Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [14]
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