The Wild Jackrabbit Hunts of the Dust Bowl Are a Forgotten Chapter in American History

IT WAS THE DRIEST yr on document when 21-year-old Paul Gatschet noticed the commercial within the native paper.

Volunteers needed, introduced the Hays Every day Information. Farmers close to La Crosse, Kansas, had a jackrabbit drawback and so they wanted assist corralling the crop-destroying critters. So one afternoon, Gatschet and his youthful brother, George, drove south from Hays to affix the remainder of the volunteers. Neither Gatschet had participated in a rabbit drive earlier than, however they have been prepared if it stored native farmers from shedding their crops.

This explicit drive was slated to comb 4 sections of rolling prairie. Organizers loaded almost 80 volunteers (all boys and males at the present time) into automobiles and farm vehicles, then dropped them off once more alongside the perimeter. By the point everybody was in place, the hunters had fashioned a spindly sq., both sides stretching 2 miles lengthy throughout the countryside. Then they began strolling.

One of many many outstanding issues about this rabbit drive was exactly how unremarkable it was in that period. In the course of the peak of the Mud Bowl — someday between 1934 and 1936 — the Kansas Emergency Aid Committee reported greater than 98,000 males, girls, and youngsters took half in 269 drives throughout 13 counties in western Kansas. Greater than 2 million jackrabbits have been killed or captured throughout 1,974 sections, with a median of 923 rabbits killed per drive. They have been, by all accounts, slaughters.

The chaos and brutality of the drives bore little resemblance to what any fashionable hunter would name rabbit searching. Nonetheless, the cooperation required to tug off the biggest organized recreation drives in North America’s written reminiscence is astounding. Western rabbit drives stay an interesting, if largely forgotten, chapter within the historical past of small-game searching. They’re additionally only one manner Individuals coped with what was arguably the worst ecological disaster in our nation’s historical past.

Though a whole bunch of hundreds of Kansans took half within the drives, Gatschet is one in all few members nonetheless alive as we speak. Now 88, Gatschet figures that drive occurred, by his greatest recollection, in 1956 — a full twenty years after the Mud Bowl. However the extreme drought situations of the Nineteen Fifties had replicated the failing crops and overwhelming jackrabbit numbers of the Thirties. Aside from the clothes the lads wore to the rabbit drives that yr — denims cuffed above the ankles, white T-shirts, the occasional black leather-based jacket — it performed out simply as a whole bunch of drives had throughout western Kansas over the earlier 50 years.

“I’m not too pleased with it,” says Gatschet. “However that is what occurred.”

Kansas Rabbit Drives In the course of the Mud Bowl

Paul Gatschet was born in October 1934, smack in the midst of the Nice Despair and simply in time to climate the worst of the Dust Bowl. Wall Avenue had crashed on Black Tuesday precisely 5 years earlier than to ship the worldwide financial system spiraling. The Black Sunday dust storm, named for its suffocating, sun-blotting situations, would howl throughout the Excessive Plains at 60 mph by the point Gatschet was six months outdated. Drought was the brand new actuality. Plows from Nebraska to Texas had floor the area’s fertile topsoil into oblivion. Native grasses had all however vanished, together with their deep roots that held the prairie in place. Wind blew away no matter was left.

Gatschet remembers these years as largely dry and scorching. Swarms of hungry grasshoppers and blowing mud descended on his hometown of Hays and surrounding Ellis County. Many kids developed mud pneumonia, a power and typically deadly situation, from inhaling all these tiny silt particles.

“My mom advised me she coated my crib with a moist sheet to maintain me alive,” says Gatschet, who grew up in a three-bedroom home on eleventh Avenue. “Actual nice mud would are available in by the partitions. As a child I didn’t know something about that, however as I bought older, I bear in mind we had mud storms. It bought fairly thick, and naturally that wasn’t good on your lungs.”

Like most rural boys of his era, Gatschet spent his childhood searching together with his father. There have been no deer within the area but, however Kansans may hunt geese and geese. And rabbits. A number of rabbits.

Black-tailed jackrabbits (which are literally hares, not rabbits) can develop as much as 2 toes lengthy and attain speeds of as much as 40 mph. Outsized hind legs launch them throughout desert sage and grassy prairie, and their large ears launch warmth to chill their our bodies. Jackrabbits are prey animals, with often-bulging amber eyes that may scan almost 360 levels for predators. They’ve a knack for quick substitute. Females can produce a number of litters every year, with as much as eight younger in every.

Jackrabbits are primarily desert dwellers, so it’s not notably shocking that their numbers swelled when drought settled over the prairie. The critters ransacked already struggling crops like wheat and sugar beets and stripped bark from valuable shelterbelt timber. It was widespread to see jacks within the daytime and straightforward sufficient to shoot them with pistols as they fed within the fields.

“When it was scorching and dry, we noticed loads of rabbits,” Gatschet says. “When the coyote inhabitants bought low, the rabbit inhabitants appeared to go up.”

Gatschet’s father was a schoolteacher and his mom was a great cook dinner with 5 kids to feed, so their boys introduced dwelling no matter they might throughout and after the Despair. Gatschet remembers these jackrabbits — fried, baked, stewed — tasted fairly good. 

By the point the Gatschet brothers noticed the newspaper advert in 1956, Paul was in faculty finding out English. Drought worse than the Dust Bowl had returned to the prairie. That meant rabbits had, too.

Just like the jackrabbit drives earlier than it, organizers didn’t enable weapons. They have been a lot too dangerous with so many individuals and so many rabbits working round. As a substitute, volunteers carried golf equipment, leading to a mob’s stockpile of sticks, baseball bats, and splintered 2x4s, some even wrapped in barbed wire. The Gatschets hadn’t introduced something like that, so somebody handed Paul the spoke of an outdated hickory wagon wheel. The wooden felt heavy in his arms.

The drivers started strolling towards the middle of the 4 sections, the place an enclosure of hen wire had been erected. Their plan was to funnel the rabbits into the pen and dispatch them there.

At first it appeared to Gatschet like corralling cattle. They began kicking up jacks, which leapt and hopped forward of them. Coordinators stored an eye fixed on the drivers, nudging or checking their tempo to make sure the pests didn’t squirt again by the strains. When the lads closed on the ultimate sq. mile, the pushed jackrabbits started to converge. However it wasn’t till the rabbits noticed their very own type working towards them that chaos broke free.

“You may inform the rabbits have been confused. Because the group bought smaller and smaller, it bought to the place there have been simply stable rabbits within the center, about 50 yards sq.. From time to time you’d see a rabbit simply go — like, Oh, he’s taking off. And he would go, as a result of we didn’t have any weapons.”

One close by rabbit made a run for it, and Gatschet reacted out of intuition.

“I threw my hickory spoke at him.… It was substantial, and dagnabbit if I didn’t hit the rabbit within the head and roll him.”

Among the many boiling jackrabbits have been two or three coyotes that had gotten swept up within the drive. Because the coyotes made their very own bids for freedom, they burst by the human wall solely to be met by a knot of coyote hunters. These males hadn’t been allowed to hold weapons both. As a substitute, they’d introduced their canine.

“The greyhounds bought beat up fairly properly,” says Gatschet, recalling a coyote that ripped one canine’s slender jaw. “It bought fairly gory. However normally these hunters had one or two Russian wolfhounds with them, and the wolfhounds would are available in for the kill. It was a twin hunt.”

By now the sq. of drivers had pushed the rabbits into the chicken-wire entice. Most Mud Bowl corrals have been octagonal, constructed 54 toes throughout and anchored by sturdy posts. As the scale of the rabbit drives tapered into the Nineteen Fifties, so did the corrals.

“The little sq. bought smaller and smaller, and the rabbits contained in the fence began leaping however they couldn’t make it over. And what stunned me was, I simply thought it was like cavemen. A number of the guys began to holler, ‘We’ll get you SOBs!’ And a name went up among the many males. All of them simply rushed the rabbits, clubbing them left and proper,” says Gatschet. “The rabbits may inform it was the top.”

Rabbit Drives within the West

It’s arduous to pinpoint the start of jackrabbit drives in American historical past, however one factor is evident: Hunters have been driving rabbits lengthy earlier than Europeans arrived.

Many early media experiences credit the Paiute-Shoshone with growing the jackrabbit drives. That is true sufficient based mostly on archaeological evidence and firsthand accounts of contemporary Paiute drives in Nevada, however the Paiute-Shoshone corralled rabbits for subsistence.

“The outdated rabbit drive was and nonetheless is a favourite means of manufacturing meals for these desert individuals,” Harry W. Gilmore wrote in American Anthropologist in 1953. “…Every individual tak[es] his station about 50 toes from these subsequent to him. This line circles round towards a lake or river, thus forming a semicircle. By closing in step by step, the semicircle turns into smaller and smaller, and the animals are unable to flee. Lastly they’re trapped between a stable line of individuals and a physique of water and are straightforward prey for arrows and peculiar sticks.”

One of many first mentions of controlling native jackrabbits as vermin appeared in Michigan’s South Haven Messenger in 1846. The newspaper column, “Slaughter of Jack Rabbits: The Western States Are Alarmed In regards to the Pests,” defined that whereas Colorado and California’s rabbit drives “have a sure component of sport and normal frolic, [the drives] are however a really critical enterprise.”

That specific account is rife with worry: the farmers feared devastation of their crops; the agricultural secretary feared the West would turn into the following Australia. (Although Australia additionally organized its own rabbit drives, these farmers had a real invasive pest drawback on their arms. Rabbits are an launched species to the continent.) Different accounts made it clear that rabbit drives have been festivals that rallied residents round a great trigger.

“The biggest drives are extensively marketed and the railroads run particular excursions to the scene of battle,” reads a 1901 Kansas Metropolis Gazette article in regards to the California drives. “Every part assumes vacation apparel. Popcorn stands, barbecues, purple lemonade, circus balloons … and gamblers curiosity the good crowds of 10,000 to twenty,000 individuals which assemble to see the enjoyable. … The rabbits cry shrilly like a child in ache when being killed. The fur flies in an obscuring cloud. Generally the younger rabbit arms hit each other within the pleasure and dirt of the slaughter and the drive leads to a free battle to the extraordinary amusement of spectators.”

Kansans started placing on their very own drives within the mid and late 1800s, however the revelry didn’t drain away till drought and dirt arrived with the Nice Despair. By 1935 there have been an estimated 8 million jackrabbits in 30 western Kansas counties. Clubbing the pests appeared essentially the most sensible answer. In spite of everything, nobody may afford ammunition to shoot the rabbits as soon as corralled. Jackrabbits additionally supplied a supply of meals and, at first, earnings. Some counties paid bounties between 1 and 4 cents per rabbit whereas they might afford it. (Hodgeman County, simply southwest of Hays, stopped paying out after 44,000 pairs of ears have been turned in.)

As crops continued to fail, livestock died, and cash dried up, Kansans — who bore among the harshest Mud Bowl situations — grew extra determined. Usually self-reliant farmers have been shedding all the things. Many bought off land to pay mounting money owed. They couldn’t feed their households. Their kids have been falling sick and even dying. Within the Thirties, it felt just like the world was ending. For some, it had. 

That helplessness explains, partially, the violent mob mentality that so stunned Paul Gatschet 20 years later. As creator Timothy Egan explains it in his e book The Worst Laborious Time, residents who have been attempting to outlive in the course of the Mud Bowl “vowed to make a final stand” in opposition to the most recent risk to their livelihoods: jackrabbits. “If nature is out of whack, ” the pondering went, “then we’ll battle with all the things we bought.” The drives had strayed past mandatory evil into managed chaos. Rabbit drives have been nearly like state-sanctioned riots, the place after church service on Sundays, “a mob of individuals with golf equipment herded rabbits right into a corral and smashed their skulls.”

Kansans funneled their desperation, frustration, and fears into the singular job of killing the critters they felt have been threatening what little livelihood remained to them. It was the farmers versus the rabbits, and it was clear who needed to win.

Rabbit Drives, 1934. Kansas Emergency Aid Committee.

Even when the jackrabbit drives grew to become much less of a competition and extra of a battle, the Kansas Emergency Aid Committee made certain to have a good time them with extensively distributed newsreel footage.

“Extermination of the rabbits has been a worth to the counties in lots of respects,” says the unnamed narrator of a 1936 film touting the company’s accomplishments in 1943. “Whereas it could appear from this that each one the jackrabbits on this planet had congregated within the western a part of the state of Kansas, there are quite a few neighboring states wherein rabbits of any type are a shortage.”

Dwell jackrabbits have been loaded into vehicles and pushed to different states, whereas some useless rabbits have been butchered and eaten. Many Kansans feared catching rabbit fever, nevertheless, and most have been floor into fertilizer and feed for chickens and hogs. 

It’s not possible to precisely estimate what number of drives have been organized nationally (hundreds) and what number of jackrabbits have been killed (tens of millions). The final extensively publicized jackrabbit drives have been organized as lately as 1981 in Mud Lake, Idaho. Whereas locals have been extra involved with defending their crops than their public picture, they made headlines as national media picked up footage of the drives.

“About 800 males, girls and youngsters, armed with ax handles, baseball bats, tire instruments and golf golf equipment, stretched throughout a mile of the desolate prairie close to Mud Lake and rounded up jackrabbits which they declare have carried out an estimated $5 million in crop injury,” learn one extensively syndicated Related Press article. “Most of the jackrabbits have been overwhelmed to demise in the course of the drive and others captured in a pen had their necks damaged and their heads decapitated.”

Animal rights teams, together with the Idaho Humane Society and the Fund for Animals, sued the drive organizers on grounds of animal cruelty. The Idaho Supreme Court docket in the end sided with the farmers.

Then, in 1983, the area’s jackrabbit inhabitants crashed. 

Jackrabbits in Fashionable Kansas and the West

If jackrabbits acquired extreme ire within the early 1900s, the other is true as we speak.

“Sadly rabbits don’t get a lot consideration in our state, or most states,” says Jeff Prendergast, the small recreation specialist with the Kansas Division of Wildlife and Parks. “I’m from Missouri and that’s what I grew up searching: rabbits. However out right here quail and pheasants are king. Rabbit hunters are nearly handled like second-rate residents or hillbillies. That’s simply my impression. However it undoubtedly looks like there’s extra of a gentleman standing to the chook hunters.”

Prendergast holds simply one in all two small-game positions throughout the whole KDWP company, and the sources at his disposal are restricted on the subject of jackrabbits. KDWP focuses on demand from chook hunters and doesn’t usually hear from rabbit hunters. When the company does, it’s normally about cottontails. The farther west you drive by Kansas, the extra doubtless you might be to identify a jackrabbit. By the point jackrabbits started showing in written accounts of the Western frontier, settlers had already disturbed the pure panorama a lot that it’s arduous to say what “regular” appeared like. There’s so much biologists don’t learn about jackrabbit populations then or now.

“They cycle,” Prendergast says. “They appear to do properly in dry situations, like in the course of the Mud Bowl instances, each time that they had these form of [population] explosions. If you concentrate on jackrabbits as a complete, you have got totally different species. However you get loads of jackrabbits within the arid Southwest — Arizona, New Mexico. So it is smart that they will persist in these dry environments and people dry years.”

It’s arduous to gauge simply how properly jackrabbits are doing in Kansas as we speak, and Prendergast couldn’t present an estimate on a complete statewide inhabitants. He does know, based mostly on the state’s annual rural mail provider survey and excluding these pure inhabitants cycles, that their numbers have been comparatively secure because the Nineteen Seventies.

Within the northern Nice Basin, a black-tailed jackrabbit’s inhabitants cycle lasts between 7 and 11 years. “Jackrabbits are identified for his or her dramatic inhabitants fluctuations,” experiences the USFWS, and their highs “could also be twice and even a whole bunch of instances larger than throughout inhabitants lows.”

Nonetheless, it’s been years since black-tailed jackrabbit plagues made headlines. Which is puzzling: We all know jackrabbits overran the nation from Kansas to California throughout historic drought. And we all know the West is at the moment experiencing record-breaking drought. So why aren’t we beating again rabbits with sticks anymore?

Researchers aren’t certain. Completely different research level to totally different culprits, and the reply most likely lies in a mix of illness, parasites, rising predator populations, and altering habitat as edge cowl diminishes. It’s additionally attainable that the absence of black-tailed jackrabbit spikes displays an total species decline. Possibly there simply aren’t sufficient critters to achieve noticeable ranges anymore.

And whereas each white-tailed and black-tailed jackrabbits have been current when settlers arrived in Kansas, white-tailed jackrabbits (traditionally extra current in north Kansas) have been extirpated from the state.

“After they speak about jackrabbit drives the place they’d encompass a pair sections and push a whole bunch of rabbits collectively, you’re not going to do this now,” says Prendergast. “We’re undoubtedly not on the ranges we’ve seen traditionally. We’re not at ranges that we’d take into account regarding, however I don’t know what to say a wholesome [level is].”

Jackrabbits are a species of least concern in Kansas, with a liberal bag limit of 10 per day and a year-round season. Although few hunters goal jacks, harvest numbers assist shed some gentle on jackrabbit numbers. In the course of the 2022 to 2023 season, an estimated 1,625 hunters in Kansas killed about 3,575 jackrabbits. Most of these have been doubtless opportunistic photographs taken by pheasant hunters. In 2006 to 2007 (the earliest yr for which information was obtainable), some 3,640 hunters killed about 57,900 jackrabbits. This distinction is much less a mirrored image of declining rabbit numbers than an instance of a spike of their inhabitants cycle.

“Now you don’t see many jackrabbits within the daytime,” says Gatschet, who nonetheless lives together with his spouse in Hays. “We used to see loads of them within the daytime once we have been youthful. However I perceive from a few of my associates who hunt that they nonetheless have some north of Hays, however it’s a must to know which discipline to go to get them.”

Within the 10 years Prendergast has labored as KDWP’s small-game specialist, he can’t recall a single criticism about jackrabbits. 

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“We don’t actually see the densities of jackrabbits we as soon as did,” says Prendergast. “So it might be that we’re not noticing the small injury that a couple of jackrabbits trigger over what was the perceived injury. Even within the Mud Bowl, the jackrabbits have been one thing of a scapegoat. [People] wanted one thing accountable for the crops failing and [losing] what little was on the market. Realistically the jackrabbits most likely have been consuming the brushy, weedy stuff that wasn’t actually impacting the farmers. The crops have been failing anyway.”

AS HIS FELLOW Kansans clubbed the trapped jackrabbits to demise, Paul Gatschet largely simply watched, his hickory spoke hanging by his facet as volunteers shouted and swatted and swore.

“To listen to the rabbits, that ‘eh eh eh,’” — Gatschet imitates the panicked bleat of a rabbit in misery — “it was a dramatic factor. We went on the market pondering we have been going to assist the farmers. However I left with the sensation they have been simply God’s creatures. They have been simply rabbits. They needed to eat. So what do you eat? There’s wheat, so assist your self to the farmer’s wheat. They usually did. I didn’t be ok with it, and I by no means went on one other drive.”

This story first ran on Mach 20, 2023.