One Came Home (25 page)

Commonly called wild pigeons, passenger pigeons were once so abundant on the North American continent that people did not even try to number them. Millions? Billions? No one knows for certain. Observers used words like “countless,” “great numbers,” and “infinite.” The pigeons flew in huge flocks that struck fear, wonder, and party-like giddiness
in spectators. But the birds that seemed infinite were proven finite when, in 1914, the last captive bird, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. And so the tale of the passenger pigeon became one of the great extinction stories of our time.

I recommend researching it for yourself. You’ll marvel. I did. I often raced off to find my husband, book in hand, to read some passage aloud. In the end, I decided these accounts sounded a lot more like science fiction than something from our not-so-distant past. Perhaps you’ll have similar feelings.

I do want to issue a warning, though. In the early source material, there is much misinformation about passenger pigeons, particularly about their habits (for instance, how many eggs they laid or how many nests they produced during mating season). A. W. Schorger spent twenty years (at least) researching passenger pigeons. He combed through over two thousand books and over ten thousand local newspapers, and he conducted interviews through correspondence and in person with people who had seen the pigeons firsthand. (Schorger did this work from the 1930s to the 1950s, long before the Internet might have helped him. It was a big job.) In 1955, he finally published his history. He wrote this in the preface to
The Passenger Pigeon:

As they say, forewarned is forearmed. This is good information for readers and writers alike! In the end, I decided to use Schorger’s history as my primary guide. Though I read secondary source material published more recently, I found none of it as helpful as Schorger’s book. That said, I take full responsibility for any mistakes I may have made in this fictional rendering.

What part of the passenger-pigeon history relates specifically to my story? In 1871, the largest nesting of pigeons ever recorded occurred in south-central Wisconsin. The width of the nesting was between six and ten miles, and the entire length was 125 miles. It was shaped like a capital
L
. The short end went up north at least fifty-five miles. The long end finished seventy miles later. This was an
extremely
large nesting.
Schorger estimates that an
average
passenger-pigeon nesting would have been about three miles wide and ten miles long, or thirty square miles. As for the 1871 nesting, Schorger gives a “conservative estimate” of 850 square miles. He also suggests that perhaps
all
the passenger pigeons in North America were in this nesting.

Reading this stunned me. Wisconsin is
my
state—where I grew up—and as far as I knew, our fame lay in cows, cheddar cheese, and rogue cheese curds (illegal in several states), whose authenticity was verified by the squeak they made as you ate them. Why had no one told me about all these birds and this last great nesting?

Maybe they did. Some things are only heard when a person is ready to hear them. When, several days later, this 1871 nesting was still knocking about in my head, I knew I had to roll up my sleeves and write. That was the beginning of this book.

As it turned out, I used the passenger pigeons and the 1871 nesting as a living, breathing setting for this story. I did my best to keep to known behaviors of the passenger pigeons (according to Schorger). I figured there was nothing to be gained by publishing
more
inaccurate information about passenger pigeons. This is despite the fact that people in 1871 would have often thought these inaccuracies true.

In addition, the way I’ve depicted the human response to the passenger pigeons has some basis in a historical account, though not specific to the 1871 nesting. I couldn’t find enough material from 1871 to construct the reality of one
particular town experiencing that migration. So I decided to use any account I found within the historical record to create scenes between people and wild pigeons. Since 1871 was the year of the largest nesting ever recorded (with possibly every passenger pigeon present), my description seemed at least plausible to me.

What of Agatha, parasol in hand, spinning under the pigeons? I made it up using this recorded observation: in flight, passenger pigeons had the habit of
exactly
following the path of the bird in front of them. John James Audubon, the famous naturalist, told of seeing a hawk attacking a line of pigeons. The first pigeon dove to escape the hawk, and Audubon said that the subsequent birds all dove in the exact same path, for a long time, even though the hawk had left.

In my imagination, this odd fact combined with what I knew of my character Agatha. She’d be captivated by one bird following another so exactly. I could see an experiment (as well as a game) forming in her mind. She’d want to see what would happen if she slowly pushed something—such as a parasol—in the birds’ flight path. When the birds altered their path and flew around her? Agatha would be delighted and, yes, she’d spin.

In reality, would the passenger pigeons have adjusted to a parasol? I have no idea—I wish there were a way to find out—but I loved the image and kept it. (By the way, both of the Audubon books mentioned in the story are books you can read for yourself:
Birds of America
and
Ornithological Biography
.)

Randolph B. Marcy’s
The Prairie Traveler: A Hand-Book for Overland Expeditions

This book actually existed in 1871, and I quote directly from its pages. It’s available on Google Books, so feel free to check it out. It combines helpful information (routes, packing lists, recipes) with stories from Marcy’s travels. For the most part, I found his advice and writing delightful. Yet take heed: Marcy is a writer from the nineteenth century, and his sometimes shocking prejudices are preserved along with his prose.

Placid, Wisconsin (and Other Places in the Book)

Placid does have a location on the map. It is approximately where the city of Wisconsin Dells is currently located, and it shares its geographic details. I chose to call the town Placid because I wanted the freedom to imagine this town completely. Dog Hollow, with its Smoke River, is completely fictional, and named after a road I found on a Wisconsin map. (It put me in mind of a lone dog—perhaps a beagle—yowling in a tiny valley, and I could not forget the name.) Prairie du Chien existed in 1871 and still exists today at the junction of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers. No one could ask for a lovelier location.

The Firestorms

On October 8, 1871, both the city of Chicago and many small lumber towns along the Wisconsin shoreline of Lake Michigan experienced huge firestorms. Afterward, survivors
of the Wisconsin fire wandered from town to town seeking medical help. I doubt that survivors would have wandered as far inland as Placid. I chose to imagine it, though, because I was struck by the huge outpouring of compassion they received. As the survivors arrived (and word finally got out), small towns across the state—made up of one ordinary citizen after the next—took strangers into their homes and cared for them.

More at
AmyTimberlake.com

I’ll be posting more thoughts on my writing process, and other supplementary material, on my website, so feel free to amble about. Enjoy yourself!

Audubon, John James.
Birds of America
.
web4.​audubon.​org/​bird/​BoA/​BOA_​index.​html
.

———.
Ornithological Biography
. Philadelphia, 1832.

Bonta, Marcia Myers.
Women in the Field: America’s Pioneering Women Naturalists
. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991.

Cokinos, Christopher.
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds
. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2000.

Eckert, Allan W.
The Silent Sky: The Incredible Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon
. Lincoln, Neb.:
iUniverse.com
, 2000. First published 1965 by Little, Brown.

Faust, Drew Gilpin.
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Gess, Denise, and William Lutz.
Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History
. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.

Marcy, Randolph B.
The Prairie Traveler: A Hand-Book for Overland Expeditions
. Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 1993.

Muir, John. “The Story of My Boyhood and Youth.” In
Muir Nature Writing
. New York: Library of America, 1997.

Price, Jennifer.
Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America
. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Rath, Sara.
Pioneer Photographer: Wisconsin’s H. H. Bennett
. Madison, Wisc.: Tamarack Press, 1979.

Schorger, A. W. “The Great Wisconsin Passenger Pigeon Nesting of 1871.”
Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of New York
48 (October 1937):1–26.

———.
The Passenger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction
. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955.

Wisconsin Historical Society.
wisconsinhistory.org
.

Without A. W. Schorger’s excellent
The Passenger Pigeon
, this novel would not have been written. I also quote from Randolph B. Marcy’s
The Prairie Traveler
. I am indebted to both of these authors. In addition, I am grateful to Hedgebrook for granting me a residency in 2009. Furthermore, Elizabeth Fama, Kate Hannigan Issa, Linda Kimball, Carol Fisher Saller, my Bible study group, and my church have all provided significant support. Thank you to Knopf, and my insightful and ever-hopeful editor, Allison Wortche. Thanks also to my agent, Steven Malk, who has been crucial in guiding this book to publication. My family knows only too well how long it takes to write a book since writing is time away from them, so I thank them especially. And finally, I’d like to remember my father, James K. Richardson Jr., who died in 2009, as I was drafting this book. A creative man himself, he loved that I wrote stories. I wish he could read this one.

Amy Timberlake is an amateur birder, a farmers’ market enthusiast, and a writer. She currently lives in the big city of Chicago, but grew up in a small town in Wisconsin. She remains convinced that the
best
stories take place in the Midwest. She is the author of
That Girl Lucy Moon
(a Book Sense Pick) and
The Dirty Cowboy
(winner of the Golden Kite Award and a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award). For more information—or perhaps to say hello—go to her website at
AmyTimberlake.com
.