During a family dinner with some of my closest relatives, my eccentric uncle proposed that the extinction of the passenger pigeon was an attempt at Native American genocide. Like allowing the wholesale slaughter of the plains bison, the unregulated market hunting of the passenger pigeon was meant to force native populations onto reservations. Knowing how underhanded the federal government's dealings were (and still are) with the tribal nations, it seemed like a reasonable assumption. The policymakers of the time knew, or hoped, that the endless flocks of passenger pigeons could be thinned down to the point that the tribes who relied on the huge roosts for meat, eggs, and oil would have to settle on the reservations and live on government assistance. They probably didn't feel that the pigeons could be driven to extinction, but if so, then all the better to control the wild savages that complicated their efforts to exploit the natural resources of the Indian territories.
    After looking into this subject, I've concluded that nothing in history is ever so "cut and dry" and that such a simple explanation is at least narrow-minded if not far-fetched. Early accounts and archeological evidence do support the fact that Native Americans relied heavily on the flocks, and pre-contact bird numbers show they must have had a minimum impact. It"s also true that the free-for-all slaughter by the early settlers and market hunters combined with non-existent or un-enforced hunting restrictions to wipe the pigeons out for good. However, based on these facts alone, we cannot conclude that there was a conspiracy to drive out the Indians by killing off their wild game stocks.
    This report from around 1650 gives us an idea of the Native's dependence on the pigeons. Adrian Van der Douk, in his Description of the New Netherlands (northeast U.S.), "The Indians, when they find the breeding places of the Pigeons, frequently remove to those places with their wives and children to the number of two to three hundred in a company, where they live a month or more on the young Pigeons which they take after flushing them from their nests with poles or sticks."
    Another early report claims the Native took a dangerous toll on the flocks, "Among the wild enemies of the Pigeon, indeed the most dangerous of them, was the Indian who levied upon the flocks wherever he found them. The populous roosts of the Southland he invaded at night, and, firing the underbrush, killed the birds by the thousands. Large numbers were caught around the numerous licks in simple traps. But it was at the great nestings that the tribe settled down to a continuous banquet, during which it gathered a bounteous harvest of savory produce."
    Whatever the size of the harvests, the Native Americans had lived with the pigeons for ages without wiping them out and these roosts were enormous! Some large roosting sites were reported to have "covered an area five miles by twelve with up to ninety nests in a single tree" and that "branches broke and whole trees were toppled by the sheer weight of roosting birds, often standing on top of each other, and leaving a pile of droppings several inches deep under the trees." The pre-contact bird population is estimated at between 3 and 5 billion pigeons, certainly enough birds to go around even after settlers from the east started hunting them.
    As settlement increased, so did hunting pressure which peaked when the railroad came into an area and made large-scale market hunting possible. Of course, anywhere a flock roosted, everyone in the nearby towns would take the day off to shoot as many as they could just for fun as well as for food. Once a town was connected by rail to the markets in the east, money gave them a reason to kill even more. By this time the demand for passenger pigeons back east was made greater by the loss of the flocks there. On July 23rd, 1860, 235,200 birds were sent east from Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1876, Oceana County Michigan sent a total of 1,600,000 back east that year.
    Michigan was one of the last places where large flocks had been seen. This report from April 8th, 1873, in "Saginaw in Michigan there was a continuous stream of passenger pigeons overhead between 7:30 in the morning and 4 p.m." The last great nesting of Passenger Pigeons is considered the 1878 roosting in Petoskey, Michigan. The birds that survived the slaughter at Petosky finally left and disappeared to the North, never to be seen again. The last record of a passenger pigeon in Michigan was of one shot in Wanye County on September 1st, 1898. The very last passenger pigeon in captivity was "Martha" (named for Martha Washington), a 29-year-old female that died in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914.
    It would appear that the demise of the passenger pigeon was due to greed, ignorance, and a lack of hunting regulation and yet there are some indications that genocide against the Native Americans was at least a popular justification for the slaughter of the great flocks. The extinction of the passenger pigeon coincides with the near extinction of the plains bison. In 1896 General Sherman is quoted as saying, "Every buffalo dead is an Indian dead". In General William Tecumseh Sherman's letter to John Sherman, on Sept. 23rd, 1868, he writes, "But the more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war. For the more I see of these Indians the more convinced am I that they have all to be killed, or be maintained as a species of paupers." It is evident that the popular belief at that time was that what was bad for the Indian was good for the white man, but the extinction of the passenger pigeon was really about the money and carelessness of natural resources. Once the pigeon was gone, the market ceased to exist and the local market hunters were out of a job they may have believed would never end. Comment about this article on the Epress Forum Board .

    Could it be that the notorious western outlaws, Frank and Jesse James's very own mother taught school in Morley at the end of the 1800s? If true, this is an exciting addition to the wild-west flavor of 19th-century life along the Muskegon River. After researching the boomtowns and western-like landscape of the prairies, this information only helped complete a picture of western Michigan as a piece of the old west in the mid-west. I had no reason to disbelieve what I had read in the "Morley Centennial 1869-1969" publication found at the local libraries.
    Unfortunately, the facts just don't correspond to the details of the story that is quoted as follows. "Mr. (Darius) Blair liked to tell of the days when he attended school in the old Schoolhouse in the Bell school district. One of his teachers was the late Mrs. (Ben) Samuels, mother of the notorious bandits, Frank and Jessie James. Mrs. Samuels' left arm had been amputated above the elbow, said to have resulted in injuries sustained as a spy in the Civil War . . . Mrs. Samuels died about 1887, . . . She is buried in the Higbee Cemetery."
    There may still be a controversy about the final resting place of Jesse James, but there is no doubt where his mother was buried. It is well-recorded fact that Zerelda Samuel (not Samuels), the mother of Frank and Jesse James, died at 86 years old on a train while en route to Oklahoma City in 1911. Her body was shipped to Kansas City and interned at Mt. Olivet Cemetery.
    Perhaps there was a different "Mrs. Samuels" buried at the Higbee Cemetery. Checking the cemetery records show no one, male or female, with the surname of Samuel or Samuels, buried at Higbee Cemetery. Interestingly, I found one woman buried there that might be related to our storyteller Mr. Blair, her name is Sarah Blair, born in 1819 died 1887, the same year this other "Mrs. Samuels" supposedly died. Maybe this "Mrs. Samuels" moved to Morley later in life but wasn't buried at Higbee Cemetery or had been buried there but then moved.
    Still not ready to give up, I checked on who was the teacher at the Old Bell School and found out that Margaret Quigley taught in 1862 when the school was first opened. Perhaps "Mrs. Samuels" taught there after Mrs. Quigley. This other "Mrs. Samuels" couldn't be the real Zerelda Samuel as she never left the homestead in Missouri to teach school in Morley. In her later years she "divided her time between the homestead and the farm of her son Frank in Oklahoma."
    Most sources said Zerelda Samuel (her maiden name was Cole) had three husbands; her first was Rev. Robert James, her second was Benjamin Simms (who was killed in a horse accident in 1854) and her third and last husband was Dr. Rueben Samuel. Perhaps she used the name "Ben" in reference to Rueben or maybe there was some confusion between Simms and Samuel.
    The only part of the story that comes close to the historic accounts is how she lost her arm but even this Morley version is far from factual. Most accounts claim that in 1875 Pinkerton agents laid siege to the Samuel home trying to capture Frank and Jesse who weren't there at the time. During the shoot-out, a device similar to the Molotov cocktail was thrown through a window, where it hit Mrs. Samuel, taking most of her arm and killing her nine-year-old son, Archie Samuel. Every picture I found of Zerelda after losing her arm shows her right arm missing, not the left.
    After researching every possible angle to prove that some aspect of this story is based on historical fact, I've come up empty-handed. The Morley tale has the date of her death wrong, the cemetery is wrong, her last name is wrong, the missing arm is on the wrong side and there's no proof in the least to support that Mrs. Samuel ever visited Michigan, much less teach school in Morley. I hate to say this, but this is one of those big yarns that got into the history books. I'd love to be proven wrong and I invite anyone with information to contact me.
    Note: I wasn't going to put this story in the Michigan Chronoscope, but I decided to do so after seeing the "Sesquicentennial Celebration of Big Rapids / Mecosta County" Issue IX (a section of the Pioneer Newspaper) and reading an article entitled "A Legend That Never Dies" (pg 15) that once again puts forth this tall tale. This article offered some new information as follows.
    A registry book for an unnamed "former hotel" in, or near, Reed City Michigan had a June 6th, 1880 entry for Jesse James and two of his known associate's name Texas Jack and Jake Wolverstine. Although "experts" were said to have validated the signatures, the registry book, found in 1972, disappeared with an antique dealer from California. No proof there, just hearsay talk about some unsubstantiated and missing evidence. Conventional history has Jesse James down in Tennessee and then in Kentucky during that time.
    A letter, written by one Nina Bently in 1937 to her cousin in Morley claims that "Mrs. Samuels" taught at the Bell school, lived in the Higbee settlement, and "tells of her return from Jesse's funeral" in April 1882. However, most sources say that Jesse was buried in the front yard of the family farm in Missouri and that Zerelda would allow tourists to view the grave for a quarter and even sold rocks from his grave. One source claimed that she lived on the family farm in Missouri and then moved in with her brother in Kansas City in April 1882..
    The tale was told somewhat differently in an Associated Press story in "The Argus-Press", Owosso, Michigan, on June 1st, 1974 and the "Battle Creek Enquirer" on June 12th, 1974. The Enquirer even claims that official Mecosta County records don't have the information to back up the story. This version is basically the same as the one in the Morley Centennial published in 1969. It references Darius Blair, making the Centennial the probable source, however, there are some exceptions. The main ones are Jesse James's mother's name is quoted as "Gerelda James Samuels Conrad Brandow" and her son "Archie James" who was killed in the explosion that took her arm. Her name was Zerelda, not Gerelda. Her maiden name was Cole, so her last name would have been Cole-James-Simms-Samuel, not James-Samuels-Conrad-Brandow. Her son's last name was Samuel, not James.
    The additional information in the AP story leads me to a theory on how it may have started. This story claims Mrs. Brandow was a teacher at Bell School, not Mrs. Samuels as stated by other sources. She "lost her right arm before she arrived in Michigan. She told her pupils it was lost while she was a spy for the Union during the civil war."
    Zerelda was never a spy for the Union. Her whole family was on the Confederate side during the U.S. Civil War. Both Frank and Jesse were Confederate guerillas and likely why they became outlaws after the war.
    ". . . her old pupils recalled Mrs. Brandow fondly." " 'She was a good teacher and could wield a heavy ruler even if she did only have one hand.' Darius Blair remarked years later." This shows it's a story first told to students by a beloved teacher missing an arm.
    "When the James boys rode in for a visit, neighbors reported, the badmen would hide beneath their mother's home whenever anyone approached." Sounds like a rumor to explain why no one saw the "James boys" at her home.
    These aspects lead me to believe there was a teacher at Bell School that was an amputee. This teacher used the "Zerelda Samuel" story to endear herself to her students. She may have taken a vacation at the time of Jesse James"s funeral that supported this story. I checked for the name Brandow interned at the Higbee Cemetery and found Mrs. Edna Brandow, but she was only 4 years old when Zerelda died.

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