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The City of Kent's Bicentennial Parade Standing Rock Cultural Arts presents Three Entries for : 1. The Missing Animals of Ohio: an 1806 exhibition of wildlife who used to roam the Ohio landscape but is now extinct from the area. 2. John Brown: Kent citizen and leader of The Anti-Slave movement in the 1800¹s. 3. Tecumseh: 1806 leader of The Shawnee tribe of Native Americans in Ohio. The parade is Saturday, September 9th, 2007, 10:00 am. It begins at Horning and Main streets, near The KSU Music and Speech building and proceeds west on Main Street to Water street in Downtown Kent. Images from the Parade
Information about our wildlife entry: Memorial to Wildlife As our Parade workshop comes to a close, here is a list of the animals that we are bringing to life: Elk, Heath Hen, Swallow-Tailed Kite, Mitchell¹s Satyr (butterfly), Alligator Gar (fish), Raven, Lynx, Fisher, Big-Eared Bat, Carolina Parakeet, Mustard White (butterfly), Wolf, Wolvarine, Wood Bison, Cougar, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Snowshoe Hare, Rice Rat, Passenger Pigeon, and Werely Salamander. VInce Packard has compiled the following information about all the extirpated species of Ohio: Missing Animals of Ohio Carolina Parakeet Conuropsis carolinses extinct c. 1914 Eastern Wood Bison -Bison bison pennsylvanicus- extinct c.1825 By 1790 they had been reduced to one herd numbering 300-400 animals in Pennsylvania. They were slaughtered in the "Sink", a large hollow in the White Mountains of Union County in the dreadful winter of 1799-1800. The following year a bull cow and calf were seen in the same county. The bull (shot the next year) was the last known in the state. A few stragglers remained in West Virginia, one killed near Charleston
in 1815 but none others were reported until 1825 when a cow and a calf
were killed at Valley Head, the source of the Tygart River. These were
the last Eastern Wood Bison in the U.S. Eastern Elk- (wapiti)-Cervus Canadensis Canadensis, extinct since 1877. Really a giant form of European reindeer, the eastern elk was numerous and extensive, being the most widespread of all american hoofed animals. As one authority pointed out their enormous range could be mapped by plotting the cities, counties, creeks and rivers named after it. But by the beginning of the nineteenth century human population pressures, loss of habitat, demand for meat and the sport in the east of running down the elk on horseback had taken its toll. It had already vanished north of the Canadian border but it was the fetish of elk teeth used as insignia by the fraternal order of elks, which caused the exacting toll. The famous half-breed elk hunter Jim Jacobson shot the last pure eastern elk on September first 1877 in Pennsylvania. Passenger Pigeon -Ectopistes migratorious extinct c.1914 The most numerous bird on earth it represented about 40% of all the birds in the U.S. In 1870 the species was already diminished when a flock 1 mile wide by 320 miles long passed Cincinnati. James Audubon traveling next to the Ohio River watched a column of the birds and described them Š "so that the light of the noonday sun was obscured as if by an eclipse". This lasted the whole day and for 3 more days subsequent flocks followed. One breeding ground in Kentucky was several miles long by 40 miles wide. Audubon reported an incredible din and branches two feet in diameter broken by masses of birds upon birds as they descended onto their roosting site. Demand for cheap meat was phenomenal and professional pigeon hunters used the innovations of telegraph and railroad to follow the flocks. Stool pigeon decoys, pigeons with their eyes sewed shut and nailed to a post, lured their quarry. The last great nesting flock came together in 18 96 near Bowling Green Ohio. Hunters descended from afar and out of 250,000 birds 200,000 were taken. Shipped in boxcars the train derailed and the wasted birds were dumped into a ravine. Martha, the last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati zoo in 1914
at 29 years of age. werley's salamander More on The Missing Animals as well as an incredible archive of art and philosophy can be found at Vince¹s website: www.cannibol.com |
