Wilson’s “Foresters”

With a mien “of surly gloom” a trapper, “the ragged owner of the hut” who has been in the forest for six days, strides past his timorous son and irritated wife into their “solitary hut, small, cheerless, rude,” which “amid vast swamps and wildernesses stood.” He is:

Laden with skins, his traps around him slung,
Two dead racoons across his shoulders hung,
Musk-rats and ‘possums in each hand he bore,
A large brown otter trailed along the floor.

Above the door hangs “A sacred horseshoe, guardian of the whole,/Terror of sprites prophane, and witches foul,/Dread, powerful talisman ‘gainst imps unknown!”

The trapper’s scowl might reflect his suspicion at finding three strange men in his cabin. He could not have known until they introduced themselves that they were, from left to right, Alexander Wilson the poet, Wilson’s nephew, Billy Duncan, and a young traveling companion, Isaac Leech. No doubt Wilson explained to his host that he and his friends were just passing through, and that one of the purposes of his journey was to study birds in preparation for a book he was thinking of publishing.^[3]American Ornithology, 9 vols (Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1808-1825).

The trapper greets the strangers politely–”Friends, how d’ye do?” to which two of them respond with discreet handwaves–then asks his wife about their livestock. The calves? “Why three of them are gone!” He curses the wolves. “They’ll eat up house and hall!” And the sheep? They’re all dead. “I thought it would be so,” responds the trapper. “Well,–now they’re at the devil, let them go.” This was the sort of worry Meriwether Lewis didn’t want distracting his hunters; it was perhaps the main reason why he sought only unmarried men for the job.

Lines 35-41 of Wilson’s poem enumerate the subjects of some of the tales told to Wilson and his companions by old Sox, the proprietor of a hostelry ominously named “Shades of Death.”

He dealt out tales and anecdotes in store;
Of panthers trapp’d of wounded bears enraged,
The wolves and wildcats he had oft engaged,
The noble bucks his rifle had brought down,
How living rattlesnakes he took to town.
His dog’s exploits–the glory of his kind!

At the mention of “panthers”–which was then the North American name for cougars or mountain lions–the poet digresses to a footnote to outline one of Sox’s more entertaining yarns.

Our host made himself very merry by relating to us an anecdote of one of his neighbours living ten or twelve miles off, who having fixed his large steel traps, in the evening, returned to the spot next morning, when, to his terror, he saw two panthers (F. Cougar) [now Felis concolor] surrounding a trap in which a very large one was taken by the leg. Afraid to hazard a shot lest the surviving one, who was at liberty, might attack him, he hurried home, loaded another gun and gave it to his wife, an intrepid amazon, who immediately followed him to the scene. Arrived within forty or fifty yards, the hunter presented to take aim, but was so agitated with terror, that he found himself altogether unable. His wife instantly knelt down before him, ordering him to rest the rifle on her shoulder, which he did, and by this expedient succeeded in killing the whole three.

Frontier hunters’ wives had too many farm and household chores to do to get involved in their husbands’ business. Nevertheless, many were able to load and fire a gun in order to put meat in the stewpot by shooting small game near their homes, to drive off predators, and sometimes to defend themselves from maurauding Indians, so this woman’s eagerness to help steady her husband’s aim would not have been exceptional.

Both Sox’s yarn and Barralet’s drawing are somewhat fanciful in other details: First, cougars are solitary creatures, not sociable enough even to travel in threes. The Corps of Discovery encountered only a few “panthers,” now usually called cougars, pumas, catamounts, or mountain lions. A few days after they left the Three Forks of the Missouri, Reubin Field shot the only one they killed, a few days up the Jefferson River; no details of the event were recorded. During the winter at Fort Clatsop, Clark bought the skin of one (23 December 1805) from local Indians, and on 26 February 1806 he wrote a summary of their conclusions about the species:

Since it was a familiar species, there was no need to say any more.

Although this illustration is unsigned, the similarity of these stylized pine trees to those in Barralet’s depiction of the Great Fall of the Missouri River, as well as his better known drawing of Niagara Falls, almost certainly proves that this one was his also.

Describing Panthers

Today it is common knowledge that only the cubs of cougars (Felis concolor–feel-iss con-coal-er) have leopard-like spots; adults wear plain coats in various shades of tan (concolor is Latin for “one color.”) In those days, however, there was widespread confusion over the distinctions among panthers, jaguars, and oscelots. One reason for the confusion was the contemporary tendency to associate North American species with those of Europe, Africa and Asia. Another reason was that each of them was, as Clark put it, “Scerce in the Country where they exist.” Therefore, naturalists hadn’t the opportunity to observe any one of them often enough to have developed comparative descriptions of the various species of cat-like animals of the Western Hemisphere. Even Noah Webster’s first (1806) definition of the cougar described it as “a spotted and very fierce wild beast.”^[5]A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806; reprint, New York: Bounty Books, 1970). We now know that the jaguar (Panthera onca, the New World counterpart of the African-Asian leopard) is native to the American southwest, Mexico and South America. The ocelot ranges from southern Oklahoma, southwest Arkansas, and western Louisiana through Texas and Arizona. The jaguar (Panthera pardus; pardus is another Latin word for panther) is spotted with black rosettes or rings in parallel rows along its back and sides; the ocelot Felis pardalis; Felis is Latin for cat; pardalis is Latin for female panther) is marked with black-bordered brown spots of random shapes. But it took many decades for biologists to sort them out and arrive at the present understanding.

Still, those “panthers,” or whatever we choose to call any of the noble ancestors of our favorite house cat, remain blithely indifferent to names of any sort.