathan Auman, born 

 February 17, 1833, '^the Sage of ^linnick's Gap", in 

 Brush Valley, relates that in the fifties when in Illi- 

 nois he stopped one night with an aged couple who 

 resided in a great beech wood. The old lady wishing 

 to please the guest told him that she would give him 

 something ''extra fine" for supper. Carrying the 

 "tallow dip", the young man accompanied the dame to 

 the attic, where on cords hung hundreds and hundreds 

 of jerked wild pigeons' breasts. These made a de- 

 licious piece de resistance, being served and eaten like 

 the bultong of the South African Veldt. Dr. B. S. Bar- 

 ton in his "miscellanies" where he so vividly described 

 the vast flight of Carolina paroquets in a snowstorm, 

 which so frightened the superstitious Dutch settlers in 

 the Mohawk Valley, New York, in the winter of 1780, 

 tells of a mild winter in 1797. when passenger pigeons 

 remained about Philadelphia a^ late as February. 

 There was much sickness that winter, though the great 

 scientist does not intimate- that they were birds of ill 

 omen. ]\Tr. Hench, of Altoona, states that when a boy. 

 in Perry County, he saw many flocks of wild pigeons 

 in wheat planting season and saw their depredations of 

 the wheat fields. He tells of millions of pigeons roost- 

 ing: on the Alleghenv mountain, between Cambria and 

 Somerset counties as late as ]\Iarch first, 1875 or 1876. 



