On the Natchez Trace, not far below Mathiston, one passes a historic marker for Pigeon Roost and Pigeon Roost Creek.
It was the home of the Folsoms, a prominent Choctaw family in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Several of the Folsom children in the 1820s even attended Franklin Academy in Columbus. Those who stop to read the marker also learn a bit of all but forgotten local natural history. The marker tells how Pigeon Roost Creek is “a reminder of the millions of migrating passenger pigeons that once roosted in trees in this area.”
The passenger pigeon was an American bird once so numerous that the passing overhead of a flock of them was said to blacken the sky for hours or even, by a few accounts, for days. “Pigeon Roost Creek” on the Natchez Trace near Mathiston is a reminder of the millions of migrating passenger pigeons that once roosted in Mississippi trees. In the 1820s their numbers were estimated at between 3 and 5 billion and John Audubon described the sound of an approaching flock of pigeons as “the sound of distant thunder.”
The wild pigeon roosts were a gathering place for Native American hunters during the roosting season when the huge flocks were present. Among the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians of Mississippi it was exceeded in importance only by the turkey. The bird eggs were specially mentioned by the Indians as a popular food. (About 20 years ago the late Dr. Harry Sherman showed me a passenger pigeon egg in a collection at MUWs Plymouth Bluff Center.)
Gideon Lincecum after traveling across Alabama in 1818 wrote, “The entire forest was alive with wild pigeons, but nobody troubled them.”
To the Indians and early settlers, passenger pigeons were a source of food but not the subject of senseless slaughter. In the late 1700s and very early 1800s, there was not the heavy pressure of over hunting or habitat loss to threaten the wild pigeon population.
Because millions of birds would roost in a single location, surrounding crops and forests were decimated. The migrations of the pigeons must have been a sight to behold. An 1821 report described flocks of pigeons as being tens of miles long. A later description told of the birds flying for long periods “at the rate of a mile in a minute.” John Audubon observed the damage done to a forest that had served as a roost. “Many trees … were broken off at no great distance from the ground, and the branches of many of the largest and tallest had given way, as if the forest had been swept by a tornado.”
The 1890 edition of “The Encyclopedia Britannica” recorded that, at one time, “Passenger-Pigeons so swarmed and ravaged the colonists’ crops near Montreal that a bishop of his own church was constrained to exorcise them with holy water, as if they had been demons.”
That destruction in roosting areas and of crops resulted in a continuous senseless slaughter, a destruction of habitat and a disruption of the birds roosting. In the 1850s people were still in awe of their sheer numbers as the birds migrated but by the 1870s, articles began appearing about the quickly diminishing size of the passing flocks. By the 1890s they were rare, and by 1900 wild passenger pigeons were no more. In a period of less than 75 years, passenger pigeons had gone from a population of billions to extinction.
Perhaps Audubon’s most telling description was of the slaughter of the birds at a roost on the Green River in Kentucky. “A great number of persons with horses, and wagons, guns and ammunition” had arrived from as far away as a hundred miles. Two farmers even brought three hundred hogs to feed on the birds. The armed rabble shot birds and struck at birds with poles and continued their assault on the roost through the night, with the forest lit by huge bonfires. Audubon also recalled a hunt in Pennsylvania where a single man with a net caught and killed over “five hundred dozen” birds in a single day. It was probably such disruptions of roosting areas that contributed the most to the pigeons’ demise as the birds were unable to nest.
The last wild passenger pigeon was said to have been shot and killed on April 2, 1902, and the last known living one died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The rapid passing of the birds that were once also known as the wild American pigeon is one of the more disturbing stories of American natural history. It is a story of extinction that, as evidenced by the Pigeon Roost historic marker on the Natchez Trace just south of Mathiston, is as much a local story as a national one.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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