Alexander Henry was a
Canadian fur trader who traipsed across the Upper Midwest, the Northern Great
Plains and the Canadian Prairies in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Luckily for those of us in the 21st
century Henry was a serious diarist. No
matter where he traveled he kept detailed notes on where he was and what he
saw. Some of his observations are
contained in a book about his travels that recounts his time near Pembina,
North Dakota in 1803.
In his journals Henry
described how the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota appeared more
than 200 years ago. Henry told stories
about fishermen capturing sturgeon in the Red River that weighed more than 100 pounds. Fish that size were captured regularly and in
large numbers. He described the river at
that time being “crystal clear” and its channel was more than one-quarter mile
wide. No sturgeon remain today in the
Red River. Its channel in many places is
less than 100 feet wide, and given the amount of agricultural runoff in its
watershed, few if any people are alive today who can remember when the last
time was that the water was clear – crystal or otherwise.
It was a spring morning in
1803 and Henry was camped along the east face of the Pembina Hills, an outlier
of eastern deciduous forest that was completely surrounded by what Henry called
“an endless sea of grass” (virgin native prairie). Not long after sunrise that day Henry heard a
rumbling sound to the south. Looking out from his campsite he saw the leading
edge of a massive herd of American bison moving west toward the rich grasslands
of North Dakota. Henry mentioned the
enormity of the herd and wondered how many animals were spread out before
him. He remained at his lookout
throughout the morning and as he did the herd of bison continued their movement
west. By late afternoon, as the sun was
beginning to set, the vast herd continued to pass and it was still doing so as
darkness overtook the landscape.
There is no way to
estimate how many bison passed by Henry that day. Given the year of the observation and the location
where the herd was seen, and the fact that the herd passed continuously for
more than twelve hours, I imagine that Henry saw tens of thousands of bison and
probably many more. Uncountable examples
exist in the scientific and popular literature describing the former abundance
of American bison on the North American Great Plains. However those numbers are
no more. At one time shooters would line
the edge of open doors on railroad cars and shoot all the bison they
encountered along the railroad tracks and they did so just to kill them. Other shooters decimated vast numbers of
bison solely to cut out their tongues while still others shot bison for their
hides leaving their carcasses to rot in the blistering prairie sun.
In 1700 the continental
population of American bison was estimated at between twenty five and thirty
million individuals. In 1889 there were
1,091 animals left. Their demise, just
like the destruction of vast flocks of passenger pigeons, is one of the most
frustrating realities for a wildlife biologist to accept. Reading the history of this demise it becomes
readily apparent that much of it can be attributed to the United States
government and their desire to “tame” the Native Americans who lived on the
Great Plains. An important part of the
Native American diet was bison.
Therefore to rein in the Native Americans it was US government policy at
the time to kill off as many bison as possible to hamstring the Native
Americans and force them into hunger and also force them to abandon their
ancestral lands. It angers me to this
day that I was robbed of the opportunity to witness what Alexander Henry saw
that day near Pembina, North Dakota and what those who followed Henry saw on
other parts of the prairies while my own government was trying to subdue the
Native Americans who did nothing more wrong than breathe. I am profoundly annoyed that people with no
conservation ethic deprived me of ever being able to see what the shooters saw
as they rode in train cars across the Nebraska prairie. I will never see any of that in North America.
One hundred seventy eight
years after Alexander Henry witnessed the spectacular movement of American
bison from his perch on the edge of the Pembina Hills the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers came up with a proposal to build a damn on the Pembina River that
flows through the hills. The river originates in the Canadian province of
Manitoba and flows southeast into the northernmost reaches of northeastern
North Dakota. Its course continues east
until it joins the Red River of the North and there, ostensibly, it returns to
Canada as part of the Red River.
The damn was billed as
being essential for flood control and recreation – the two most overused
phrases in the damn building history of the Corps. Certainly the river flooded on occasion –
that is what rivers do. And certainly
the river caused damage in its floodplain – that’s why wise people don’t build
in flood plains. However the Corps was
undeterred by reason and fact. The
Pembina River still flowed freely and by god they were just the bunch of
engineers to subdue it.
One of the aspects of
recreation that the Corps failed to recognize was land based wildlife
observation and hunting. The forest of
the Pembina Hills was an outlier of the eastern deciduous forest in Minnesota
and Manitoba. Breeding birds found in
the Pembina Hills were unlike almost any other place in the prairie state of
North Dakota. Here we found nesting
white-throated sparrows, Philadelphia vireo, American woodcock and other forest
birds with an eastern affinity making the river and its valley a much sought
out place for birdwatching.
The Corps also failed to
factor in the value of the forest and the river for hunting and especially big
game hunting. At that time there was a
sizeable population of moose in the forest and the North Dakota Fish and Game
Department maintained a limited hunting season for those forest behemoths each
fall. The Corps in its infinite wisdom
failed to take into account the uniqueness of a prairie state having a
population of moose in its limited forests. All the Corps saw was a
free-flowing river that should have a damn on it. They sought out Congressional approval
(always a snap to receive if it involves building something egregious) and
planning began for the Pembina Damn.
The Ecological Services
office of the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Bismarck, North Dakota was in
desperate need of scientific data on the biological richness of the Pembina
Hills. The more irrefutable data they
possessed the better chance they had to pound some sense and reason into the
typically thick skulls of the Corps. To
that end the Bismarck office contracted with the Northern Prairie Wildlife
Research Center in Jamestown to conduct an analysis of breeding bird
populations in the Pembina Hills. Once data
collection was completed the data were to be analyzed and a paper summarizing
the results was to be presented to the Bismarck office.
In 1981 I had the
most-enviable position of being the nongame bird research biologist at the
Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center. It was a dream come true for a farm
boy from the north woods of Wisconsin to work with world-renowned research
biologists (and one world-renowned statistician) and because of my interests I
was asked to conduct the research. With
me in the field that year was Jon Andrew, a recent graduate of the Master’s
Degree program at Appalachian State University in western Maryland. Jon and I traveled to the Pembina Hills in
late May where we established many sampling plots on which we would later map
out the locations of territories maintained by territorial male birds. After sampling birds a minimum of 8 different
times on each sample plot we would have enough information (according to the
already published literature) to determine the boundaries of every territory on
the plots and from that information calculate an estimated breeding bird population
for the entire area to be inundated and destroyed by the proposed damn.
Because it was the summer
solstice and the longest day of the year, on June 21, 1981, we conducted early
evening censuses on each of the sample plots.
Our objective was to get a better handle on crepuscular singing birds
like thrushes and woodcock. We stayed
late that evening, until well past 11:00 p.m. counting birds and then listening
for owls before returning to the nearest town to crash for a few hours.
June 22, 1981 dawned clear
and brisk along the Pembina River and Jon and I were out in the field by 5:00
a.m. I dropped Jon off along the road
near two sample plots that he was to census and I drove on to another site that
I was to cover.
All the while we were
conducting our research we saw abundant sign of moose in the forest. Droppings were everywhere as were moose
tracks in the moist soils. Occasionally
we found trees that had been trashed the fall before by male moose as they
tried to scrape the velvet from their antlers.
However despite all the sign we had not seen a single moose.
On my sample plot that
morning I remember finding least flycatchers and a singing male Philadelphia
vireo and American redstarts were everywhere in the woods. Near the center of the sample plot was a very
large basswood tree that had died and fallen to the ground. As I had done on all previous censuses I
hopped up on the log and stood there for a couple of minutes listening and
watching and recording what I saw. That
morning was just like all the other mornings I had been on this plot and like
all the other mornings when I came onto the fallen basswood tree I jumped up on
it at about the middle of its length and prepared to stand and listen.
However on the morning of
June 22, 1981, things were a little different on that sample plot because unknown
to me at the time a young bull moose was sleeping right on the other side of
the log. The young male didn’t know I
was there until I jumped up on the log.
I had no idea that the moose was there until the entire sky in front of
me had turned a hairy brown color and the air suddenly smelled like moose
droppings because less than 2 feet from me was the very recently startled awake
moose!
Moose are very near
sighted and have a well-developed sense of smell. I’m not sure which of the senses kicked in
for the moose in the nanosecond between when I made my appearance on the log
and when I began screaming at the top of my lungs out of fear. All I remember in the split second after
startling the moose out of its slumber was me yelling and then hearing the
thundering hooves of a moose as it ran toward the river while I ran as fast as
I could up the hill away from the river.
It was the first, last, and only moose we ever observed in the Pembina
Hills and if anyone needed proof that they were there we could now provide it.
Finishing our research a
few weeks later we analyzed the data, wrote a paper for the Ecological Services
office in Bismarck and then adapted it for publication as a scientific paper
and then let the Bismarck office do its magic fighting the Corps. As luck would
have it the biological uniqueness of the Pembina Hills was so overwhelmingly
obvious that even the damn builders at the Corps of Engineers realized that it
was not good policy to destroy such beauty and diversity with another in an
endless string of useless damns. About a
year after we submitted our paper for publication the Corps of Engineers
announced that they were abandoning their plans to damn the Pembina River. In public they told everyone that they did so
for economic reasons. In reality they
did it because of the biological values Jon Andrew and I discovered during the
summer of 1981.
Now 33 years later, a full
third of a century after the fact, the Pembina River still flows through those
wooded hills from which Alexander Henry counted that massive herd of American
bison more than 200 years ago. It has been 33 years also since I last stepped
foot in those beautiful forests but I know from Google Earth that they are
still there. The basswood tree that the
young moose used as a night roost 33 years ago last night is probably long gone
and returned to the earth but the moose are still there and some of them are
likely the offspring of the male I scared so badly in a beautiful aspen forest 33
years ago this morning.
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