Stampede!

This year marks the 200^th anniversary of an event you have probably never heard of.  Once you read this though you may find it hard to forget.  For some of the people who lived through it, their first awareness that something was happening may have been when they heard the pitter patter of little feet.

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If you have watched much television, you may have seen nature documentaries showing migrations of wildebeests in Africa or Caribou in North America.  Well, witnesses say the event I’m talking about was not so much a migration as a stampede.

In western movies you’ve probably seen stampeding bison or cattle.  You have seen the runaway bovines trample people and bowl-over wagons, basically destroying anything in their path.

Well, the beasts in this stampede were not wildebeests, caribou, bison, or cattle, but the devastation was incredible…but like the hoofed critters, the perpetrators were covered in hair.

Referring to my opening paragraph, I should point out that, although some of the residents of Hamilton County, Indiana did give birth around 1822, this post is not about tiny humans.  Nope, while these critters did have tiny feet, they also had bushy tails.  You see, I’m about to tell you about the Great Squirrel Stampede of 1822. 

Don’t laugh; I assure you, it was a very real thing…and it could happen again.

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In earlier posts I’ve told how squirrels around our cabin have caused us frustration, cleaning out our bird feeders and gnawing on things we leave out on our porch, a bench, a table, our rocking chairs, even the porch railings and floors themselves.  I’ve also told how I’ve reduced their assaults with a pellet rifle, making some rather tasty meals out of the culprits.

My problems with squirrels at Sweetwater are nothing compared to what happened around Hamilton County, Indiana in late 1822.

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White settlers first came to what is now Hamilton County about 1818.  The pioneers began to clear the forest and plant crops, building log cabins and trying to start a new life.  Times were not easy and people couldn’t just ask the government for help when things got tough.

It is not recorded whether there was much warning of what was going to happen.  In September of 1822, just as residents were starting to harvest the corn they depended on to feed both their families and their livestock, the squirrels came.

Not one squirrel, or two, or three, but by the dozens and the hundreds, hordes of the buck-toothed critters left the forest and scurried into the open.  They moved across farmers’ corn fields, pastures, and vegetable gardens, eating everything in their paths.

Everything.

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Noblesville lawyer Augustus F. Shirts (1824-1905) wrote a history of Hamilton County in 1901.  He passed on information he had gathered from long time residents.  He told about the Great Squirrel Stampede.

“The squirrels passed through this county from west to east. The number could not be estimated. The time occupied in passing was about two weeks. They destroyed all the corn in the fields they passed over. They could not be turned in their course, but went straight on in the route taken. When they came to White River they entered the water at once and swam across. Hundreds of them were shot. Others were killed with clubs.”

Other accounts from personal letters of residents in the area at that time tell of farmers trying to protect their crops, indeed their lives themselves.

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Calvin Fletcher was a lawyer, banker, and civic leader in the early 1800s.  He kept a diary throughout most of his adult life.  In his diaries and the letters he wrote at the time he gave detailed accounts of life at the time.

In a correspondence with his brother dated February 23, 1823, he said, “The corn this year was literally destroyed, unless in the prairies, by grey and black squirrel. Sir, there was by one man killed round one cornfield 248 in 3 days about 4 miles of this place. Many people lost whole cornfields – 12 squirrels were supposed to destroy as much corn as one hog. They eat only the heart or pit of the kernel. The squirrel appeared to be emigrating towards the S.W. instead of the E. as he has always done heretofore. The reason for his emigration this year was this – our woods or wilderness, it scarcely ever fails to produce a sufficient quantity of mast to support such vermin but this year they entirely fail’d.”

He explained, “the word mast is used by the people here for the fruit and nuts that grow on forest trees.”

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No less an observer of nature than naturalist and artist John James Audubon wrote that he witnessed a horde of squirrels reach the Ohio and Hudson rivers.  He wrote that he was impressed at how well they swam, grabbing floating debris to aid in their attempts to reach the other shore.

In his book, Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1846), he said “The farmers in the Western wilds regard them with sensations which may be compared to the anxious apprehensions of the Eastern nations at the sight of the devouring locust.” 

Keep in mind that Indiana was considered part of the west at that time.

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Oliver Johnson lived in a cabin in what is now Indianapolis.  As we older folks are wont to do, he willingly told stories about his youth to anyone who was interested.  Luckily for us, Johnson had a grandson who shared some of his grandpa’s stories in a book, A Home in the Woods.

In that book, Mr. Johnson said, “Squirrels were always so plentiful that we saved only the choice parts: the hams and the back. We always shot a squirrel in the head so that the bullet wouldn’t spoil those parts. In the fall we nearly always had a spell of travelin’ squirrels. We supposed that the mast and nuts that they fed on was scarce in some sections and caused them to move on to other places where they could find something to eat. One fall there was so many passin’ through they became a pest, makin’ raids on the corn fields. They come by the thousands for several days. They was so starved and footsore from travelin’ that they wasn’t fit to eat. Pap said something had to be done, so he put Uncle Milt and me to patrollin’ the corn field with our rifles. At night we would mould enough bullets to keep us shootin’ all the next day. The squirrels was so hungry they didn’t scare very much, but the crack of the rifles helped to keep them up in the trees. One day I counted eighteen dead squirrels I shot from a tree without changin’ position or missin’ a shot. We left so many dead ones on the ground that they actually attracted the buzzards. We saved most of our corn that fall, but some neighbors who didn’t patrol their fields had their corn eat up so bad it didn’t pay to gather it.”

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The Great Squirrel Stampede of 1822 ended as it had started, with little warning or fanfare.  The squirrels died or were killed by predators, or simply dispersed into places with more available food.  Settlers, who didn’t have an easy life anyway, struggled to make it through the winter with their stores of food drastically reduced by the marauding squirrels, but I was unable to find any accounts of people who died as a direct result of the stampede.

Perhaps area residents were somewhat prepared for the invasion, for a good reason.  As you may have gathered from some of the earlier quotes, 1822 was not the only such invasion, merely the most notable due to the incredible numbers of advancing animals.  One in 1845 was almost as large.  An observer of that one said the mass of advancing squirrels was 130 miles wide by 150 miles long.  Another witness noted seeing about 1400 squirrels on a small portion of road…all at the same time.  A modern scientist estimates that the emigration contained half a billion squirrels.

As Oliver Johnson told his grandson, nearly every fall he could count on seeing “a spell of travelin’ squirrels.” They weren’t always destructive, but one year they raided corn fields “by the thousands” for several days.  Johnson’s father tasked him and his brother with patrolling the fields with their rifles, and he once shot 18 squirrels from a tree “without changin’ position or missin’ a shot.”

Well, with the fragmentation of the woodland that originally covered most of the American continent and the virtual extinction of the once prolific chestnut tree, squirrel numbers have been greatly reduced and their emigrations have become much less frequent or massive.  But they do still occur at times. Although much smaller than the Stampede of 1822, one such emigrations occurred in the eastern U.S. in 1968 and another took place near Lake Michigan in 1985.

So it could still happen.

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My grandkids and I don’t make a fulltime job of it but we try to do our thing to help keep the population of squirrels living on Sweetwater in check.  Hopefully we do a good enough job that we’ll never witness an emigration of a magnitude approaching that of the Great Squirrel Stampede of 1822.

That would be nuts.

Sorry.

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