The border between the United States and Canada at the northeast corner of Minnesota — Pigeon Point — is the Pigeon River, which empties into Pigeon Bay on Lake Superior, just below Pigeon Falls. Each of these places is named not for city pigeons, but the passenger pigeon; once the most abundant bird in North America.
When French fur traders named the river Rivière aux Tourtres (Pigeon River) in the 1700s, flocks of millions roared back and forth across the border in spring and fall, “breakfast[ing] on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and din[ing] on blueberries in Canada.” They took days to pass, and blotted out the sun. Nesting colonies stretched for miles, felling tree limbs with their weight.
So many eloquent words have been written about the extraordinary ecology and tragic extinction of passenger pigeons that I won’t spend an entire newsletter re-hashing it.
Instead, I want to note that these birds — which left such an impression on North American society that they have hundreds of places named for them in dozens of states and provinces — are a good case study in a bigger geographic story: The animals and plants that indigenous people and European settlers named places for have often since been extirpated, leaving only their ghosts behind.
Google’s dictionary has two definitions of the word “haunt”:
1) verb (of a ghost) manifest itself at (a place) regularly, e.g. “a gray lady who haunts the chapel.”
2) noun a place frequented by a specified person or group of people, e.g. “I revisited my old haunts.”
With regard to place names, we’ve often exchanged the second definition for the first one, as places once frequented by particular animals have become their etymological graveyards.
There are no more Carolina parakeets in Paroquet Springs, Arkansas or Eastatoe Creek, South Carolina (eastatoe is an indigenous Cherokee word for this extinct parakeet); no more bison in Buffalo, New York; no more caribou in Caribou, Maine; no more American chestnut trees in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania; and no more curlews in Curlew, Iowa.
In these instances, William Faulkner’s dictum that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” doesn’t seem to hold up very well. Most of the people living in these areas probably do not associate them with the animals and plants that their names invoke; indeed, many may not even know that those species once occurred nearby and have since disappeared.
The project of settling North America has often been one of ridding the countryside of its fantastic beasts and spooky woodlands. The wolves, cougars, cypress swamps and pine barrens have been cleared away to make way for humans, especially in the East.
Chillingly, some animals’ names even seem to invoke that very process. The call of the northern saw-whet owl, for example, ostensibly reminded lumberjacks in logging camps of the sound made by sharpening the very saws that would be used to cut down the tiny owls’ trees. Nevertheless, the trees were cut, the predators trapped and shot, and Americans were left with a tame, soulless landscape for about a hundred years.
Though we may have domesticated the landscape physically, however, our fascination with wilderness remained intact. So, we chose to reanimate the land with danger and mystery in our imaginations, telling stories about headless horsemen, bears, ghosts and wolves.
This is especially true in late October, when we turn the clock of our collective consciousness back to a dream-like world in which — or so we tell ourselves — development consisted only of small, isolated cottages set in deep, misty valleys, walled in by monstrous, autumnal trees.
Sleepy Hollow is the backdrop of Halloween, both culturally and ecologically.
But the good news is that this former world — in which wolves could be heard howling from the threshold, and campfires illuminated the eye shine of beasts unknown — is not entirely imaginary, even today. Wolves and black bears have returned to some parts of their former ranges; and as the East has reforested, it feels wilder now than it did a century ago.
During college, I visited Hanover, New Hampshire in mid-October. The town looked like a postcard of New England, with pumpkins on every porch and hillsides flaming with color. As our group of students hustled into the kitchen of the house we were staying at, we looked out the window to see three black bears playing among the leaves in the backyard. Seeing us, they lumbered off into the woods.
Such moments give me hope that to the extent that some charismatic animals remain with us, they can be reintroduced to the places in which they once lived. Wisconsin’s Wolf River has wolves again; though Tennessee’s Wolf River does not. Wolf Lake, Minnesota likewise has wolves; though Wolf Lake, Michigan is still waiting.
The case of Caribou Island in Lake Superior is an amusing microcosm of this give-and-take. The island, which is located 40 miles from the mainland, may never have had a permanent population of native caribou, although other Lake Superior islands like Michipicoten Island did have native populations until as recently as 2018.
Instead, the island was stocked with caribou as a private hunting ground from the late 1800s until the mid-1920s, when the remaining caribou left the island via an ice bridge during an especially cold winter (this may have been a relief to the lighthouse keeper, toward whom the caribou were allegedly aggressive).
In 2014, resurgent wolves reached Michipicoten Island, which was Lake Superior’s last major caribou stronghold, via an ice bridge created by the polar vortex. They nearly extirpated the caribou there by 2018, so the government of Ontario airlifted a few individuals to Caribou Island to save them. The island is now an ark; and its name is appropriate once more.
It’s not exactly clear to me whether there is justice in the Caribou Island story, or the story of the bears in Hanover, which probably eat their fair share of birdseed and trash. What is clearer is that places without any charismatic wildlife — eponymous or not — are adrift in history. I would always rather live, I think, in a place called “wild onions” (Chicago) than a place called Springfield, Greenville or Fairview; names which leave the mind’s eye blank, and the soul unstirred. ◆
Another beautiful essay!