The passenger pigeon. Credit John J. Audubon/Birds of America
A few days ago, I dialed up the WAYBAC machine and journeyed back 200 years to 1816 Indiana.
From the Frank and Katrina Basile Theater at the Indiana History Center, a group took a visual trek from Kentucky, across the Ohio River to Spencer County, Indiana, with a young Abe Lincoln and his family. Within a year of their move, the Lincolns and other southern Indiana residents witnessed billions of periodical cicadas emerge, mate, lay eggs and die. “They probably thought they encountered a plague of Biblical proportions,” said Mike Homoya, a state botanist and plant ecologist with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Nature Preserves, who served as the guide.
The progeny of those cicadas emerged in that area again in 2004. “It’s one way of connecting to our past,” said Homoya, author of Orchids of Indiana and Wildflowers and Ferns of Indiana Forests, each published by Indiana University Press.
Connecting the audience to our past was what “This Was Indiana: The Historic Hoosier Landscape 1816” was all about. This landscape tour reminds us of what was there, what’s missing and what remains, however altered.
We learned how Indiana was plotted in square townships, which still exist and are used as geographic locators today. (These are not the same areas that we commonly think of as townships.) Corner posts and nearby trees, called witness trees, guided surveyors and travelers. Using an 1804 map of Marion County townships, Homoya found what was the location of our witness tree at Circle Centre mall, just outside Victoria Secret.
There were about 23 million acres in Indiana with 21 million of them forested and 2 million acres of prairies. Some of the trees were huge, with a sycamore measuring 14-foot diameter at chest height in 1819. Today’s sycamore champ measures 8-foot diameter at chest height, he said.
Carolina parakeet, Eastern subspecies. Credit John J. Audubon/Birds of America
It’s not just the big trees that are gone. Porcupines, prairie chickens, wolves, Carolina parakeets and passenger pigeons resided here or migrated. Homoya said there were many reports of the noonday sun obscured, as if by an eclipse, by millions of passenger pigeons for three days or more. Despite those numbers, the parakeets and pigeons are extinct. Also no longer in the wild here are buffaloes, which made the famous Vincennes Trace as they hoofed through southern Indiana, Homoya said.
Much of our state’s natural features have changed since then, but the cypress swamps remain in southwest Indiana, the Indiana dunes and lakeshore are part of the National Park Service, forest remnants of older-growth trees are scattered about, including at Crown Hill Cemetery, and slivers of the great prairie can be found in Spinn Prairie in White County. Lots to explore in celebration of our bicentennial.