The regular shipments by rail before the party commenced operations
were sixty barrels per day. On the 16th of April, just after our
arrival, they fell to thirty-five barrels, and on the 17th down to
twenty barrels per day, while on the 22d the shipments were only eight
barrels of pigeons. On the Sunday previous there were shipped by
steamer to Chicago 128 barrels of dead birds and 108 crates of live
birds. On the next Sabbath following our arrival the shipments were
only forty-three barrels and fifty-two crates. Thus it will be seen
that some little good was accomplished, but that little was included
in a very few days of the season, for the treasury of the home clubs
would not admit of keeping their representatives longer at the nesting,
the State clubs, save one, did not respond to the call for assistance,
and the men were recalled, after which the Indians went back into the
nesting, and the wanton crusade was renewed by pigeoners and all hands
with an energy which indicated a determination to make up for lost time.
The first shipment of birds from Petoskey was upon March 22, and the
last upon August 12, making over twenty weeks, or five months, that the
bird war was carried on. For many weeks the railroad shipments averaged
fifty barrels of dead birds per day--thirty to forty dozen old birds
and about fifty dozen squabs being packed in a barrel. Allowing 500
birds to a barrel, and averaging the entire shipments for the season at
twenty-five barrels per day, we find the rail shipments to have been
12,500 dead birds daily, or 1,500,000 for the summer. Of live birds
there were shipped 1,116 crates, six dozen per crate, or 80,352 birds.
These were the rail shipments only, and not including the cargoes by
steamers from Petoskey, Cheboygan, Cross Village and other lake ports,
which were as many more. Added to this were the daily express shipments
in bags and boxes, the wagon loads hauled away by the shotgun brigade,
the thousands of dead and wounded ones not secured, and the myriads of
squabs dead in the nest by trapping off of the parent birds soon after
hatching (for a young pigeon will surely die if deprived of its parents
during the first week of its life), and we have at the lowest possible
estimate a grand total of 1,000,000,000 pigeons sacrificed to Mammon
during the nesting of 1878.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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