Even after we’ve aged to the place where we should know better, we like to go out and do crazy things. Take this for instance: driving 200 miles through heavy rain to get to a spot infested with mosquitoes, heat, and humidity, then climbing through barbed wire and tramping through thick growth virgin sod to a spot where there is nothing except for a few depressions in the ground, standing under a rain cloud and getting soaked, and then, when all is said and done, calling it good. And, after getting home and kicking back in my Lazy Boy and finding a tick crawling on me I tell the wife it was still good. That’s the way it was yesterday.
The primary destination was Pigeon Point in the Owego township of Ransom County and joining me for the drive and keeping good company reminiscing about the old days was Larry Strand, an old Sheldon friend. We drove to Dennis and Linda Bjugstad’s new and beautiful country home south of Kindred so that Dennis could act as our tour director. We first drove to Abercrombie to visit the new-to-me visitors center at the fort. Fort Abercrombie served as the gateway to further westward movement in the historical period that interests me. Then we headed west again, passed through Walcott, decided it was time to eat dinner and found some pretty-good home cooked food in the local bar, and continued on to Pigeon Point and the site of the Owego settlement where fascinating history has been made. The site’s name of Pigeon Point apparently came from the time when pigeons were common and how men could knock them down by the bushel in the trees there. I’ve checked the writings of a prime bird expert, John James Audubon, who verified the huge numbers of those birds that once flew in these parts. He said once,
the “light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse.” He estimated that when he saw a flock passing overhead that if it were one mile wide when it passed for three hours, traveling at the rate of a mile a minute, allowing two pigeons to the square yard, one billion, one hundred and fifteen million plus birds passed overhead.
As we tramped around the area which is now owned and protected by Nature Conservancy we tried to envision the large wagon trains that stopped here overnight on their way to supply the new Fort Ransom. Just south of the Pigeon Point the land stands very level and most likely served as their parking place. I could almost hear the sounds of the many oxen grazing the grass that was in abundance. One of the wagon trains I’ve referenced numbered forty wagons. How many oxen were hitched to each wagon I’m not sure. If four, then 160 of them plus a spare number for replacements, maybe 200 of them. The bull-whacker drovers, known for their coarseness and profanity, would have added to the scene to make it a very colorful one, indeed.
So I’ve got my work cut out for me as I research further, write countless drafts, search out editors, and do whatever it takes to properly weave all the bits together so as to preserve this history in writing. I’m sure it will take two years or more. Dennis asked if that meant there will not be another chapbook of poems before then. My reply, “Oh, there might be one anyway.”
