In a book that seems tailor-made for me, nature writer Joel Greenberg has compiled a scrapbook of sorts, a collection of nature writing sharing impressions of nature in the Chicago landscape from the 1700s to early 1900s. “Of Prairie, Woods and Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing” is a diverse compilation; it includes scientific articles and settler’s diaries, old newspaper articles and yellowed journal pieces hauled out of the archives.
Most of the reminiscences conjure landscapes now lost: the Kankakee Marsh, the great old-growth forests of Michigan, the once-unbroken sweep of the Illinois prairie. The writers seem to alternate between knowing these places are in danger–some stories end with a postscript saying that the habitat described is already lost, even back in the 1800s–while others seem to take this bounty for granted, assuming it will subsist and sustain forever.
There’s a callousness toward nature here that’s disturbing. Some of the articles from shooters and trappers convey wholesale slaughter, as old-time sportsmen aim shotguns to the sky and fill their bags with dozens of birds. There’s even an entry from an old target shooter who remembers when they used to compete with live birds, fifty at a time, right out of the trap.
But Greenberg does a good job balancing the perspectives on display. Some writers point out that pioneer families relied on the protein of the field and were vulnerable to the predations of wolves…not that it makes the tales of wolf hunts easier to read. Others lament the loss of habitat and indiscriminate killing; they work to stop the shoots or collection of birds for ladies’ hats.
As Benjamin T. Gault writes in the Audubon Bulletin in 1937, “the encouragement of ‘Crow Shoots’ and dynamiting them at their winter roosts, is all wrong as it has been practiced in our state and by the Conservation Department. It is wrong, I think, for the harm it does psychologically to our growing youth by encouraging murderous instinct.”
Like any historic compilation, some of the writing is wonderful and some is old, weird, baroque. But on the whole it’s a wondrous collection, an evocation of a world now lost. As Donald Culross Peattie writes in “A Prairie Grove” (1938), “There is no other land in the world with autumns like ours. We pile the treasure of the year into a great burial fire. Tongues of flame go up to the sky, the garnet of black and red oaks, the leaping maples and the flickering aspens and out of the midst of it all one exulting spire of light where a cottonwood shakes primal yellow at the primal blue of the American sky.”