east of the Appalachians, then east of the Mississippi and beyond. Much
the same occurred with eastern panthers and wildcats. Bear hunting was
a prestigious sport everywhere. But farmers, resenting bears’ treating crop
fields as cafeterias, rigged muskets or shotguns with trip wires connected
to bait. Many bears—and doubtlessly raccoons, opossums, and squirrels—
were thus blasted, in absentia, in a fashion resembling more the industrial
than the woodlands hooliganism of booze and male bonding.^7
Southerners ate all sorts of birds. Slaves in the Carolinas windrowed
brush late in the year, in effect inviting songbirds, among others, to nest
and become victims of blinding by torchlight at night, gathering and kill-
ing, and the making of festive stews. Children (usually white boys) killed
the most colorful songbirds one by one using nets and sticks and traded
them for toy tops and candy at country stores. Thus youth were initiated
into market hunting. Storekeepers packed the dead birds off to milliners
in northeastern cities—all this as early as the s, well before the late
Victorian peak of the fashion rage for hats adorned with egret feathers as
well as the complete bodies of smaller avians. In the fall, adults and older
boys flocked to open fields, where they gunned down clouds of passenger
pigeons. Many of these they ate, although unused excess kills were justified
as riddance of a nuisance. The very last passenger pigeon died in the Cin-
cinnati zoo early in the twentieth century.
Some southerners may have consumed Carolina parakeets, but this
lovely bird’s massacre to extinction (by about ) was desperate and delib-
erate. The Carolina parakeet, vividly green, yellow, and red and about a foot
long, bore little resemblance to today’s tiny tropical creature in a cage. Like
passenger pigeons, the big parakeets nested and migrated in enormous
flocks, feeding on seeds and berries opportunistically. Then came Euro-
American settlers, crackers and planters alike, who ritually established fruit
orchards, usually of apples. Fruit, consumed fresh or dried for storage,
is of course an important human food. But it was also currency on fron-
tiers and on almost every nineteenth-century backwoods farm and plan-
tation. In Rachel Jackson (wife of Andrew) had slaves plant no fewer
than , apple trees. Her objective, doubtlessly, was to feed the cider
press and distillery. Liquor, often apple brandy, could always be sold in a
countryside where children drinking watered booze with breakfast was not
unknown. The Jacksons had many commodities under production at the
Hermitage, brandy being only one. Small farmers and herders, however,
often produced few field surpluses for market, so they depended on their
orchards not only for private imbibing but for cash to pay taxes, school fees,