Posted: Apr. 17, 2016
SUSSEX COUNTY -- One of the problems encountered by the early Sussex County residents was wild animals, especially wolves.
One local historian to write about this problem was the Rev. Alanson A. Haines, who compiled a history of local events in his book "Hardyston Memorial" in 1888.
Haines wrote, "The first white settlers were greatly troubled by beasts of prey. Panthers, bears, wildcats and wolves dwelt in the woods, and often prowled around the settlers' homes, killing sheep and calves, and even threatening men. Hunters were compelled to keep their fires burning all night when they bivouacked on the mountains. Wolf scalps or heads were nailed on the outside of many a cabin, a pleasing exhibition of the hunter's success in the chase after these ravagers.
"The destruction caused by a single wolf, or a pair of wolves, for they generally went in pairs, in one night among a flock of sheep would be fearful. The old wolves became exceedingly cunning to escape pursuit or to avoid the traps set for them, and the she wolves, when they had young, were the fiercest and most ravenous."
Haines described the American gray wolf as "nearly four feet long, with a bushy tail of 18 or 20 inches. Some overgrown specimens might have been even larger. Although about the same height and length as the European wolf, the American was more muscular and had more powerful jaws. The general color was a grey, with some much lighter than others."
Continuing to discuss the American wolf, Haines wrote, "Sometimes a great hunt would be organized for the destruction of a single wolf, which had broken into some sheep fold. The hunters surrounded a large district, or a mountain side, within which they supposed the wolf was lurking, and then came in closer and closer until it was found. Wolves are afraid of fire, and of the human eye, and seldom attack men. Large bounties were paid for killing wolves."
As early as June 1682, a bounty of 15 shillings per head for wolves was offered by each county, and 15 shillings additional were paid by the town within whose limits the animals might be killed; excepting the towns in Somerset, where seven shillings were paid. In 1695, these bounties were repealed, and it was left to the discretion of each town to adopt such measures as might be necessary to exterminate the wolves.
"In July 1730, the bounty for a full grown wolf was 20 shillings; for a 'whelp not able to prey', it was five. But presumably these amounts were insufficient and in 1751, the bounties were increased to 60 shillings for wolves and 10 shillings for whelps."
Benjamin Edsall, in his "Centennial Address" in 1853, wrote that "the taxes collected in the county during the years 1753-54 furnished the means of defraying expenses. The sum of 100 pounds were paid for wolf scalps, or nearly three times as much as it cost to erect the county jail at Johnsonburg.
What happened to the wolves in Sussex County? Fred Space, one of the county's foremost experts on wildlife, says that the wolves were gone long before his time and presumably in the 1800s. Space's understanding is that a wolf demands a lot of territory and they were shot off by the early settlers. Due to competition with the early settlers, the wolves were not able to survive here. The coyotes that migrated down from Canada have adapted, Space says. "The coyotes are able to survive in heavily populated areas. They are cunning and they reproduce in large numbers and have a 90 percent survival rate.
"But," says Space, "in a sense, the wolf has not entirely disappeared, as the DNA of the Eastern coyote is 25 percent wolf and 75 percent coyote. The Eastern coyote," says Space, "is sometimes alluded to as a 'crowolf.'?" Space explains in support of this theory that the Eastern male coyote weighs between 50 and 60 pounds, while a Western male coyote weighs between 30 and 35 pounds.
As noted by Haines, many times a hunt would be held to capture a wolf that had caused considerable damage. Two versions of the wolf hunt, described as one of the last to be held in Sussex County, have survived in written format. And although they vary slightly, they do provide an idea of how the wolf hunts took place so many years ago. The hero, in both accounts places "Buckey" (Thomas) DeKay as the main character, with the estimated guess of taking place in the early winter of 1807, with David Strait credited as the narrator.
Here's one version of the story. "An old she wolf for some years had committed many depredations, killing the farmers' sheep and even young cattle in many sections, and had become so wary as to avoid all traps that had been set for its capture. These depredations had become more and more frequent, first in the Sparta mountain, next night in the Hamburgh or Wawayanda mountains.
"The wolf had killed a number of sheep for William Headley, a brother-in-law of David Strait, at Milton. As there was a good tracking snow, Strait and Headley and several other of the neighbors organized that morning with a determination that now that old wolf must die for the many misdeeds she had done.
"She had been tracked through the mountain to Stockholm, and from thence to Canisteer, and by a long roundabout way to Vernon, where that night it had killed some sheep at 'Buckey' DeKay's. The party reached there soon after the wolf had committed the bloody act, in the early morning, having traveled day and night. When the extent of the old wolf's work elsewhere was made known to Mr. DeKay he demanded a rest and provided a bountiful breakfast for the hunting party.
"In the meantime he organized a new party with hounds and muskets, who joined with the others, and followed in pursuit of the wolf. The wolf was overtaken about noon and shot at but managed to escape, and it was not until late in the afternoon that it was finally surrounded at Beaver Dam, between Snufftown and Franklin. The hounds there closed in upon her; but many of them were killed in short order. It was here that 'Buckey' DeKay rushed in upon the conflict between the hounds and wolf, and with one well-directed blow upon the head of the wolf, killed it with his musket, and the hounds were released from their great chase.
"A bounty of $100 had been offered for the wolf, dead or alive, so its carcass was taken to the tavern at Snufftown, 'Buckey' placed the wolf carcass in an upright position, put a pipe in his mouth, and then treated everybody to whiskey. A general time of rejoicing was held and the wolf was kept on exhibition all night and everyone went to see it."
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How to Build a Forgotten(NYC and surrounding envrions) Landscape from the Ground Up
The science behind the Welikia
(and Mannahatta) Project is
landscape ecology. Landscape ecology is the study of how different ecosystems (e.g. forests, wetlands, streams, etc.) combine together to create habitat for plants and animals. The
Wildlife Conservation Society uses landscape ecology to understand how to conserve wildlife and wild places, especially as many of the changes people make to the landscape (e.g. building roads, clearing land for agriculture, constructing cities) affect wildlife species. Our goal in the Welikia Project
is to build a digital version of New York City’s original ecological landscape, layer by layer, literally “from the ground up,” starting with geology, soils, topography, then streams, springs, ponds, wetlands, etc., eventually working up to species of plants and animals (including people.)
Data from Many Sources
To make this happen, we collected data from many sources. We started with historical maps which described the original features of city. To those we added information from soil surveys, tree rings, descriptions of plant life and animal life, historical accounts, even field surveys from today. For Mannahatta, we “georeferenced” all this information to a single base map, 1782 British Headquarters map from The National Archives in the United Kingdom, and created a geographic information system (GIS) database, in this case, the most complete description of a landscape ever attempted. For the other boroughs, we will need to use a combination of maps from the 18th and 19th centuries to carefully reconstruct the forgotten landscape.
Starting from Scratch
The process of layering and analyzing spatial data is not, in and of itself, new. Many different fields use geographic information to answer questions in business, government and science. The challenge in recreating Mannahatta, or Welikia writ large, is that none of the data layers existed prior to our work. No one alive today knows where the streams flowed in 1609 or where the bears lived or where the oak-hickory forest grew, and the native Lenape people who would have known these things left no maps behind. In other words, we had to start “from scratch.”
Bernard Ratzer, “Plan of the city of New York in North America: Surveyed in the years 1766 & 1767,” published January 12, 1776
The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
This map, by British army officer Bernard Ratzer, is the most accurate depiction of New York in its late colonial days. At the southern tip of Manhattan are the narrow, crooked streets of Dutch and English New York. Both in the colonial town and beyond, Ratzer captured the island’s varied topography: hills and valleys; meadows, cultivated fields, and woods; ponds, streams, and swamps; and roads radiating northward along routes that started, in many cases, as native pathways.
The beginnings of order—not imposed by plan but conceived by private owners—are evident. Some owners of large properties carved their land into small grids, each abutting another at a different angle. For the most part, property owners opened streets as they saw fit, with little municipal regulation. GK
Our starting point to reconstruct Mannahatta was geolocating the 18th century British Headquarters Map to the modern street grid of New York. We found over 200 control points where we could locate features on the map (e.g. streams, hills, ponds) to their current locations. The final rectification was accomplished with an error of approximately 40 meters, or about half an uptown block in midtown. Georeferencing the British Headquarters Map with this level of accuracy means that all data layers derived from it will also be that spatially accurate, allowing us to estimate the distribution of ecological features block by block across the city. The result is a testament to the workmanship of the British military cartographers who created the map.
For the rest of the city, it won’t be so easy, because we won’t have only one map to work with. Rather we will need to work even harder to synthesize information from many different sources into one composite base map to work with. Fortunately though because development of the rest of the city (Brooklyn partly excepted) proceeded later in time than Manhattan, we can use maps through most of the 19th century to detect old streams, hills and shorelines that have since been erased by development
The Physical Landscape
The complex topography of the “Island of Many Hills” created the basis for over 55 different ecological communities for plants and animals and is an important factor behind Mannahatta’s original biodiversity.
The non-living, physical environment (the soils, waters, hills, and climate) can be thought of as the stage on which the ecological play is acted. Our next objective was to reconstruct these factors; an interesting exercise in itself, especially as these physical factors have been so transformed in the intervening centuries.
Mannahatta once had 570+ hills, more than 60 miles of streams, over 20 ponds, and over 300 springs. The rest of the city had many more. Sandy beaches stretched from the tip of Manhattan to past 42nd Street on the Hudson River shore. And beyond the shore was the vibrant, dynamic tidal estuary, with complex currents, sedimentary pattterns, and the influence of the Hudson River. Together these physical factors made for a stage as interesting as anything on Broadway today.
The Biological Landscape: Ecological Neighborhoods
Over the physical landscape, we mapped the biological landscape of ecological communities. Ecological communities are regularly occurring collections of plants and animals, like forests or wetlands; they can be thought of as “ecological neighborhoods.” Where Manhattan has the Upper West Side and Tribeca today, Mannahatta once had “coastal oak-pine forest” and “red maple swamps.” We used a system of
ecological communities for New York State developed by the
New York State Natural Heritage Program. Why an ecological community occurs where it does is a matter of the physical conditions of the site plus the interaction of disturbance processes like fire, windthrows, freezing, and habitat change caused by people or other animals (e.g. beavers).
Taken together, we estimate the Mannahatta once had 55 different ecological community types. This wealth of different communities in such a narrow space in large part explains the extraordinary biodiversity of the island. We expect that similar patterns enabled the biodiversity characteristic of the other boroughs as well, with important differences in the different parts of the city.
Mannahatta’s Abundant Wildlife
If the physical landscape sets the stage, and the ecological communities are the setting in which the play is acted, the ecological actors are the species. Through a long process of compiling historical and modern sources and consulting with scientists from many disciplines, we developed a species list for Manhattan.
Eastern Wolf
We can not be certain of exactly what species were once on the island, so we describe different species by their probability of occurance: likely, probable, possible and remotely possible. In total, our research leads us to conclude that just over 1000 species of plants and vertebrate animals (24 species of mammals, 233 birds, 32 reptiles and amphibians, 85 fish, and 627 species of plants, and unknown numbers of fungi, lichens, mosses, insects, shellfish and other invertebrates) once occurred on Mannahatta. These likely wildlife included wolves, black bears, mountain lions, beavers, passenger pigeons, heath hens, timber rattlesnakes, tree frogs, bog turtles and over 30 species of orchids and 70 species of trees.
We expect but don’t know yet that the biological abundance of Welikia Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island will be greater than Manhattan’s. We use similar techniques as for Mannahatta, but tailor them to these other four boroughs, producing borough specific species lists for the entire city.
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