One of my aunts recently passed away, an event which happens in families all the time. But in this case, she was the last of the line. My Dad’s family included eleven siblings — eleven siblings who married and begot a generation of their own descendants. We lived amongst those twenty-two brothers, sisters, and spouses throughout their lives, only to watch the number diminish, one by one, as they left us. My cousins and I now remain as the oldest generation in the family.
I feel a bit of sadness after learning the last one of anything has disappeared from the earth. I even felt a bit gloomy when I read about the death of the last passenger pigeon, a species that once was the most common bird in North America. The word “irreversible” connotes strong meaning, and once the last beating heart stops, that’s it.
Fred Baguhn, an old Owego pioneer, wrote about the huge numbers of pigeons that visited our area. He said, “So numerous were they reported to have been that they completely obscured the sun when in flight and completely covered the trees of the woods when they alighted.” Scientists at the time estimated there were three to five billion pigeons in North America. But after their numbers were greatly depleted through hunting and netting that bagged as many as 500 at a time, the end came about 1900 when a boy shot what was thought to be the last surviving bird in the wild. Some were held in captivity, and the last of these died in 1914.
We have become interested in family genealogy as that found in both Scandinavian and German-Russian history. I found an interesting passage written by an old Catholic priest when he compiled a history of families living in the Dickinson area. He wrote of rolling steppes in the southern part of Ukraine that lay idle for a long while until the Empress of Russia Catherine the Great invited German farmers to settle and farm the virgin soil. On that land Russian wolves had multiplied to great numbers and Monsignor Aberle wrote “It took those brave settlers and their descendants almost one hundred years to wipe out the ever hungry and vicious wolf pack.”
References can be found where wolves, buffalo, bears, eagles, crows, and all manner of wildlife once lived here. Consider the huge buffalo herds roaming the prairie, and it stands to reason that many kinds of predators and scavengers once thrived here. Buffalo dying from natural causes or injuries made for easy pickings for wild animals to dine on their meat. Then civilization happened with people, towns, and fences to thin their numbers and make their light die out and disappear from our region.
Even the ground we live on enters the picture. Since we now make our home in Fargo, this old farm boy can’t ignore the fact of his residence sitting on a piece of beautiful farmland taken out of production so some developer could build on it to make a one time profit from its sale. We always learned the Red River Valley is among the richest land in the world, which is not a stretch of the imagination after seeing the bountiful crops grown on these fields year after year. Driving to the outside boundaries of the city, heavy machinery continues to prepare the cropland for another building and asphalt street. The line from a Joni Mitchell song hits the mark, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” The end has come for many things.
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