USA > Pennsylvania > Progressive Pennsylvania; a record of the remarkable industrial development of the Keystone state, with some account of its early and its later transportation systems, its early settlers, and its prominent men > Part 9
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Pennsylvania is also fortunate in having beautiful In- dian names for most of its rivers-Lehigh, Lackawanna, Susquehanna, Juniata, Conestoga, Conemaugh, Loyalhanna, Catawissa, Youghiogheny, Monongahela, Allegheny, Kiski- minitas, Ohio, and many others. The names of the rivers of the State are not only euphonious but they wisely preserve the memory of the Indians who lived upon their banks. Indian names have also been given to many Penn- sylvania towns and cities-Hokendauqua, Catasauqua, Kittanning, Allegheny, Aliquippa, Monongahela, and others.
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CHAPTER VIII. ANIMAL LIFE IN PENNSYLVANIA.
NEITHER the Indians nor their predecessors, that mys- terious people the Mound Builders, were the first inhabit- ants of Pennsylvania. The beasts of the forest, the birds, the wild fowl, and the fish in the streams were here before these primitive people and they were important factors in the settlement of Penn's province, because they helped materially to furnish food for the first settlers while they were building their homes and opening their farms. The flesh of most of the wild animals that were found in the forests of Pennsylvania, the turkeys and other wild fowl, and the fish were really essential to the very life of the settlers. Penn and other writers in the pioneer age of Pennsylvania repeatedly called attention in their letters to the animal life of the province as an attraction worthy to be mentioned in connection with its fruitful soil and its magnificent forests. They dwelt upon the abundance of elks, deer, bears, squirrels, rabbits, and other animals that were fit for food, and of turkeys and other wild fowl and of all kinds of fish. Wild fruits and nuts also added their stores to the general stock of native food supplies. Plums, grapes, pawpaws, haws, and berries were to be found in many places, while the black and white walnut, the chestnut, and the hickory yielded nutritious nuts in profusion. Indian corn could be grown the first season from seed that was readily obtained from the friendly Delawares. The early settlers and the frontiersmen after them could not want for food to supply their needs. A study of the animal and vegetable life of the colonies will show that no other colony was as rich as Pennsylvania in indigenous life-supporting products of the forest and river. Dismissing the native vegetable products of Pennsylvania there are some details of its native animal life that are worthy of attention.
Penn mentions the elk in his enumeration of the native
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animals of Pennsylvania, particularly indicating its pres- ence in the Susquehanna valley. This noble representa- tive of the deer family in Pennsylvania seems, however, to have been most numerous in the northern and north- western sections of the province. One of the northwestern counties of Pennsylvania is called Elk county. Hundreds of elks have been killed in this county and in adjoining counties. There is an Elk run in Tioga county, and there are Elk townships in Tioga and Warren counties and an Elklick township in Somerset county. Elk licks were numerous in Western and Northwestern Pennsylvania in the early days of the province. In Stone and Cram's American Animals (1902) it is said that "in the Eastern States the elk seems to have lingered longest in the wilds of Central Pennsylvania, and men are still living who can remember the killing of the last elk of their several locali- ties about fifty years ago." Another authority says that "the last elk in Potter county was killed in 1856." Mc- Knight says that the last elk killed in Pennsylvania was shot in 1864 "near the Clarion river" by Jim Jacobs, an Indian, but another antiquarian says that the year was 1867. Rhoads says that in the years 1831 to 1837 Seth I. Nelson, a hunter, killed 22 elks in Clinton, Potter, Tioga, and Lycoming counties. The moose does not seem to have inhabited Pennsylvania at any time.
The common varieties of the deer family were found by the early settlers in every part of Pennsylvania, and deer are still found in all the wild and unsettled parts of the State. As they are protected by the laws in certain seasons of the year they would increase rapidly but for the license given to hunters to destroy them in other sea- sons, not for food, as was necessary and justifiable in the early days, but to gratify a senseless desire to kill these beautiful creatures. One thousand deer were killed in Pennsylvania in 1904. Some of our deerslayers appear to be actuated entirely by no other motive than that which leads an Englishman of a certain class to say to his guest : "This is a fine day ; let us go out and kill something." It is not at all likely, however, that deer will become extinct in Pennsylvania, as at least three parks for their
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preservation have been established by public-spirited citi- zens-one in Monroe county, one in Carbon county, and one in Centre county. There are probably others.
While the skins of the deer were largely used by the Pennsylvania pioneers for clothing and for other purposes, as they had been by the Indians, many fur-bearing ani- mals were found in every part of the province and their skins contributed to the comfort of these pioneers-bears, beavers, otters, raccoons, opossums, weasels, minks, squir- rels, muskrats, and others. The furs of some of these animals also formed from the first important articles of trade with the Indians and with foreign countries. Brown and black bears were found in considerable numbers in the mountain districts of Pennsylvania, and the beavers appear to have been active on the streams in every part of the province. The trade in beaver skins formed the most important part of the fur trade of the colonists. The otter, with its fine fur, was more rare than the beaver, but the other and smaller fur-bearing animals were every- where. Every one of the animals mentioned is still to be found in Pennsylvania. Both brown and black bears are killed every year. The otter still lingers in some of the streams in the northern part of the State. It could be found in Pike county only a few years ago, and otters were numerous in Monroe county ten or fifteen years ago. There is at least one colony of beavers in the northeast- ern part of Pennsylvania. A lone beaver was seen by W. C. McHenry in September, 1899, swimming on the Beaver Dam branch of the South Fork of the Conemaugh river in Cambria county. Squirrels are abundant, and the other animals mentioned are very far from being extinct.
Otters were still found on some of the streams of Southwestern Pennsylvania not many years ago. We have received a circumstantial account of their presence on Redstone creek, which empties into the Monongahela just below Brownsville. A letter from George W. Kelley, of Grindstone, Fayette county, to Dr. J. S. Van Voorhis, of Bellevernon, in the same county, dated September 4, 1905, the original of which is lying before us, gives the following details : "With reference to the otters that I
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killed on Redstone creek I will give you exact data of each as I killed them. February 15, 1873, I shot the first one near the old Parkhill mill, and on March 5 shot the sec- ond one at the same place. On March 3, 1879, I shot the third one in Cook's dam, two miles above. On January 25, 1881, I shot the fourth one near the Parkhill mill-a large one that weighed 25 pounds. On March 6, 1881, I shot a very large one, weighing over 30 pounds. Its hide, after being stretched, measured 5 feet 2} inches from tip to tip. On February 27, 1883, I shot the sixth otter. Otters have been known in the Monongahela and Youghi- ogheny valleys for a number of years. At the present time there are otters in Dunlap's creek, but none in Red- stone creek, as there are no fish left in that stream." Dunlap's creek empties into the Monongahela about one mile above the mouth of Redstone.
The colony of beavers in Pennsylvania above referred to, and the only one of which we have any knowledge, was in existence in 1903 near Stroudsburg, in Monroe county, on the farm of Judge James Edinger. The judge had carefully protected the colony from all molestation. The New York Tribune for July 5, 1903, says that "Judge Edinger had a law passed at the last session of the Penn- sylvania Legislature for the protection of the beavers. The law provides a fine of $100 or imprisonment for one hundred days for each beaver killed with a gun or caught with a trap, or for having one of the animals in posses- sion, dead or alive." The Monroe county colony is not numerous. It had only recently made its appearance and had built a dam near the site of a beaver dam that was built over a hundred years ago. A letter from Judge Edinger in September, 1907, says that "the beavers are still here and have done considerable cutting this fall."
The early settlers of Pennsylvania found many animals in the forests that were troublesome neighbors and others that were really to be dreaded. Some of these animals, including the bears, have already been mentioned, and to these may be added foxes, panthers, wild cats, and wolves, all of which, except possibly panthers, are still to be found in some of the thinly settled sections of the State. The
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newspapers of Pennsylvania contain frequent references to encounters with bears and wild cats, especially in the winter season. In 1903 Joseph Hoffman, who lived near Hazleton, in Luzerne county, killed one of two wolves, and in 1908 another wolf was killed near Hazleton. In 1897 "a mammoth gray wolf" was caught in a steel trap in Somerset county by an old man, Jonathan Queer. In January, 1908, "a large timber wolf" was killed in Greene county. In March, 1904, the commissioners of Cambria county paid bounties on fifty-two pairs of foxes' ears which had been cut from foxes captured in that county during the first seventeen days of that month. In August, 1907, it was stated that Henry Stock, a hunter in Rush township, Dauphin county, had killed sixty-five foxes and fifty-six minks between May 5 and July 31. The wood- chuck, or groundhog, is still here, and the porcupine, or hedgehog, is occasionally seen. One of these latter was killed near Geistown, in Cambria county, in 1903. A pan- ther was shot in the northern part of Somerset county about 1865. It was a huge, tiger-like animal, which had carried off bodily a full-grown sheep from a pen in which it had been confined. A male and female panther were killed in Clinton county in 1871.
The feathered inhabitants of Pennsylvania when the white settlers first came to the Delaware were not only found in great variety but in great numbers. We can not learn that any of the species or varieties which were then represented in the forests or lowlands of Pennsylvania or on the bosom of its rivers have entirely disappeared, not even excepting the wild pigeons. Occasional specimens of that noblest of all American birds, the wild turkey, are still to be found in Pennsylvania. In October, 1904, " boys living near New Baltimore, at the foot of the Alle- gheny mountains, located twenty wild turkeys and shot seventeen." In November of the same year a dispatch from Williamsport said that "wild turkeys are plentiful in Lycoming county, and sportsmen have been bagging them daily since the opening of the season." A wild gobbler was killed in Bedford county in the same year. In October, 1906, a dispatch from Connellsville said that
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"the first wild turkey killed in this section this season was brought down on Savage mountain last evening. The bird was a 19} pound gobbler." The eagle is occasionally seen in Pennsylvania, but it is still rarer than the wild turkey. Pheasants and partridges, wild ducks and wild geese, swans and loons, herons, and crows and hawks and owls are still with us. A large blue heron was captured in Tioga county a few years ago. A swan was shot near Wilmore, in Cambria county, about five years ago.
Wild pigeons were very numerous when Penn first visited his province. Janney quotes the following account of them: " The wild pigeons came in such numbers that the air was sometimes darkened by their flight, and fly- ing low those that had no other means to take them some- times supplied themselves by throwing at them as they flew and salting up what they could not eat ; they served them for bread and meat in one. They were thus sup- plied, at times, for the first two or three years, by which time they had raised sufficient out of the ground by their own labor." Proud says that the wild pigeons were knocked down with long poles in the hands of men and boys. Wollenweber gives a humorous account of the com- motion caused in Berks county about the middle of the last century by an immense flock of wild pigeons. The pigeons created "a dreadful noise" just before daylight which greatly excited the fears of the superstitious, who believed that a great calamity was impending.
Wild pigeons have repeatedly blackened the skies of Pennsylvania within the memory of persons now living. They appeared in Cambria county on January 1, 1876. The Johnstown Tribune for Monday, January 3, of that year, said : "On Saturday there were immense flocks of wild pigeons flying over town, but yesterday it seemed as if all the birds of this kind at present in existence throughout the entire country were engaged in gyrating around overhead. One flock was declared to be at least three miles in length by half a mile wide. To-day the wild birds were again on the wing, and a perfect fusillade was kept up for a time on neighboring hills." On January 4 the same paper said : "There were a number of flocks
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of wild pigeons on the wing again this morning, and a great many local sportsmen ascended neighboring hills for the purpose of securing a mess of the birds. These pigeons are in excellent condition, and while the craws of some are filled with rice there are many others which have been luxuriating on beech nuts." On January 31 the Tribune further said : "Near the farm of Mr. Reynolds, along toward the headwaters of the South Fork, there is what is called a 'pigeon roost,' which means that an immense flock of wild pigeons has located in that place ; and although all fly away during the daytime for food and water yet they return early in the evening. Stout limbs on some of the trees were actually broken off by the weight of the birds, which pile one on top of another until it would seem that a pyramid of pigeons had been erected from a point where the first branches project clear to the very top." In the fall of 1878 wild pigeons again appeared in the southern part of Cambria county, but they were not so numerous as in 1876.
Wild honey was one of the food supplies of the early settlers of Pennsylvania. The bees, which were originally swarms from hives that had been imported, would deposit their honey in hollow trees, which, when found, would be secured by the settlers by cutting down the trees. Until the present day "bee trees" in the mountains of Penn- sylvania have yielded vast stores of wild honey. In 1903 a bee tree was cut down in Clearfield county which con- tained 200 pounds of honey. The combs in this tree are said to have been eight feet long. Another bee tree in Western Pennsylvania yielded 94 pounds of honey in 1906. The magnificent sugar maples of that section of the State soon supplied the pioneers with maple sugar, which be- came an important article of commerce for transportation to the eastern part of the State a hundred years ago.
The fish of Pennsylvania which were found in such abundance in colonial days are rapidly disappearing, ow- ing more to the pollution of the streams than to the work of the fishermen. In most of the streams of the State fish in appreciable numbers are no longer to be found, but in the first half of the last century they were
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filled with the choicest of fish. In the Susquehanna and Juniata rivers shad were caught in the spring of the year in large numbers. They are still caught in these streams and in the Delaware, a few shad having been taken in the Juniata in 1907. Trout were once caught in every part of the State. West of the Alleghenies pike were found in all the large streams, some of them attaining a weight of 20 and 25 and even 30 pounds. In the Cono- quenessing creek, in Butler county, about 1880, United States Marshal Stephen P. Stone, of Beaver, caught a pike which weighed 23 pounds. Catfish, black bass, perch, suckers, and mullets were found in the streams of Penn- sylvania and are still caught. Herring are still taken in the Delaware. In the Ohio river below Pittsburgh cat- fish, sturgeon, and some other fish of large size are less numerous than formerly. Eels are still found in the Sus- quehanna and Juniata rivers and in some other streams east of the Alleghenies. In the streams west of the Alle- ghenies in Pennsylvania few eels have ever been found. Successful efforts are being made to replenish the streams of Pennsylvania with bass and other fish.
As relevant to the industrial history of Pennsylvania the foregoing summary of the native food products which contributed to the support of the Indians and afterwards to the support of the early settlers and of the pioneers who pushed into the central and western parts of the province, and also such mention as we have made of the fur-bearing animals, properly find a place in this volume. In the next chapter the most interesting of all the animals of provincial Pennsylvania will be considered.
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CHAPTER IX.
BUFFALOES IN PENNSYLVANIA.
IT is a curious fact that the existence of the buffalo in Pennsylvania in colonial times or at any time before the coming of the white settlers can not be proved by any evidence based on the preservation of buffalo skulls or whole skeletons which have been found within the borders of the State. They are not to be seen anywhere. Professor Spencer F. Baird has mentioned the existence of fossil remains found near Carlisle which he says may have been buffalo bones. Other authorities definitely record the finding of buffalo bones in Pennsylvania. In Rhoads's Mammals of Pennsylvania and New Jersey (1903) he men- tions buffalo bones which have been found in Pennsylva- nia and are preserved at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Other proofs that the buffalo once ex- isted in this State are abundant.
Early French explorers in the region south of the Great Lakes mention the presence of "wild bulls," "wild beeves," and "vast herds of wild cattle" in the territory they visited, and some of these buffaloes were seen on the southern shore of Lake Erie, which would include Penn- sylvania. Vaudreuil, describing this lake in 1718, says : "There is no need of fasting on either side of this lake ; deer are to be found there in great abundance; buffaloes are found on the south but not on the north side." Colo- nel James Smith was captured by the Indians in Penn- sylvania in 1755, when a boy, and taken to Ohio, where he remained a captive until 1759. Forty years after his release he published a circumstantial account of his cap- tivity, which is an American classic. In this account Colo- nel Smith frequently mentions buffaloes as forming part of the staple diet of the Indians with whom he lived in the eastern part of Ohio. He killed one himself. In 1770 Washington visited what is now known as West Virginia, and in the journal of his trip he speaks of receiving from
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"an old acquaintance," Kyashuta, "a quarter of very fine buffalo." He also mentions a buffalo path, "the tracks of which we saw." On November 2, recording his explora- tion of the Great Kanawha river, he writes : "Killed five buffaloes and wounded some others, three deer, &c. This country abounds in buffaloes." He says of a creek near which he encamped that "on this creek are many buffa- loes, according to the Indians' account." In 1784 Wash- ington paid a visit to Western Maryland, Western Penn- sylvania, and what is now West Virginia, and in his diary of that journey he refers to buffalo paths and salt licks frequented by buffaloes in the vicinity of Morgantown, which is only a few miles south of the Pennsylvania line.
When a young man, soon after the close of the Revo- lution, Albert Gallatin was engaged in land explorations in the western part of Virginia. In an article on the In- dians and their means of subsistence, contributed by Mr. Gallatin in 1848 to the Transactions of the American Eth- nological Society, that eminent man, referring to buffaloes, says : "The name of Buffalo creek, between Pittsburgh and Wheeling, proves that they had spread thus far east- wardly when that country was first visited by the Anglo- American. In my time (1784-1785) they were abundant on the southern side of the Ohio, between the Great and the Little Kanawha. I have during eight months lived principally on their flesh." He also says of the buffa- loes that "they had at a former period penetrated east of the Allegheny mountains."
Dr. Bausman, in his History of Beaver County, Pennsyl- vania, quotes Colonel Brodhead as writing to Washington in 1780 that he is "sending hunters to the Little Ke- nawha to kill buffaloes," and in Craig's History of Pitts- burgh we read that Colonel Brodhead, in a letter to Rev. D. Zeisberger, under date of December 2, 1780, “proposes that he should send fifteen or twenty best hunters to Little Kenhawa, to kill buffalo, elks, and bears, to be salted down in canoes made for that purpose." Dr. Baus- man also quotes this passage from Schoolcraft : " There was added for all the region west of the Alleghenies the bison of the West (Bos Americanus), the prominent object
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and glory of the chase for the tribes of these latitudes." The common name of bison is buffalo.
In General Peter Muhlenberg's journal of his trip to the Falls of Ohio in 1784 he writes, under date of April 5, that the boat on which he had taken passage on the Ohio river "came to shore on the Indian side," the Ohio side, where "a hunting party turned out and killed one buffalo and one deer, but both very poor." On the 6th the general writes that his boat again landed "on the In- dian shore" and adds that "we killed three buffaloes but found them too poor to eat, so that we determined to kill no more." He further says that "the winter must have been very severe here and hard for the game, as we have this day found several deer, one bear, and four buffaloes dead in the woods which seem to have perished through want." This is the latest reference to the presence of buf- faloes in Ohio that we have seen.
The foregoing quotations justify beyond all doubt the inference that the buffalo was an inhabitant at least of Western Pennsylvania. It is not to be presumed that it would frequent the territory immediately west and south of Pennsylvania and not cross over the boundary lines.
That buffaloes frequented the salt springs in North- western Pennsylvania is shown in the following extract from a letter written by the English traveler, Thomas Ashe, at Erie, in April, 1806. He says : "An old man, one of the first settlers in this country, built his log house on the borders of a salt spring. He informed me that for the first several seasons the buffaloes paid him their visits regularly." He supposed that there were no less than 10,000 in the neighborhood of the spring. Ashe further says that in. the first and second years this old man, with some companions, killed 600 or 700 of these noble crea- tures for the sake of their skins. He also says that buf- falo bones had been found in large quantities on Buffalo creek, but he does not locate the creek. Fort Le Bœuf, (Waterford,) in Erie county, Pennsylvania, established by the French about 1754, meant Buffalo Fort.
In his valuable monograph on The Extermination of the American Bison William T. Hornaday says that in the
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region between the Allegheny river and the west branch of the Susquehanna "there were at one time thousands of buffaloes." In support of this opinion he quotes from Professor J. A. Allen's American Bisons and from other monographs by the same author.
Professor Allen refers to Buffalo creek, "which emp- ties into the eastern end of Lake Erie," and to other evidences that buffaloes "once existed in Western New York." Hornaday adds that "from the eastern end of Lake Erie the boundary of the bison's habitat extends south into Western Pennsylvania to a marsh called Buf- falo swamp on a map published by Peter Kalm in 1771." He quotes Allen as saying of this swamp that it "is indi- cated as situated near the heads of the Licking and Toby's creeks, apparently the streams now called Oil creek and Clarion creek." It was in this locality that "there were at one time thousands of buffaloes."
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