| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| Introduction | ix | |
| [I] | My Boyhood Among the Pigeons | 1 |
| [II] | The Passenger Pigeon From "American Ornithology," by Alexander Wilson | 9 |
| [III] | The Passenger Pigeon From "Ornithological Biography," by John James Audubon | 25 |
| [IV] | As James Fenimore Cooper Saw It | 41 |
| [V] | The Wild Pigeon of North America By Chief Pokagon, in "The Chautauquan" | 48 |
| [VI] | The Passenger Pigeon From "Life Histories of North American Birds," by Charles Bendire | 60 |
| [VII] | Netting the Pigeons By William Brewster, in "The Auk" | 74 |
| [VIII] | Efforts to Check the Slaughter By Prof. H. B. Roney | 77 |
| [IX] | The Pigeon Butcher's Defense By E. T. Martin, in "American Field" | 93 |
| [X] | Notes of a Vanished Industry | 105 |
| [XI] | Recollections of "Old Timers" | 119 |
| [XII] | The Last of the Pigeons | 141 |
| [XIII] | What Became of the Wild Pigeon? By Sullivan Cook, in "Forest and Stream" | 163 |
| [XIV] | A Novel Theory of Extinction By C. H. Ames and Robert Ridgway | 173 |
| [XV] | News from John Burroughs | 179 |
| [XVI] | The Pigeon in Manitoba By George E. Atkinson | 186 |
| [XVII] | The Passenger Pigeon in Confinement By Ruthven Deane, in "The Auk" | 200 |
| [XVIII] | Nesting Habits of the Passenger Pigeon By Dr. Morris Gibbs, in "The Oölogist" | 209 |
| [XIX] | Miscellaneous Notes | 217 |
| FACING PAGE | |
| The Passenger Pigeon By Louis Agassiz Fuertes | [Frontispiece] |
| Audubon Plate (color) | [24] |
| Passenger Pigeon and Mourning Dove | [88] |
| Fac-simile of "Among the Pigeons" | [92] |
| H. T. Phillip's Store | [104] |
| Band-tailed Pigeon (color) | [130] |
| Comparative Size of Pigeon and Dove | [156] |
| Young Passenger Pigeon | [198] |
| Pigeon Net | [218] |
F
FOR the last three years I have spent most of my leisure time in collecting as much material as possible which might help to throw light on the oft-repeated query, "What has become of the wild pigeons?" The result of this labor of love is scarcely more than a compilation, and I am under many obligations to those who have so cheerfully assisted me. I have given them credit by name in connection with their various contributions, but I wish that I might have been able to give them the more finished and literary setting that would have been within the reach of a trained writer or scientist. I am merely a business man who is interested in the Passenger Pigeon because he loves the outdoors and its wild things, and sincerely regrets the cruel extinction of one of the most interesting natural phenomena of his own country. If I have been able to make a compilation that otherwise would not have been available for the interested reader, I need make no further apologies for the imperfect manner of my treatment of this subject.
It is hard for us of an older generation to realize that as recently as 1880 the Passenger Pigeon was thronging in countless millions through large areas of the Middle West, and that in our boyhood we could find no exaggeration in the records of such earlier observers as Alexander Wilson, the ornithologist, who said that these birds associated in such prodigious numbers as almost to surpass belief, and that their numbers had no parallel among any other feathered tribes on the face of the earth; or that one of their "roosts" would kill the trees over thousands of acres as completely as if the whole forest had been girdled with an ax.