The Falcon



For almost the entire human saga, our ancestors were hunter-gathers.  For most of us, these kinfolk are long forgotten in family memory.  Quite a bit has been written about wild societies by visiting outsiders from civilization, strangers who could not fully understand the cultures of their subjects.  The Falcon is the autobiography of John Tanner, a fascinating book that gives readers a ringside seat at a wild society, prior to conquest, from the viewpoint of an insider.

Tanner was a white lad born about 1780, in frontier Kentucky, not far from Cincinnati, Ohio.  At the age of 9, he was captured by the Shawnee and taken to Saginaw, Michigan, where he was treated harshly for two years.  Then, up at Mackinaw, an Ottawa woman, who had lost her son, bought him for 20 gallons of whiskey, blankets, tobacco, and other treasures.  He was given a name that meant “the falcon.”

Tanner was a rough, tough, honest man who endured an incredibly difficult life.  He lived among the Ottawa and Ojibwa people from roughly 1790 to 1820, and spent this period hunting, trapping, fishing, and defending himself from a variety of angry and violent folks.  He traveled thousands of miles by foot, canoe, and horseback through a vast wilderness.  His saga mentions visits to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan; Pembina, North Dakota; Lake of the Woods, Ontario; and Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba.

This story takes place in an era of bloody helter-skelter, when the traditional way of life was seriously assaulted, and beginning to disintegrate.  Disease ridden, pale faced terrorists had landed on the east coast, and their infectious pathogens spread to distant regions of the interior, killing enormous numbers of natives.  Terrorists were beginning to settle on the frontier.  Tanner’s parents had moved west from Virginia, stupidly planning to acquire prime real estate in an extremely dangerous wilderness.

In that era, many New England tribes had become heavily dependent on agriculture.  Corn produced far more food per acre than forest, leading to increased population density and conflict.  Diana Muir described how corn quickly depleted the soil, requiring ongoing deforestation to clear new fields.  When the devastating epidemics arrived, tribes had been on an unsustainable trajectory to run out of forest that was suitable for cropland.  Corn helped the Iroquois become a dominant power, and their aggressive expansion forced other Algonquin tribes to flee westward.

At the same time, the fur trade was a booming, and there was intense competition for pelts.  Many traders were lying, cheating, racist creeps.  Industrial scale trapping drove the beavers close to extinction in eastern regions, so traders and trappers had to keep moving westward.

As eastern tribes were forced westward by warfare, settlers, and the quest for pelts, they put growing pressure on the fierce Sioux tribes of the prairies, who were not amused.  Tanner spent a lot of time in hot zones close to Sioux country, where he was in constant danger of losing his scalp.

The Sioux hated Tanner and his tribe for trespassing.  Because Tanner was the offspring of terrorists, many of his Indian companions and family were wary of him — terrorists were often whirlwinds of evil spirits.  Several times, they tried to kill him.  Finally, the terrorists hated him because he looked like a savage, thought like a savage, and spoke a savage tongue.  He once made an effort to return to his kinfolk in Christian society, but he didn’t belong in that bizarre world, and kept catching fevers.

Indians were tolerant of gender-benders.  On a visit to Leech Lake, Minnesota, Tanner met the son of a chief who was an A-go-kwa — “one of those who make themselves women, and are called women by the Indians.  There are several of this sort among most, if not all the Indian tribes.”  The A-go-kwa was about 50-years old, and had lived with many husbands.

The central theme of the book is the endless struggle to survive.  Starvation was a primary threat, and getting food was job #1.  Mike Culpepper wrote an essay on Tanner’s life, including a description of his diet:  “Tanner hunts bear, buffalo, moose, but also eats muskrat, rabbit, beaver, porcupine, otter and other animals trapped for their fur, and, when game is not available, his dogs, horses, and scraps of leather.  He eats ducks, geese, blackbirds, and swan.  He fishes for sturgeon, dory, and unnamed small fish that are eaten by the handful.  He consumes corn, wild rice, and berries.”  Yum!

Throughout the book, Tanner and those around him suffer from infections and fevers.  He lived in an era where diseases were common and largely incurable, for both wild folks and the civilized.  Howard Simpson described the situation after 1812, as settlement of the Midwest began:  “The most lethal dangers the pioneers had to face were neither savages nor wild animals.  They were typhoid, malaria, dysentery, malignant scarlet fever, pneumonia, erysipelas in epidemic form, spotted fever, or what would now be called meningococcal meningitis, and diphtheria.”

Homo sapiens is a bipedal species — we move on two legs, not four.  This evolutionary trait enabled long distance running, chasing game until they collapsed from exhaustion, a practice often mentioned in discussions of the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.  Tanner also mentioned this.  “There are among the Indians some, but not many, men who can run down an elk on the smooth prairie, when there is neither snow nor ice.  The moose and the buffalo surpass the elk in fleetness, and can rarely be taken by fair running by a man on foot.”

Tanner, armed with a low tech, single shot musket, killed lots of animals.  One winter, he was hired by a fur company to provide meat for Scottish settlers.  In four months, he killed about 100 buffalo.  Another winter, he hunted with a buddy.  “O-ke-mah-we-ninne, as he was called, killed nineteen moose, one beaver, and one bear.  I killed seventeen moose, one hundred beavers, and seven bears, but he was considered the better hunter, moose being the most difficult of all animals to kill.”

Nomadic people found some trade goods useful: muskets, ammo, gunpowder, knives, axes, pots, blankets, corn, etc.  They gained no prestige by hoarding valuable trade goods, because it was dumb.  The stuff they owned had to be hauled along, every time they moved to a new camp.  So, one pot was enough.  Consequently, they trapped just enough to secure the necessities, and no more.  Traders learned a toxic secret — offering booze seriously motivated the trappers to produce far more pelts.

Oblivion drinking is a regular celebration in this saga.  After a long, harsh winter of trapping, pelts would be taken to the trading post.  Necessities would be acquired, and the leftover income would be invested in 10 gallon (38 l) kegs of booze.  Over the course of the book, at least 100 gallons of rum and whiskey were guzzled.  Multi-day drunks often resulted in impolite comments, bloody fights, and murders.  Their lives were harsh, and a lovely drunk provided a vacation from the daily routine, a spirit journey.  Booze destroyed many lives.

In Tanner’s day, in roadless woodlands, dogs were their beasts of burden.  On the wide-open prairie, there was a new beast of burden, the horse.  The Spanish had brought horses to America, and some escaped.  They rapidly grew in numbers.  By 1700 or 1750, plains Indians had horses — lots of horses.  Horses greatly increased their ability to hunt, feed more people, and zoom across the plains at superhuman velocity.

Each horse was the private property of an individual.  Only fools hoarded 100 iron pots, but owning 100 horses provided immense social status.  Horses fed themselves, moved themselves to new camps, and hauled people and stuff.  Stealing them from neighbors was an exciting way to demonstrate your bravery and get rich quick, or die trying.  Raiding was a popular pastime.  Naturally, it was a good way to make enemies, and ignite long-term feuds.  In the horse age, living in a remote location was no longer safe and secure.

Tanner described the bloody side of raiding:  “I had four horses, one of which was a very fleet and beautiful one, being considered the best out of one hundred and eighty which a war-party of Crees, Assinneboins, and Ojibbeways, had recently brought from the Fall Indians.  In this excursion they had been absent seven months.  They had fallen upon and destroyed one village, and taken one hundred and fifty scalps, besides prisoners.”

Tanner spent most of his life in the Great White North, a region known for long and extremely harsh winters.  On chilly nights, they huddled around fires inside drafty lodges.  Tanner mentioned several close calls with death.  Once, after breaking through the ice, “we were no sooner out of the water than our moccasins and clothes were frozen so stiff that we could not travel.  I began also to think that we must die.  But I was not like my Indian brother, willing to sit down and wait patiently for death to come.”

Homo sapiens evolved on the warm tropical savannahs of Africa, where a year round supply of organic food was generally available.  They didn’t need clothing or shelter.  Hypothermia was never a risk.  Life was so much easier in an ecosystem for which evolution had fine-tuned our bodies.  Remember that.  The status quo is zooming toward sharp limits, and our soft lifestyles are a temporary high-impact luxury.

Tanner, John, The Falcon, Penguin Books, New York, 1994.  Free PDF download.

Culpepper, Mike, John Tanner Between Two Worlds.  This 10-page essay fills in many helpful details missing in Tanner’s words, and better describes the big picture dramas that affected his life.  It discusses his controversial end.

Fierst, John T., Return to Civilization, Minnesota History, Minnesota Historical Society, 1986.  This 15-page essay describes Tanner’s troubled life in Sault Ste. Marie, in the years after his story had been published.

Dr. Edwin James transcribed Tanner’s story, in 1828, at Sault Ste. Marie.  He edited out lots of excessive details, to make the story more readable.  The 1830 edition, published by Baldwin & Craddock in London, includes an 18-page introduction by James (HERE).

Muir, Diana, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond — Economy and Ecosystem in New England, University Press of New England, Hanover, New Hampshire, 2000.  Chapter one describes the ecological and social turbulence generated by the adaptation of agriculture by the Native Americans.

Simpson, Howard N., “The Impact of Disease on American History,” The New England Journal of Medicine CCL (1954):680.

Feral (Rewilding)

Beneath the pavement in London, archaeologists have found the bones of hippos, elephants, giant deer, giant aurochs, and lions.  The Thames watershed was once a gorgeous, thriving, wild paradise.  In the early Mesolithic, the western seaboard of Europe, from Scotland to Spain, was covered by a magnificent rainforest.  Europe was once a thriving wild paradise.

Evolution created utterly fantastic masterpieces.  The megafauna of the Americas grew to enormous size, in the absence of too-clever two-legged tool addicts.  Ground sloths weighed as much as elephants.  Beavers were the size of bears.  The Argentine roc had a 26-foot wingspan (8 m).  All of them vanished between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, about the time you-know-who arrived, with their state of the art hunting technology.

On a damp gray dawn, the English writer George Monbiot woke up screaming once again.  He suffers from a chronic spiritual disease that he calls ecological boredom.  Living amidst endless crowds of two-legged strangers can become unbearably unpleasant for sensitive people with minds.  Human souls can only thrive in unmolested wildness (the opposite of England).  He leaped out of bed, packed his things, and moved to the coast of Wales, where there was more grass than concrete.  He hoped that this would exorcise his demons.

They weren’t demons.  Obviously, ecological boredom is a healthy and intelligent response to the fierce madness of twenty-first century life, and it’s curable.  What’s needed to break this curse is a holy ceremony called rewilding.  During five years of country living in Wales, Monbiot wrote Feral, to explain his voyage and vision.  It’s a 500-decibel alarm clock.

Humans were wild animals for millions of years.  In the last few thousand years, we’ve declared war on wild ecosystems, in our whacked out crusade to domesticate everything everywhere, and lock Big Mama Nature in a maximum-security zoo.  Rewilding is about throwing this sick, suicidal process into reverse.

It’s about allowing long extinct woodlands to become healthy thriving forests once again.  It’s about reintroducing the wild beings that have been driven off the land — bear, bison, beavers — a sacred homecoming.  It’s about creating marine reserves so aquatic species have places of refuge from the insane gang rape of industrial fishing.  Importantly, it’s about introducing our children to the living planet of their birth.

Wales was a land of lush forests 2,100 years ago.  Today, it’s largely a mix of sheep pasture and other assorted wastelands.  One day, Monbiot climbed to a hilltop in the Cambrian Mountains, where he could see for miles.  He noted a few distant Sitka spruce tree farms, and a bit of scrubby brush, but otherwise, “across that whole, huge view, there were no trees.  The land had been flayed.  The fur had been peeled off, and every contoured muscle and nub of bone was exposed.”

Some folks now call it the Cambrian Desert, whilst shameless tourism hucksters refer to it as one of the largest wilderness areas in the U.K.  To Monbiot, rural Wales is a heartbreaking sheepwreck, reduced to ecological ruins by the white plague — countless dimwitted furry freaks from Mesopotamia that gobble the vegetation down to the roots, and prevent forest recovery.

One day, Monbiot met a brilliant young sheep rancher, Dafydd Morris-Jones, who had no sympathy for rewilding at all.  His family had been raising sheep on this land for ages.  Every rock in the valley had a name, and his uncle remembered all of them.  Allowing the forest to return would amount to cultural genocide, snuffing out the traditional indigenous way of life, and erasing it forever.

I had great sympathy for Dafydd’s view.  In 1843, my great-grandfather, Richard E. Rees, was born in the parish of Llangurig, Wales — deep in the heart of sheep country.  His mother was a handloom weaver.  They lived down the road from the wool mill in Cwmbelan.  My ancestors survived for many generations by preventing the return of the forest, deer, and boars, by preventing an injured land from healing.  Of course, for the last several thousand years, none of my ancestors had been wild people — they suffered from the tremendous misfortune of having been born in captivity.

Every generation perceives the world of their childhood as the normal state, the ideal.  Many don’t comprehend that the ecosystem was badly damaged long before they were born.  What they accept as normal might give their grandparents nightmares.  Monbiot refers to this shortsightedness as Shifting Baseline Syndrome.  The past is erased by mental blinders.  Each generation adapts to an ongoing pattern of decline.  Humans have an amazing tolerance for crowding, filth, and stress.  The result is the wounded wheezing world you see around you.

Monbiot gushes with excitement when describing the amazing changes that followed the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park.  They promptly corrected deer overpopulation, which led to forest regeneration, which led to healthier streams, which led to more fish.  When they reduced the coyotes, the result was more rabbits, mice, hawks, weasels, boxes, badgers, eagles, and ravens.  Here is Monbiot enthusiastically discussing this process in a 15 minute TED talk. 

A number of European organizations are promoting rewilding.  Pan Parks has protected 240,000 hectares (593,000 acres), and is working on a million more.  Wild Europe is working to create wildlife corridors across the continent.  Rewilding Europe promotes the reintroduction of missing species (here is a brief video trailer).  Pleistocene Park in Siberia is reintroducing many species in a 160 sq. km. park (62 sq. mi.), which it plans to expand to 600 sq. km. (232 sq. mi.).

In continental Europe, the rewilding movement is building momentum.  Wolves, bears, bison, and beavers have begun the path to recovery.  Not every effort succeeds — Italy reintroduced two male lynx, and the cute couple mysteriously failed to produce offspring.  Britain and Ireland remain out to lunch.  Most of the land is owned by wealthy elites who are obsessed with preserving a “tidy” looking countryside — treeless and profoundly dreary.  They enjoy recreational hunting, and wolves would spoil their fun.

Monbiot delights in goosing every sacred cow along his path, and readers of many varieties are sure to foam at the mouth and mutter naughty obscenities.  For me, Feral had a few zits, but they don’t sink the book.  He leads us to the mountaintop and allows us to view the world from above the haze of assumptions, illusions, and fantasies.  Who are we?  Where is our home?  Where are we going? 

He rubs our noses in the foul messes we’ve made, hoping we’ll learn from our accidents and grow.  He confronts us with big important issues that we’ve avoided for far too long — the yucky stoopid stuff we’re doing for no good reason.  I like that.  This is important.  He recommends intriguing alternatives to stoopid.  It’s about time.

Monbiot, George, Feral — Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding, Allen Lane, London, 2013.