Helen McGinnis(Cougar Rewilding) sent me a paper she had written about Pennsylvania Folklorist, Henry Shoemaker.........He related some truths in his writings about Pennsylvania's historical array of wildlife.............His writings also were prone to "tall tales" and exaggeration............Enjoy Helen's take on Mr Shoemaker's yarns

Henry W. Shoemaker (1880-1958) was known for his deep love for the wilderness and native cultures of Pennsylvania. The state's first official folklorist, he wrote more than twenty books detailing Pennsylvania's modern mythology. Pennsylvania Mountain Stories is perhaps Shoemaker's definitive collection of folktales. The idea for this book came to Shoemaker during his college years, when he spent his vacations traveling through the mountains of Pennsylvania—on foot, on horseback, or by buggy.

 He claimed that he heard the stories, "mostly after supper," from people he met at lumber camps, farmhouses, and backwoods taverns. "As so many of the tales are devoted to subjects of a more or less supernatural order they cannot very well be true," he writes, but then hastens to add, "neither are they of the author's invention." In this ethereal space between fact and fiction, Pennsylvania Mountain Stories reveals the values, the passions, the obsessions of the people who told them.

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From: Helen McGinnis <helenmcginnis@meer.net>

To: Rick Meril

Subject: Henry Shoemaker's Panther of the North Woods

HENRY SHOEMAKER AND REALITY

Of all the tales told of the East and its fauna in the days of early white settlement, none stick in the mind as firmly as those told by the Henry Shoemaker in his book Extinct Pennsylvania Animals (1919).  Many of you
probably remember the story of the circle drive organized by "Black Jack" Schwartz in 1760 in the vicinity of Pomfret Castle, a fort in Pennsylvania. Gerry Parker retold and accepted the story in his book The Eastern
Panther. 

 Black Jack organized a "grand drive towards the center of acircle thirty miles in diameter. . . As many as two hundred hunters marched towards the center," where a plot had been cleared.  Although several hundred buffalo broke through the circle, "41 panthers, 109 wolves, 112 foxes, 114 mountain cats, 17 black bears, 1 white bear, 2 elk, 198 deer, 111 buffaloes, 3 fishers, 1 otter, 12 gluttons, 3 beavers and upwards of 500 smaller animals" were slaughtered.  Charles Humphreys picked up the same story in his book Panthers of the Coastal Plain.  On the basis of this story and others, Humphreys and Parker conclude that Pennsylvania must have been excellent panther habitat.

Shoemaker wrote an even better yarn about Pennsylvania buffalo.  It's a terrible winter, with deep snow.  The last herd of buffalo in the colony finds a clearing with a settlers' cabin at the side.  The huge beasts crowd into it so tightly that the inhabitants are crushed to death against the walls.  The storm continues and the snow deepens.  The herd wanders to another clearing.  Packed together and starving, they could not reach the grass beneath the snow.  The settlers find them and kill every last one.
Many years ago I worked as an assistant to John Guilday at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. He was an expert in the fauna of Northeast during the Ice Age and later prehistoric times. Knowing of my budding interest in reports of pumas in Pennsylvania, he warned me not to take Shoemaker seriously.
Guilday had looked for indisputable physical evidence of buffalo in Pennsylvania but was unable to find any as of 1963.  He wrote:  "The book . . . is, at first sight, a major source of information about the past history of the buffalo in the state, but critical reading leaves one with a sense of despondency.  Some of the material is no doubt authentic, but most of it is embellished folklore and hearsay uncritically presented. Shoemaker's accounts wildly distort whatever fact they may be based on, and, as far as the history of the buffalo in Pennsylvania is concerned, must regretfully be discounted" (Bull. Soc. PA Archaeol. 33:135-139).
 Consider the size of the circle and the number of hunters at Pomfret Castle.  A circle 30 miles in diameter would have a circumference of 94 miles.  The 200 hunters would have been a half-mile apart at the beginning of the drive.  Quite a few animals would have broken through that line!  I would assume that the drivers would have be at least 200 feet apart to keep animals from breaking through the line, and that circle would have been only 2.4 miles across.
When I was researching my paper on reports of pumas in Pennsylvania, I found another example of Shoemaker's willingness to accept stories handed down for generations uncritically.  Philip Tome, who roamed the wilderness of north-central and northwestern Pennsylvania between 1798 and 1823 said he saw "some 30" pumas in his lifetime.  Quoting Tome's relatives, Shoemaker (1917) says he killed hundreds of panthers.
Everyone likes to tell a good story and to make a good one even better. The more mouths a tale passes through, the more memorable—and incredible—it will become.  Any Shoemaker story more than one person removed from its
source should be read with skepticism.
Helen McGinnis