forty or fifty yards. By the pulling of a string, the stick
on which the pigeons rest is alternately elevated and depressed, which
produces a fluttering of their wings, similar to that of birds
alighting. This being perceived by the passing flocks, they descend with
great rapidity, and finding corn, buckwheat, etc, strewed about, begin
to feed, and are instantly, by the pulling of a cord, covered by the
net. In this manner ten, twenty, and even thirty dozen have been caught
at one sweep. Meantime the air is darkened with large bodies of them
moving in various directions; the woods also swarm with them in search
of acorns, and the thundering of musquetry is perpetual on all sides
from morning to night. Wagon loads of them are poured into market, where
they sell from fifty to twenty-five and even twelve cents per dozen; and
pigeons become the order of the day at dinner, breakfast and supper,
until the very name becomes sickening."

[Footnote A: To-day, we think that the fowlers of the roccolos of
northern Italy are very cruel in their methods of catching song-birds
wholesale for the market (chapter xi); but our own countrymen of
Wilson's day were just as cruel in the method described above.]

* * * * *

The range of the passenger pigeon covered nearly the whole United
States from the Atlantic coast westward to the Rocky Mountains. A few
bold pigeons crossed the Rocky Mountains into Oregon, northern
California and Washington, but only as "stragglers," few and far
between. The wide range of this bird was worthy of a species that
existed in millions, and it was persecuted literally all along the line.
The greatest slaughter was in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In 1848
Massachusetts gravely passed a law protecting the _netters_ of wild
pigeons from foreign interference! There was a fine of $10 for damaging
nets, or frightening pigeons away from them. This was on the theory that
the pigeons were so abundant they could not by any possibility ever
become scarce, and that pigeon-slaughter was a legitimate industry.

In 1867, the State of New York found that the wild pigeon needed
protection, and enacted a law to that effect. The year 1868 was the last
year in which great numbers of passenger pigeons nested in that State.
Eaton, in "The Birds of New York," said that "millions of birds occupied
the timber along Bell's Run, near Ceres, Alleghany County, on the
Pennsylvania line."

In 187