GIVING HUMANS THE BIRD

 

 I have a horrible feeling we’ve gotten this whole endangered species thing backward. Yes, we continue to carelessly destroy habitats, introduce alien species, and randomly dump industrial waste, and that’s all bad.  But I’ve been eating dolphin safe tuna for sixty years now and dolphins are still not safe. I thought these guys were supposed to be smart! Meanwhile, nobody tried to protect the Northern Pike of Lake Davis, California: Quite the opposite.

See, some idiot released a couple of Esox Lucius Linaeus – Northern Pike - into the small and placid Lake Davis back in 1991 because they thought Pike would be fun to catch. 

Unfortunately the lake (above), 5 miles long by 2 miles wide and just 21 feet deep,  already had a stocked population of game fish, Onocorhynchus clarki – Rainbow Trout - which are not only native to the lake but a very popular game fish. However the trout were also an easy meal for the voracious Northern Pike.

To the California Fish and Game Department the worry was that once these piscatorial carnivores had finished off the Trout they would swim downstream on the Feather River, into the Sacramento River and then upstream to devour the Delta Salmon fry populations, which The C.F. & G. had just spent tens of millions of dollars re-introducing. So, beginning in 1997 officials spent something in excess of $24 million trying to kill off these finned invaders from Minnesota  and that effort didn't prove to be fun for anybody, except possibly the Pike.

The Northern Pike of Lake Davis were poisoned. They were electrocuted. They were shot, netted, hooked, cornered, dynamited, starved and suffocated. The state even drained the lake. For over a year the nearby human population couldn’t drink the water, it was so full of piperonyl butoxide. The pike barely noticed the stuff.

Sometimes it seemed that the "experts" were hunting down the pike one at a time, to beat them to death with sticks and clubs. It was like trying to control flies with a fly swatter. It seems to have just ticked them off.These Franken-Pike refused to die. They weren't on any endangered species list, they’re on the ten most wanted list. They’ve had more people gunning for them than Osama bin Laden, and for years with about as much luck .When nothing else worked California Fish and Game tried stocking Lake Davis with oversized Trout fry, thinking they would be too big for the young Pike fry to eat and the Pike would then be eaten by the giganto-trout. But in response the Pike began growing nine to fourteen times faster than normal. They became super-pike fry-enators: big nasty Pike that had no trouble swallowing the trout of unusual size.Six hundred Pike were caught in Fish and Game sample nets the year after the lake was poisoned. In 2004 the catch was 17,635. In all, something over 65,000 Pike were pulled from tiny Lake Davis after humans began trying to eradicating them, and God knows how many sacrificial trout. But however many it was, it wasn't enough.

In May of 2005 the Pike Fry were caught trying to find a way around the specially built screens on the spillway below the Grizzly Valley Dam.  And in 2006, after a winter of heavy snow pack and spring rains, Lake Davis came within inches of overflowing the spillway entirely and thus releasing the Pike directly into the Sacramento River system. Still, not willing to admit he has been beaten by a mere fish, Steve Martarano of California Fish and Game gamely insisted, “We’ve gotten better at knowing where the Pike are.” Yeah, Steve: they’re in the water.

Well, in January, 2007, Fish and Game announced plans to try it one more time. That fall,  as part of yet another $12 million "new" program, about 48,000 acre feet of “rotenone”, a commonly used and “safe” pesticide, were dumped into the lake and, this time, upstream in the lake's tributaries. And this, The Department of Fish and Game assured everyone, would finally kill off "the-Pike-that- wouldn't-die" without killing the people or the local economy...again. They would not know for certain if it worked until spring. 

The ice over Lake Davis that year was 12 to 24 inches thick, but under the ice 31,000 new Eagle Lake Trout had been re-stocked, ranging in size from 8 oz.to 3 lbs. And down there, in the dark water, unseen by human eyes, the battles were occurring which would  decide the fate of many a naturalist at Fish & Game. As spring approached they poured in another 1 million trout. Everybody in California had their fingers crossed. 

And come spring, the hated Pike were gone, And ever since, "...there have been no confirmed cases of northern pike in the lake."  Still the locals cannot avoid the gnawing anxiety that somewhere in the still, deep, dark waters of Lake Davis, the ancestors of the Pike are merely waiting to rise and begin to eat tourists and boats and any SUVs parked too close to the shore. And in that way, the story of Lake Davis reminds this reader of a certain story by Mary Shelly.

Meanwhile, at the same time,  biologists were raising endangered California condor chicks. They were even using hand puppets to feed the baby vultures, so they would have no positive human interaction before they were released. 

But despite these efforts about a half dozen of the first juvenile Condors freed in the wild chose to hang out at the Pine Mountain Club, a condo resort village down the road from Fraser Park, at the Western end of the Tehachapi mountain range between Central and Southern California. The problem was that the bird brains figured out on their own that their razor sharp beaks and talons designed to rip open animal carcasses worked even better on plastic trash bags and kitchen window screens.

One “naturalist” studying the Condor-condo interactions returned home after a hard day of remote Condor observing via powerful binoculars to discover three of the 30 pound birds and their 10’ wingspans, gallivanting about his bedroom, using it as a sort of playroom and free toilet. 

They had entered via a slit they made in his window screen. One was in his underwear drawer shredding his shorts while the other two were slowly dissecting his mattress with all the abandon of adolescences free from parental oversight.  It almost looked as if the birds had picked out this guy personally to deliver the message; "Stop watching us, you eco-papparazi!" Now the average citizen, like say maybe Russel Crowe, would have gone into that room with a broom and defended his privacy, and he would driven those feathered gangbangers out the way they had come in!

But this guy was a “naturalist”. So, to avoid human interaction with the feathered truants he retreated until the birds got bored and left on their own. The “naturalists” then convinced local politicians to require all trash to be held inside until the morning of collection, and then placed only in locking containers. And at the landfill a bulldozer would immediately cover the trash bags with dirt.  All to avoid interacting with the condors.
The thinking was that without an easy food supply the condors would return to their natural behaviors.  Instead the Condor youth gangs’ response was to loom about on the roof of a local restaurant (above), depressing the hell out of potential customers. 

The condors were actually waiting for the trash trucks to arrive. They would then use their extraordinary skills at gliding to follow behind the trucks all way to the dump, where they quickly descended on the leftover meat and soup cans and macaroni and cheese containers as if they were a dinning on a dead wooly mammoth. The front loaders couldn’t cover the trash bags without the risk of burying a condor at the same time, so the meals could now be eaten at leisure in a sort of Condor olfactory buffet. Game, set, and match to the Condors.

The biologists and naturalists were horrified because it didn’t fit their image of noble Condors sailing in an empty sky above an untouched wilderness - which is where the Condors almost became extinct in the first place. Need I point out that not a single condor died at the Pine Mountain Club? They ate too many French fries but none of them died!
The happy ending to this story of rebellious Condors is that once they matured and mated the adult condors didn’t want their offspring growing up in an urban environment anymore than Republicans do. 

Today, the Pine Mountain Club is condor free, except for a few weeks every summer when the newly adolescent vultures fly in for a sort of condor rumsringa. They eat spicy food, taunt the humans and stage panty raids on the naturalists. And then they leave. Everybody has adapted to living with each other

Now, I’m not suggesting we try protecting endangered species with dynamite or by raising their cholesterol levels, but it does seem that the animals we’re protecting are all in trouble while the ones we’re trying to exterminate are experiencing population booms. What can we learn from this? Well, that there are eight billion humans on this planet at present and baring global warming unchecked or suicide with WMD we are not going anywhere. 

And if we do, so are the Condors and most of the Pike and Trout. Modern Condors, searching for dinner while soaring above the wilderness are going to see a lot more humans than dead deer. And Pike and Trout are going to meet a lot of little fish with hooks in them. So why not “humanize” them, teach them what every mentally challenged pigeon already knows; the fries are better at Burger King, don’t drink the yellow water, never trust a politician in an election year and don’t go swimming in Lake Davis unless you want your talons bitten off.

-30 - 

TALE TELL POE

 

I smile at the stories, published in August of 1835, by the  “Penny Dreadful” New York Sun, under the title of “Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel…”  Now, John Herschel was a famous astronomer who was the son of a famous astronomer. According to The Sun,  using a new telescope Doctor Herschel had observed on our moon “…nine species of mammalian …” including tail-less beavers that walked on two legs and lived in huts, unicorns, and four foot tall people with bat wings.

Of course Sir John Herschel had made no such report because he wasn’t nuts. But neither was Richard Adams Locke (above), who was the grandson of the 17th century philosopher and the actual author of the moon-beavers story. He was a one-time editor of the Sun, and an close acquaintance of Edgar Allen Poe - who claimed he knew of “…no person possessing so fine a forehead as Mr. Locke”.

The story about the moon-beavers raised the Sun's circulation for a few weeks from 15,00 to more than 19,000, which gave it an advantage over it's rival the New York Herald.  On 18 September, 1835,  the Sun admitted the joke, and the only people not laughing were the editors of the Herald, who felt they had been made to look foolish for not knowing it had been a gag. 

But it is helpful to remember that in our age with unlabeled Corporate Video News Releases (VNRs) padding out local news programming from sea to shinning sea, and FOX news lying on a nightly basis,  it’s gotten easier to fool the fools, not harder. In Edgar Allen Poe’s day fake news had to be an inside job. Edgar even did it himself.

Poe had already written “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue” but when he moved to Baltimore with a sick wife he had just $5 in his pocket. And myself , as a hungry writer, who has produced articles for such distinguished men’s publications as “Velvet” and “Velvet Talks”, (back in the 1980's they paid $125 for 1200 obscene words and $25 for three accompanying obscene “letters”) I sympathize with Edgar.

Now, Edgar Allen Poe was “odd”. Both his parents died when he was young. He was adopted by a wealthy manic-depressive patriarch who was alternately loving and vicious toward him. The result was that Edgar became an un-socialized morose alcoholic who as a college student confided to his roommate that he had “joked” that he was going to murder their landlord, and the landlord had believed him: ha, ha, ha.

Edgar had gotten married when he was 25, to the sickly Miss Virginia Clemm, who was just 13 years old - Sigmund Freud would have had a field day with this guy. Faced with imminent starvation Edgar sought out Locke’s advice, and probably based on what Locke told him, Edgar wrote what would later would be called “The Great Balloon Hoax of 1844”, or as I like to call it, “72 Hours of Hot Air”.

The headlines in the Baltimore Sun read, “Astounding News by Express, via Norfolk! The Atlantic Crossed in Three days!...in the Steering Balloon “Victoria”, after a passage of Seventy-five hours from Land to Land! Full Particulars of the Voyage!”

According to the 5,000 word front page story, the plan had been to cross the English Channel suspended beneath a silk dirigible filled with 40,000 cubic feet of coal tar gas. But once airborne above Wales, and impressed with their “Archimedean Screw” propeller, the decision was made “on the fly” to sail to North America instead. “We soon found ourselves driving out to sea at the rate of not less, certainly, than 50 or 60 miles an hour…as the shades of night have closed around us, we made a rough estimate of the distance traversed. It could not have been less than 500 miles…The wind was from the East all night…We suffered no little from cold and dampness…

"Sunday, the 7th, this morning the gale…had subsided to an eight or nine knot breeze, and bears us, perhaps, 30 miles an hour or more…at sundown, we are holding our course due West...Monday the 8th, the wind was blowing steadily and strongly from the North-East all day…Tuesday, the 9th. One P.M. We are in full view of the low coast of South Carolina. The great problem is accomplished. We have crossed the Atlantic – fairly and easily in a balloon! God be praised!”

According to Edgar’s unbiased reporting, on the day of publication the Baltimore Sun’s offices were besieged. “As soon as the first copies made their way into the streets, they were bought up," wrote Edgar, "at almost any price. I saw a half a dollar given, in one instance, for a single paper…I tried, in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy.” And according to Edgar, Edgar was there in the crowd, telling anyone who would listen, that he was the author of the story, and…that it was a gag. Now why would he do that?

Poor old Edgar had a number of personality traits that confused even the people who liked him. For instance, he could not stop himself from maintaining contact with Elizabeth Ellet, a carnivorous little “pot-stirrer” and bad writer who made passes at Edgar in German. I mean, German has always been the language of love, hasn’t it? “Halten Sie mich schlieben, meine little Turtle Dove?” And then, when Edgar cut off all contact with her, she told her brother that Edgar had insulted her. And he challenged Edgar to a duel. Luckily, since Edgar didn't own a gun the two fools ended up beating each other up, over a woman who clearly didn’t think much of either of them. Men. Sigh.

The point of all this, it seems to me, is that idiots who spend their time and energy perpetuating a hoax on the public are hoping the public will not be insulted. But even if the public is willing to laugh at themselves once, the chances are they will not trust the same source a second time, ever. Or, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, "...fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

The very day after the Sun published the balloon hoax there appeared on the back page of the same paper the following notice; “…the mails from the south…not having brought confirmation of the balloon from England…we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous”. Well, that’s one way to maintain journalistic integrity: NOT!

Me, I’m willing to bet that Edgar was paid $25 for writing the back page mea culpa. The publishing business hasn’t changed much in 200 years. And neither has the life of writers. Edgar’s wife died of tuberculosis in New York, three years after the Balloon Hoax.

And two years later the New York Sun, which sold for a penny a copy, was bought for $250,000 (more than $6 million in today’s money). That was the same year Edgar Allen Poe died in Baltimore, flat broke as usual. Writers. Sigh.

- 30 -

GREASY GRASS Chapter Seven

 

I ask you to witness the hilltop siege (above) during the morning of  Monday, 26 June, 1876. Laying flat behind their barricades the 300 plus survivors suffered few wounds. Several earned medals sneaking down to the river to collect desperately needed water for the rest.  Twice Captain Fredrick Benteen lead spoiling charges to break up groups of Indian snippers. By afternoon, the gunfire faded in intensity. About 7:00 pm the Sioux and Cheyenne set fire to the sparse prairie grasses to cover their retreat westward toward the Big Horn Mountains.  

Shortly after mid-day on the next day, Tuesday,  the survivors saw in the valley below (above, center) the approach of the Second Cavalry and 7th Infantry regiments.  These 450 men under Colonel John Gibbon had marched from the Idaho country. They were supposed to have been the anvil upon which Custer's 7th Cavalry hammer was to have crushed the hostile Indians.  Instead they were the recorders of the disaster.

Where once had the great gathering had camped the western soldiers found just two lodges, both  containing Indian dead on the ground (Sioux) and on scaffolds (Cheyenne) under the trees along the river. The abandoned site also contained bloody cavalry clothing and dead cavalry mounts, brought back in a failed attempt to treat their wounds.  Private  Eugene Geant, of H Company, 7th Infantry, said he saw little evidence of white men "...except a very few bodies and some heads evidently dragged from a distance."

Meanwhile, Lieutenant James H. Bradley, head of Gibbon's scouts, was the first white man to stumble upon Custer's graveyard. "I was scouting the hills some two or three miles to the left of the column upon the opposite bank of the river...  when the body of a horse attracted our attention (above)...and...the appalling sight was revealed to us of his entire command in the embrace of death," At first glance he counted 197 bodies. 

The next day, Custer supporter Lieutenant Godfrey called Last Stand Hill (above) one of "...sickening, ghastly horror". Pvt. Geant,  reported the bodies of more than 230 men, "mostly naked and mutilated in a horrible manner."   All of Custer's command had been stripped, scalped and mutilated, their dead white bodies bloating in the summer sun - Except, if we are to believe the white men, the corpse of Custer himself.  

On Wednesday, 28 June, 1873 Reno's command were assigned to bury the dead. They had few shovels, and graves for the enlisted were scrapped a few inches deep into the hard pan prairie with knives and axes (above). Some got little more than dirt thrown over their faces. A Second Cavalry officer admitted "A number were simply covered in sagebrush". The officers graves were  12 to 14 inches deep. 

The next day, Thursday, 29 June, the fifty wounded were loaded onto travois and began the painful bouncing journey to the Big Horn River, where the steamboat Far West waited. It set a record never equaled, by steaming  the 710 miles down the Yellowstone river to Fort Abraham Lincoln and Bismarck, North Dakota Territory in just 54 hours.  And then, on the first day of July, 1876, the Story of "Custer's Massacre" first reached the American public. 

Over some 10 hours of combat, out of the 650 American soldiers and civilians following Custer over that Wolf Mountain divide, 286 had died violently- 16 officers and 242 enlisted killed, (44% of the command) plus 1 officer and 51 enlisted wounded - for a total devastating 52% loss. 

The 210 men directly under the command of “General” Custer were dead within an hour after their first contact with the Sioux and Cheyenne.  Each dead officer left behind a family who would morn, often a wife and children thrown into the poverty of a small pension. The enlisted were usually young men, who left behind an emotional vacuum of lost potential and no pension. By definition, enlisted soldiers were "cannon fodder". 

To the stone age Sioux and Cheyenne peoples it was the battle of the Greasy Grass. Indian casualties were 40 to 50 providers, where every death left grief and often starvation and death for the youngest and oldest surviving family members.  Within a year the independent Indian nations had been crushed, their treaty lands seized. According to the U.S. Censes, in 1870 there were 313,712 Indians in the United States. By 1880 that number had been reduced to 306,543, and, by 1900 to just  237,200. 

Immediately after the battle the military judgments were unanimous. President Grant, who had been elevated to the White House based on his record as a military commander, told a reporter, “I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops brought on by Custer himself,…(which) was wholly unnecessary – wholly unnecessary.” 

General Philip Sheridan, who had lobbied for Custer’s inclusion on the expedition considered the disaster primarily Custer’s fault. “Had the Seventh Cavalry been held together, it would have been able to handle the Indians on the Little Big Horn." 

In fact all the officers who had insisted that Custer was the answer to the Indian problem in 1876 were the most determined to blame Custer for the failure. And finally, General Samuel Davis Sturgis (above), overall commander of the seventh, whose son, James, had died on the Little Big Horn under Custer, reacted negatively to the suggestion that a monument be dedicated to the memory of “The American Murat”, The Boy General" Custer; “For God’s sake let them hide it in some dark valley, or veil it, or put it anywhere the bleeding hearts of the widows, orphans, fathers and mothers of the men so uselessly sacrificed to Custer’s ambition, can never be wrung at the sight of it.”

If there was going to be a hero rise from the Little Big Horn, logic said it should  have been Major Marcus Reno. Most of the men under Custer's second in command made it out alive, held together over three horrible days of combat and thirst.  Yet, within half a dozen years after the "Last Stand" the public thought of Reno as a coward.     

The reason the army lost this second battle of the Little Big Horn was that their enemy was even more ruthless and relentless than the Sioux or the Cheyenne. She was a five foot four inch Victorian widow with blue-gray eyes and chestnut hair. Her name was Elizabeth Bacon Custer (above). And in this engagement she left no survivors - beginning with Marcus Reno.

Having dismissed Custer to cover their own behinds.  the army also dismissed his 34 year old widow. Barely a month after her husband had died amid the Montana scrub brush, “Libby” Custer (above) was forced to leave Fort Abraham Lincoln. As a widow Libby had no right to quarters on the post, and so lost the social support of her Army life and fellow wives and widows. Her income was immediately reduced to the widow’s pension of $30 a month; her total assets were worth barely $8,000, while the claims against Custer’s estate exceeded $13,000. And then, in her hour of need, Libby received support from an unexpected source.

His name was Frederick Whittaker. A Civil War cavalry hero in his own right, shot through the lung at the Battle the Wilderness, after the war he scratched out a living as a writer of pulp fiction and non-fiction for magazines of the day, “…about the best of its kind”. He had met Custer during the Civil War, and the General’s death inspired him to write a dramatic eulogy praising the fallen hero in Galaxy Magazine, where Whittaker referred to Custer’s “natural recklessness and vanity”. But Libby saw past that, and seduced the ex-lieutenant. Libby provided Whittaker with the couple’s personal letters, access to family and friends, war department correspondence and permission to use large sections from Custer’s own book, “My Life on the Plains,” which might have been largely written by Libby.

What emerged, just six months after Little Big Horn, was “A  Life of General George A. Custer”. It was pure pulp,  filled with inaccuracies and excessive praise for Custer, but it was also a best seller. “So fell the brave caviler, the Christian soldier, surrounded by foes, but dying in harness amid the men he loved.”

This time Whittaker saw no faults in Custer. Instead the blame was laid elsewhere. Whittaker wrote; “He could have run like Reno had he wished...It is clear, in the light of Custer’s previous character, that he held on to the last, expecting to be supported, as he had a right to expect. It was only when he clearly saw he had been betrayed, that he resolved to die game, as it was too late to retreat.” http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.Whittaker (Sheldon and Company, New York, 1876).

Most professional soldiers admitted that Whittaker had gotten it very wrong. But those same officers now withheld their criticism of Whittaker to avoid being attacked for having insisted on Custer commanding the cavalry in 1876, and to avoid being forced to also criticize Custer's widow in public.

Reno was eventually forced to ask for and received a Court of Inquiry (not a Court Martial) on his conduct at Little Big Horn, which cleared his name and revealed the character of the people Whittaker had relied upon for his version of the battle. But it made little difference to Libbie Custer or Whittaker and his publisher, who declared the Inquiry a whitewash.

The first who jumped on Libby's bandwagon was Edward Godfrey, who had been a Lieutenant at the Little Big Horn and a Custer “fan”.  His 1892 “Custer’s Last Battle” was unequivocal. “...had Reno made his charge as ordered,…the Hostiles would have been so engaged… that Custer’s approach…would have broken the moral of the warriors….(Reno’s) faltering ...his halting, his falling back to the defensive position in the woods...; his conduct up to and during the siege…was not such as to inspire confidence or even respect,…” 

Elizabeth Custer went on to support herself comfortably by public speaking and by writing three books; “Tenting on the Plains”, "Following the Guidon” and “Boots and Saddles”.  She was such a good writer that many believe she was the true author of her husband's "My Life on the Plains". In each of her books her "Audie" was idolized and lionized. 

In 1901 she managed to squeeze out one more, a children’s book, “The Boy General. Story of the Life of Major-General George A. Custer”: “The true soldier asks no questions; he obeys, and Custer was a true soldier. He gave his life in carrying out the orders of his commanding general… He had trained and exhorted his men and officers to loyalty, and with one exception they stood true to their trust, as was shown by the order in which they fell.” 

By the time Libby died, in 1933, at the age of ninety-one, her version of the Battle of the Little Big Horn was set in the concrete of the printed page.

The 1941 movie staring Errol Flynn as Custer, displays Libby's view as well as any tome, echoed even by respected historians such as Robert Utley who in the 1980’s described Reno as "… a besotted, socially inept mediocrity, (who) commanded little respect in the regiment and was the antithesis of the electric Custer in almost every way.”

So for over a century Marcus Reno was reviled and despised as the coward who did not charge as ordered, instead pleading weasel-like that Custer had not supported him as promised. It would not be until Ronald Nichols biography of Reno, “In Custer’s Shadow” (U. of Oklahoma Press, 1999) that Reno received a fair hearing.

About the same time the Indian accounts of the fight began to finally be given a serious consideration by white historians, including the story told to photographer Edward Curtis in 1907 by three of Custer’s Indian scouts. The trio said they watched amazed as Custer stood on the bluffs overlooking Reno’s fight in the valley, a story supported by some soldiers in the valley fight who reported seeing Custer on the bluffs. (To that point most historians had assumed the native warriors were lying.)

One of the scouts, White Man Runs Him (above), claimed to have scolded Custer; “Why don’t you cross the river and fight too?” To which the scouts say Custer replied, “It is early yet and plenty of time. Let them fight. Our turn will come.”

And it did. But it sure was a long time coming.

- 30 -