Twain's Feast (5 page)

Still, for an observer like me, there is one great difference between the booming ground and a true zoo, and that is the sky. Even through the thin viewing slot, the sky is a palpable presence, stretching vast and blue over this postage stamp of teeming, wakeful grassland. When grass ruled, reaching this open land was a true shock, a moment of almost terrifying emergence after hundreds of miles of dark eastern forests. Twain himself remembered the suddenness of the change: “Beyond the road,” he wrote, “where the snakes sunned themselves was a dense young thicket, and through it a dim-lighted path . . . ; then out of the dimness one emerged abruptly upon a level great prairie.”

He recalled the prairie’s loneliness; he recalled its peace. And doubtless it was peaceful, especially to a boy of seven or eight, who could view it at his leisure before retreating to a forest-hemmed farmhouse. But, ironically, the quiet of the prairie was an early sign of sickness, the cough before the fever.

A healthy prairie is a living, breathing, and extraordinarily dangerous place—a place of malarial wetlands and brutal storms. Most of all it’s a place of fire. Tallgrass like big bluestem
needs
fire; fire is how a prairie breathes. Without periodic burns, the eight-foot-tall stems begin to choke on themselves, creating a wall of grass that a horse can vanish behind, far too thick for prairie chickens to nest on. Burning fertilizes the earth and allows light and water to reach the soil, all without damaging the roots that remain safe in the dark, cool earth.

Looking at the old tallgrass land today, it can be difficult to imagine the force and peril of a prairie fire. Prairie fire could move as fast as the wind, make its own weather, kill anything on the surface that couldn’t burrow or fly. In 1836 an eight-mile-wide blaze tore through more than sixty miles of grass in six hours before the Rock River halted it. This kind of terrifying burn was once an annual event.

No longer, of course. Beyond the grassy lek, the ground is bare; corn is harvested before the stalks are as explosively dry as grass. But Native Americans understood the relationship between fire and prairie; the Illinois nation used the same word,
sce-tay,
to refer to both. In fact, Native Americans were probably the single biggest source of prairie fires (the second was lightning). Fire softened and prepared bottomland for planting, promoted green growth to attract bison, or simply burned away dry growth, making the land around a village or a camp safe. Precontact Native Americans of the plains were gardeners of grass.

Burning helped to sculpt the prairies and the great societies that lived on them. In A.D. 1200, thirty thousand people lived at Cahokia, the mound city in the prairies a hundred miles west of Newton. Thirty thousand people—that’s more than there were in London at the time, just fifteen years before the Magna Carta. Thirty thousand people hearing the prairie chickens boom at dawn in the surrounding cornfields, feasting on the meat of hunted birds, then adorning themselves with bones and barred feathers and quills. Later the Blackfoot and Shoshone and Sioux and Cheyenne all danced prairie-chicken dances in praise of approaching spring, celebrating as the booming echoed over black, newly burned grasslands. In 1805 William Clark wrote of “a Cloudy morning & Smokey all Day from the burning of the plains, which was Set on fire by the Minetarries for an early crop of Grass.” It was a common experience for newcomers. The birds were always deeply American, dependent on a land the first nations helped make with fire.

That the young Sammy Clemens never directly confronted a prairie fire, a wall of flame advancing as fast as a horse, was all to the good as far as his safety and that of his uncle’s farm were concerned. But by damping down the burns, the settlers were ending an ancient pattern of destruction and renewal, a pattern that animals like the prairie chickens depended upon to create the blend of grasses they used for nesting and the open ground they needed to mate.

Mating, after all, is why the chickens boom and call, and I’ve been hoping to see a pair coupling.
²
But they never do, at least out in the open. Each hen typically spends five days on the grounds, moving through stages of indifference, awareness, flirtatiousness, seduction, and reception. Though the season as a whole is winding down, I’m probably seeing these particular birds on one of their first days; they still feign disinterest, like seventh-graders at their first dance.

One by one the remaining hens fly off. When the last is gone, the booming soon fades. The cocks sink onto the grass. Lying on the lek, pinnae and tails lowered, orange throat sacs deflated and invisible, they seem like entirely different birds—diminished, depleted, and humble.

The last hen is gone; we’re free to leave without fear of disturbing them. When I shuffle out and swing the plywood door closed, the sky seems vast and bright and open. Though the puddles have frozen thicker since dawn, as I make my way along the path toward the Prairie Ridge offices I stay on clumps of icy bunchgrasses to avoid the deepest.

As I crunch from clump to clump, the booming still fills my head. I’ve seen something strange, a flamboyant performance that couldn’t be seen anywhere in the state save for our quiet, frozen blind. And it brings me low to think how sad that is. I reach the Parklane Bowling Alley very hungry, and just in time for the last of breakfast.

Late in boyhood, years after leaving his uncle’s farm for the last time, Twain finally, reluctantly, abandoned his dreams of piracy and joining the circus. One “permanent ambition,” however, he clung to—that of piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi River. In the five years that he lived his greatest and longest-lasting childhood dream, surely Twain often heard the booming of prairie chickens in grasslands along the shore, thrumming in the silence after the howl of the steam and the splashing of the great paddlewheels were stilled. It must have sounded like the moaning of the earth.

Because, amazingly, there were more prairie chickens in Illinois during Twain’s piloting tenure than at any time before or since. The booms I heard at Prairie Ridge were made by twelve cocks, give or take. As Twain piloted his way up and down the Mississippi River, some
14 million
of the birds lived amid the Illinois tallgrass. No wonder that in
Moby-Dick
, Melville used them as a symbol of ingrained permanence, writing that the Nantucketer “lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie.”

Still, the ideal habitat for prairie chickens is a blend of native tallgrass and cultivated ground, a combination that provides the birds with shelter and an easy supply of corn for food. Years later, heading west to the Nevada Territory and California, Twain would describe the transition from grass to agriculture: “the land was rolling . . . like the stately heave and swell of the ocean’s bosom after a storm. And everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this expanse of grassy land.”

For a few decades after the arrival of white farmers, it had seemed that corn farming would never take hold on the vast upper prairies; the defiant, incredibly dense tallgrass roots stopped traditional iron plows as suddenly as though they’d struck bedrock. Cahokians and other Native American farmers had always clustered in the bottomlands along the Missouri and Knife rivers, where gardeners like the famous Buffalo Bird Woman (subject of a 1917 book and herself a member of the Hidatsa tribe’s Prairie Chicken clan) used sticks to break out small clumps of sod they then beat free of topsoil. A month of this brutal labor might ready a small garden plot, enough for a single family—and this was ground that Buffalo Bird Woman called “soft and easy to work.”

White farmers were slow to realize that the world’s best soil lay under an armor of sod. Some even assumed that land where no trees would grow must be worthless; James Monroe once wrote to Thomas Jefferson that “a great part [of northern Illinois] is miserably poor. . . . that upon the Illinois [River] consists of plains which have not had . . . and will not have a single bush on them for ages.” Even when farmers began to understand the quality of the black soils, the knotted tallgrass roots defied anything less than fourteen oxen pulling a hundred-pound plow. Sod would cling to the plowshare like glue, forcing a halt every few feet to scrape the iron clean with a wooden paddle. The work was known as “breaking” the prairie; even with the massive oxen teams, attacking the roots must have felt like swinging a sledgehammer at a mile-thick wall.

Then, in 1837, just two years after Twain’s birth, John Deere invented the self-scouring steel plow. Nobody knew it at the time, but the day the first steel plow left Deere’s workshop marked the end of the wild American tallgrass. The time of the prairie farmer had come. Now a homesteader with a single pair of horses could break grassland by himself, quickly tearing through the dense sod to reach the unbelievably fertile soils below. And so, for the next fifty years, row by row and field by field, farmers broke the Illinois prairies for corn ground, creating a patchwork of food and shelter. For those fifty years, Illinois was prairie-chicken heaven; their numbers doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

Those fifty years happened to correspond almost exactly with the first great expansion of America’s railways. Chicago’s first train appeared in 1848; by 1860, just before Twain went west, the city was serviced by more than a hundred daily trains from eleven different railroads. The nation’s total miles of track more than tripled, from nine thousand miles in 1850 to thirty thousand miles by the decade’s end. The simultaneous growth in railroads and the prairie-chicken population meant that the birds would be one of the first fresh, inherently local foods to be eaten thousands of miles from where they were hunted.

Now, eating local, seasonal foods often makes both culinary and environmental sense. When you eat something grown in season, close to your home, you get something fresh that also took far less gasoline to transport than something grown a continent or an ocean away. Still, my local supermarket has shrimp from Thailand, apples from Chile, lamb from New Zealand, and this is deeply strange; from a historical perspective, it’s just completely bizarre that eating locally takes any effort at all.

Of course, transporting food long distances has been going on for millennia. But the Egyptian wheat that fed Rome, the spices of medieval Europe, and the cod that sustained the Iberian empires were all important precisely because they were easily preserved. Eating dried or salted foods is very different from eating a banana picked five thousand miles away. When you eat fresh meats or fruits or vegetables raised or grown more than a few miles from your home, you’re doing something that makes you different from nearly all other people who have ever lived; today we have to struggle to
avoid
doing it. Through most of history, when it came to fresh food, eating locally and seasonally was just what humans did.

By the mid-nineteenth century, technologies that could carry game and produce to distant markets ever more quickly, ever more reliably, were transforming America’s tables—and its landscapes. As author Ann Vileisis points out, America’s foodsheds—the areas that produce a given community’s food, just as a watershed provides its water—were rapidly expanding and overlapping. The foodsheds of major eastern cities saw particularly dramatic change. The Erie Canal had already opened the Midwest; soon steamboats would carry Southern vegetables from converted cotton plantations. After the Civil War, the spreading spiderweb of railroads carried game like prairie chickens fresh to markets hundreds, or even thousands, of miles from the grasslands the birds needed to live. In Twain’s boyhood the foodshed of the Quarles farm had included the surrounding prairie, forests, and fields. Now, as transportation technology radically expanded, New York City’s foodshed included the same places; it included, in effect, the Quarles farm.

We take this kind of thing for granted. But in Twain’s day it was a huge novelty, and novelty sells. So, for a few decades, Illinois was heaven not only for prairie chickens but also for prairie-chicken hunters. Thomas De Voe, author of a magisterial 1867 guide to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia foodstuffs called
The Market Assistant,
recalled that in 1821 a pair of aged prairie chickens had sold in New York for the spectacular price of five dollars (they might have been prized as a substitute for the quickly vanishing Long Island grouse). By the time Twain wrote the menu for his feast, prairie chickens were hunted by the literal train-load. Chicago markets measured them by the cord and ton, to the tune of some six hundred thousand birds every year. As early as 1861 in New York, the five dollars per pair had fallen to fifty cents; by 1867 enough birds regularly appeared between October and April to glut the city’s market. Some people even credited the first development of insulated shipping barrels and techniques of carrying frozen food to the hunger for prairie chicken. What’s more, a private “chicken hunting culture” was developing, with railroads offering special rates to parties of hunters; specially equipped wagons were sold complete with gun racks, dog kennels, and iceboxes.

One Illinois newspaper, recognizing that the birds had become emblems, named itself the
Prairie-Chicken.
The paper, declared the editors, would be “rich, spicy, popular, cheap and wholesome.” But not long after,
Science
magazine noted that most people could hope to encounter a prairie chicken only once it had been killed and shipped to market. The prairie chicken was beginning to vanish; soon it would again be a local dish, until it disappeared entirely from restaurant and even home tables.