290 AMERICAN GAME BIRD SHOOTING 
the Indian having now [1671] destroyed the breed, so 
that ’tis very rare to meet with a wild Turkie in the 
Woods.’ 
“That the species was formerly found throughout 
the Cambridge region, there can be no reasonable 
doubt. Turkey Hill in Arlington may well have de- 
rived its name from the presence there of this noble 
bird in early Colonial days. Indeed, Mr. Walter Faxon 
writes me that an acquaintance of his has seen ‘in a 
manuscript diary of the ancestor of an Arlington man 
...anentry of killing some Wild Turkeys in the region 
about Turkey Hill.’ At Concord, less than ten miles 
further inland, the species had not become wholly ex- 
tinct at the beginning of the past century. The late 
Steadman Buttrick of that town, a keen lover of field 
sports and a man of undoubted veracity, who died in 
1874, used to delight in narrating how, when a boy, 
he had made repeated but invariably fruitless expedi- 
tions in pursuit of the last wild turkey that is known 
to have lingered in the region about his home. He 
often saw the bird, a fine old gobbler, but it was so very 
wary that neither he nor any of the other Concord 
gunners of that day ever succeeded in getting a fair 
shot at it. It was in the habit of roosting in some tall 
pines on Ball’s Hill, whence, when disturbed, it usually 
flew for refuge into an extensive wooded swamp on 
the opposite (Bedford) side of Concord River. Mr. 
Buttrick was born in 1796. As he was presumably at 
least twelve or fifteen years of age before he began to 
use a gun effectively, it is probable that his experience 
