the air is darkened with large bodies of them moving in various directions; the woods also swarm with them in search of acorns, and the thundering of musquetry is perpetual on all sides from morning to night.  Wagon loads of them are poured into market, where they sell from fifty to twenty-five and even twelve cents per dozen; and pigeons become the order of the day at dinner, breakfast and supper, until the very name becomes sickening.”

[Footnote A:  To-day, we think that the fowlers of the roccolos of northern Italy are very cruel in their methods of catching song-birds wholesale for the market (chapter xi); but our own countrymen of Wilson’s day were just as cruel in the method described above.]

* * * * *

The range of the passenger pigeon covered nearly the whole United States from the Atlantic coast westward to the Rocky Mountains.  A few bold pigeons crossed the Rocky Mountains into Oregon, northern California and Washington, but only as “stragglers,” few and far between.  The wide range of this bird was worthy of a species that existed in millions, and it was persecuted literally all along the line.  The greatest slaughter was in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  In 1848 Massachusetts gravely passed a law protecting the netters of wild pigeons from foreign interference!  There was a fine of $10 for damaging nets, or frightening pigeons away from them.  This was on the theory that the pigeons were so abundant they could not by any possibility ever become scarce, and that pigeon-slaughter was a legitimate industry.

In 1867, the State of New York found that the wild pigeon needed protection, and enacted a law to that effect.  The year 1868 was the last year in which great numbers of passenger pigeons nested in that State.  Eaton, in “The Birds of New York,” said that “millions of birds occupied the timber along Bell’s Run, near Ceres, Alleghany County, on the Pennsylvania line.”

In 1870, Massachusetts gave pigeons protection except during an “open season,” and in 1878 Pennsylvania elected to protect pigeons on their nesting grounds.

The passenger pigeon millions were destroyed so quickly, and so thoroughly en masse, that the American people utterly failed to comprehend it, and for thirty years obstinately refused to believe that the species had been suddenly wiped off the map of North America.  There was years of talk about the great flocks having “taken refuge in South America,” or in Mexico, and being still in existence.  There were surmises about their having all “gone out to sea,” and perished on the briny deep.

A thousand times, at least, wild pigeons have been “reported” as having been “seen.”  These rumors have covered nearly every northern state, the whole of the southwest, and California.  For years and years we have been patiently writing letters to explain over and over that the band-tailed pigeon of the Pacific coast, and the red-billed pigeon of Arizona and the southwest are neither of them the passenger pigeon, and never can be.