Post by Larry Koschkee on Nov 4, 2002 11:18:19 GMT -5
Gene had started a thread on this message board "What did they hunt?" The subject has disappeared. At least I could not retrieve it. I replied with a quote from an early LaCrosse newspaper describing game animals for the pot and some food preparation.
The Almanac also posted a reply suggesting that the region (Illinois and Wisconsin) was teeming with game during the 1820s and 1830s. Recorded accounts and archaeological evidence suggests this was not the case.
This is a common misconception that most of the New World had always been a sparsely populated wilderness full of game. When in truth, many areas of North America had been in fact heavily populated, and game, at least large game was limited.
The main two factors one needs to consider here is habitat and human activity prior to Euro-american settlement.
The landscape in the Lead Region and vicinity where the Black Hawk War activities occured took place in a prairie, savannah or oak opening setting. The exception was north of the Wisconsin River which was heavily timbered and broken, hilly terrain.
These were predominately tall-grass prairies with some species far exceeding the height of a man. There were some mixed (short and tall) grass and sedge areas that were more favorable to Elk, Bison and Prairie Chickens, but limited.
Deer are not prairie animals that graze but rather are browsers preferring thickets and timber edges or fringes. All of the big game species mentioned do not do well in old climatic forests.
Major Stephen Long's expedition in 1823 overland from Chicago to Prairie du Chien, WI noted only 3 or 4 deer sighted in that stretch.
V. Geist, large mammal ecologist, stated that "given the hunger and hardships revealed at archaeological sites, bison would have been exterminated had they not removed themselves from the reach of human hunters."
Starting about 9,000 years BP human hunters confined bison to the Great Plains, keeping them away from the richer forage of the western foothills and the eastern river systems. That would start to change in 1492. The Old World whites unwittingly brought with them many new diseases that the Indians lacked resistance against. It appears that pandemics swept through the New World, repeatedly devastating the indigenous populations.
After human numbers declined in the 1500s, bison began to increase in numbers and move east. By 1650 they had moved well into southern and western Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio and by 1700 had made it all the way to the Atlantic coast and northern Florida... Bison most likely reached their peak of abundance in Illinois and Wisconsin in the early 1600s.
By 1700, the bison were gone from southern Wisconsin and the tribes had to travel well into Illinois and Iowa to kill them... It appears, at least for Wisconsin and Illinois, that rebounding populations of Indians eventually repelled the bison invasion long before appreciable numbers of Europeans arrived.
The prairies and savannas of southern Wisconsin and Illinois hosted occasional elk during their 6,000 years of existence, with a significant but temporary increase in numbers in the 1600s and 1700s. Elk lasted longer than bison in Wisconsin, the last shot in 1866
It is surprising that the bison was found so long in Wisconsin in view of the fact that it was almost extinct east of the Mississippi prior to 1815... Governor Dodge said buffalos were killed on the Wisconsin side of the St. Croix River the year following the close of the Black Hawk War. 1833 would be the last of them in Wisconsin.
After the Indians were removed to the west side of the Mississippi, some of the settlers continued the practice of setting the prairies on fire but soon stopped it because of loss of property and in some cases life. The cessation caused a tremendous change in the prairie landscape. Thickets and brambles emerged providing excellent habitat for the white-tailed deer causing a population spike in the 1840s through the 1850s.
Larry
The Almanac also posted a reply suggesting that the region (Illinois and Wisconsin) was teeming with game during the 1820s and 1830s. Recorded accounts and archaeological evidence suggests this was not the case.
This is a common misconception that most of the New World had always been a sparsely populated wilderness full of game. When in truth, many areas of North America had been in fact heavily populated, and game, at least large game was limited.
The main two factors one needs to consider here is habitat and human activity prior to Euro-american settlement.
The landscape in the Lead Region and vicinity where the Black Hawk War activities occured took place in a prairie, savannah or oak opening setting. The exception was north of the Wisconsin River which was heavily timbered and broken, hilly terrain.
These were predominately tall-grass prairies with some species far exceeding the height of a man. There were some mixed (short and tall) grass and sedge areas that were more favorable to Elk, Bison and Prairie Chickens, but limited.
Deer are not prairie animals that graze but rather are browsers preferring thickets and timber edges or fringes. All of the big game species mentioned do not do well in old climatic forests.
Major Stephen Long's expedition in 1823 overland from Chicago to Prairie du Chien, WI noted only 3 or 4 deer sighted in that stretch.
V. Geist, large mammal ecologist, stated that "given the hunger and hardships revealed at archaeological sites, bison would have been exterminated had they not removed themselves from the reach of human hunters."
Starting about 9,000 years BP human hunters confined bison to the Great Plains, keeping them away from the richer forage of the western foothills and the eastern river systems. That would start to change in 1492. The Old World whites unwittingly brought with them many new diseases that the Indians lacked resistance against. It appears that pandemics swept through the New World, repeatedly devastating the indigenous populations.
After human numbers declined in the 1500s, bison began to increase in numbers and move east. By 1650 they had moved well into southern and western Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio and by 1700 had made it all the way to the Atlantic coast and northern Florida... Bison most likely reached their peak of abundance in Illinois and Wisconsin in the early 1600s.
By 1700, the bison were gone from southern Wisconsin and the tribes had to travel well into Illinois and Iowa to kill them... It appears, at least for Wisconsin and Illinois, that rebounding populations of Indians eventually repelled the bison invasion long before appreciable numbers of Europeans arrived.
The prairies and savannas of southern Wisconsin and Illinois hosted occasional elk during their 6,000 years of existence, with a significant but temporary increase in numbers in the 1600s and 1700s. Elk lasted longer than bison in Wisconsin, the last shot in 1866
It is surprising that the bison was found so long in Wisconsin in view of the fact that it was almost extinct east of the Mississippi prior to 1815... Governor Dodge said buffalos were killed on the Wisconsin side of the St. Croix River the year following the close of the Black Hawk War. 1833 would be the last of them in Wisconsin.
After the Indians were removed to the west side of the Mississippi, some of the settlers continued the practice of setting the prairies on fire but soon stopped it because of loss of property and in some cases life. The cessation caused a tremendous change in the prairie landscape. Thickets and brambles emerged providing excellent habitat for the white-tailed deer causing a population spike in the 1840s through the 1850s.
Larry
