86 PIGEONS AND DOVES 



and stuffed specimens, are all that remain to show for the 

 uncountable millions of Pigeons that swarmed over the United 

 States only yesterday, as it were! 



There is no doubt about where those millions have gone. 

 They went down and out by systematic, wholesale slaughter 

 for the market and the pot, before the shotguns, clubs and 

 nets of the earliest American pot-hunters. Wherever they 

 nested they were slaughtered. 



It is a long and shameful story, but the grisly skeleton of 

 its Michigan chapter can be set forth in a few words. In 

 1869, from the town of Hartford, Michigan, three car-loads 

 of dead Pigeons were shipped to market each day for forty 

 days, making a total of 11,880,000 birds. It is recorded that 

 another Michigan town marketed 15,840,000 in two years. 

 (See Mr. W. B. Mershon's book, "The Passenger Pigeon.") 



Alexander Wilson, the pioneer American ornithologist, 

 was the man who seriously endeavored to estimate by com- 

 putations the total number of Passenger Pigeons in one flock 

 that was seen by him. Here is what he has said in his "Amer- 

 ican Ornithology": 



"To form a rough estimate of the daily consumption of 

 one of these immense flocks, let us first attempt to calculate 

 the numbers of that above mentioned, as seen in passing be- 

 tween Frankfort and the Indiana Territory. If we suppose 

 this column to have been one mile in breadth (and I believe 

 it to have been much more) and that it moved at the rate of 

 one mile in a minute, four hours, the time it continued passing, 

 would make its whole length two hundred and forty miles. 

 Again, supposing that each square yard of this moving body 



