f 
I 
Nov. 27, 1909.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
853 
very abundant in Massachusetts, where many 
years ago I saw a skin taken at Mt. Tom about 
1848 or ’49. 
Wm. Brewster, in his admirable volume on 
the “Birds of the Cambridge Region of Massa¬ 
chusetts,” published in 1906, as No. IV. of the 
Memoirs of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, 
has gathered much interesting information con¬ 
cerning the turkey in Eastern Massachusetts 
and in Maine. He says: 
“Morton, referring no doubt to his experience 
at Merrymount, now Wollaston, only a few miles 
south of the Cambridge region, where he lived 
from 1625 to 1628, and again in 1629 and 30, says: 
Great flocks (of turkeys) have Tallied by our 
ioores; ... I had a Salvage who hath taken out 
iis boy in a morning, and they have brought home 
heir loades about noone. I have afked them 
what number they found 
n the woods, who have 
mfwered, Neent Metawna, 
which is a thofand that 
lay.’ Wood confirms this 
>y stating that ‘fometimes 
here will be forty, three 
core, and an hundred of 
a flocke, fometimes more 
nd fometimes leffe; 
heir feeding is Acornes, 
fawes and Berries, fome 
f them get a haunt to 
requent our Engli/h corne : 
n Winter when the Snow 
overs the ground they re- 
ort to the Seafhore to 
ooke for Shrimps and fuch 
! mall Fifhes at low tides, 
uch as love Turkie hunt- 
lg muft follow it in Win- 
■r after a new falne Snow, 
hen he may follow them 
V their tracts; fome have 
idled ten or a dozen in 
Mfe a day; if they can be 
)und towards an evening 
id watched where they 
:irch, if one come about 
n or eleaven of the clocke 
may Jhoote as often as he will, they will 
unleffe they be flenderly wounded. Thefe 
irkie remaine al the yeare long, the price 
1 a good Turkie cocke is foure fhillings; 
fd he is well worth it for he may be 
i weight 40 pound; a Hen two fhillings.’ 
i’Slyn mentions seeing, probably at Black Point 
low Scarborough), Maine, ‘threefcore broods 
young Turkies on the fide of a Marfh, fun- 
ig of themfelves in a morning betimes, but 
s was thirty years fince [in 1638 or 1639], 
•' Engli/h and the Indian having now. [1671] 
troyed the breed, fo that ’tis very rare to 
et with a wild Turkie in the Woods.’ 
That the species was formerly found through- 
> the Cambridge region, there can be no rea- 
1 iable doubt. Turkey Hill in A.rlington may 
"11 have derived its name from the presence 
Ire of this noble bird in early Colonial days, 
leed, Mr. Walter Faxon writes me that an ac- 
I intance of his has seen ‘in a manuscript diary 
1 the ancestor of an Arlington man ... an 
ry of killing some Wild Turkeys in the re- 
n about Turkey Hill.’ At Concord, less than 
< miles further inland, the species had not 
‘ome wholly extinct 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 ex¬ 
peditions 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 Con¬ 
cord 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 ef- 
WILD TURKEY COCK STRUTTING. 
fectively, it is probable that his experience with 
the Wild Turkey happened sometime between 
1808 and 1815.” 
The turkey was abundant in the southwestern 
portions of the province of Ontario and oc¬ 
curred through much of New York, in Penn¬ 
sylvania and Ohio, from which last State it has 
been exterminated in comparatively recent years. 
It is said that a few turkeys still linger 
in Pennsylvania. Michigan, Wisconsin, South¬ 
ern Minnesota and Iowa all once had turkeys 
enough. They were abundant in Nebraska, 
reaching beyond th.e northern boundary of the 
State, for Capt. W. L. Carpenter found turkeys 
on the Niobrara River and Dr. Coues speaks 
of good evidence of their occurrence as far 
north as Yankton on the Missouri—about the 
same latitude as the mouth of the Niobrara. It 
is well understood that the turkey was fairly 
abundant on many streams flowing into the 
Missouri or its tributaries south of the Platte 
River, and undoubtedly they worked up many 
of these streams into the mountains. Indians 
in whom I have confidence have told me of 
killing turkeys on tributaries of the South 
Platte in the mountains west of where Denver 
now stands. From that point south Merriam’s 
turkey was undoubtedly abundant in the moun¬ 
tains. The turkey found on the plains to the 
south of the Platte, westward until the moun¬ 
tains are reached, is presumably the eastern 
form (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris ). 
Capt. L. H. North, who as a little boy moved 
with his family into Nebraska in the year 1856, 
says of the streams in eastern central Nebraska 
forty or fifty years ago: 
There were a good many wild turkeys here 
on the Loup River, the Elkhorn and Shell Creek 
when we came here. Ed. Chambers tells me 
they were often seen on the Niobrara River in 
early days—say in 1877. I do not recall that 
any turkeys were seen when the Pawnee scouts 
were out in 1867, guarding the track layers on 
the plains toward the mountains, but at that time 
turkeys were found on the 
Platte River near old Ft. 
McPherson—not far below 
the forks of the Platte.” 
In August, 1909, Forest 
and Stream printed a let¬ 
ter from me inquiring as 
to the western range of 
the wild turkey. This in¬ 
quiry brought out some ex¬ 
tremely interesting infor¬ 
mation which indicates that 
the former range of the 
turkey extended regularly 
to South Dakota. In my 
letter I asked what the 
northern and western range 
of the turkey was, and 
whether any of Forest and 
Stream’s correspondents 
had ever known of its 
being found in the Black 
Hills. In response to this 
Sandy Griswold, of Omaha, 
Neb., sent to Forest and 
Stream a letter from which 
I quote the essential para¬ 
graphs : 
“The query whether wild 
turkeys ever got as far 
west as the Black Hills I am unable to answer; 
I do know, however, that no longer ago than 
1894 they had found their way as far as the 
foothills this side of the Black Hills in South 
Dakota. 
I was camped on the Lake Creek marshes 
that fall, duck shooting, and on the third of 
November Alfred Reshaw, a young halfbreed 
Sioux, who was one of our camp helpers and 
guides, killed a twenty-one-pound black and tan 
turkey in the -scraggy pine hills along White 
River twenty miles north of our camp and forty- 
five or fifty miles this side of the Black Hills. 
He killed the bird flying from out of a bunch 
of five which he had jumped from a patch of 
ground cherries on one of the bluffs. He knew 
what the birds were, as he and his brother had 
killed several the previous winter in the same 
vicinity. 
“Two days later Alfred, the late George W. 
Scribner, of San Francisco, and I went to White 
River where the Sioux had killed his gobbler, 
and although we hunted assiduously for hours 
up and down on both sides of the river, we 
found no turkey. We did find plenty of sign, 
however, in almost every rose thicket and among 
