Often, Heinrich claimed, they acted as if they were angry because they had not been named the national bird, as Benjamin Franklin had once suggested. Early to bed, early to rise: a drover who overslept might find his turkeys all over the landscape. He said they might decide to go to bed at three in the afternoon, and nothing could stop them. The late Joe Heinrich mastered the strange habits of the prima donnas of the Meleagris family the hard way. Sterling, Kentucky, continued driving turkeys until 1913. Thomas Heinrich & Son, poultry dealers of Mt. In Carson City eager buyers snapped them up at five dollars apiece, and with his profits Hooker bought his first Texas and New Mexico cattle and started his Arizona ranch. Soon he had rounded up almost every bird: the turkeys seemed anxious to continue the guided tour. Hooker later said their departure gave him “the most indescribable feeling” of his adventurous career. Within minutes the last bird had vanished, leaving their owner sure he would never see them again. As the turkeys milled at the edge, the dogs nagged at them to go. But one day, after Hooker’s flock had passed the summit, it reached a precipitous slope and stopped. The feathered hikers behaved themselves up to the snow line and beyond. Despite dire warnings, Hooker bought all the turkeys he could pay for and set out with a couple of dogs, a helper, and the birds. He began assembling a flock, meaning to walk it over the mountains. Looking for a way to up his stake, Hooker thought roast turkey would taste good in Nevada. Carson City, Nevada’s infant capital across the High Sierras, was bursting its seams like many boom towns, it imported food, and people “ate poor.”įarmers around Hangtown raised turkeys. At that time the Comstock Lode was booming. Hooker rescued a thousand dollars in cash and nothing else. Hooker could tell them plenty about stampedes of cattle, but his first stampede, it seemed, was of turkeys.Īs a young man in the 1860’s he ran a hardware business in Hangtown, California, the sudden-death town that later became Placerville. Famous people visited it to ride, breathe the tonic air, and share for a while the cattleman’s way of life. Hooker’s Sierra Bonita ranch in the San Simon Valley of Arizona was, in its day, a desert oasis of baronial splendor. Here and there an old-timer dredges up memories, and by piecing together scattered accounts, it is possible to reconstruct those picturesque and sometimes fantastic odysseys.Īt least one famous cattle fortune was started with the proceeds of turkey-trailing. Cattle drives have been chronicled endlessly hardly anyone remembers how far turkeys walked in order to be eaten. A breeding herd is said to have walked from New Mexico to California, taking a year to do it. The birds crossed mountains, rivers, plains, even deserts. When leaves put on autumn tints, drovers herded turkeys by the thousands to markets or railheads that were sometimes hundreds of miles away. It is almost forgotten now that, before truck transportation and refrigerated boxcars, turkeys never would have reached city tables for Thanksgiving and Christmas if they hadn’t walked. Bruffey saw the turkey man again after he had sold his birds and learned he had “done well” on the deal. A thousand drumsticks on the hoof could look mighty appetizing. Horace Greeley, visiting it in 1859, reported that everybody ate pork, hot bread, beans, and coffee three times a day, day after day, except when an ox well-toughened by a fifty-day trip across the plains was butchered. They fattened as they went.ĭenver was a hungry town then. Where feed was scarce, shelled corn was thrown to them from the wagon. Mostly the birds lived off the country, devouring hordes of grasshoppers. When it was against them, they had their troubles. When the wind was behind them, the turkey man said, they could make twenty-five miles a day. The outfit consisted of the owner, a wagon loaded with shelled corn and drawn by six horses and mules, the turkeys, and two boy drovers who had walked all the way. Upon inquiring, Bruffey discovered that the drover had bought the birds in Iowa and Missouri from there to Denver he had undertaken an epic trail drive of well over six hundred miles with some of the most temperamental birds of this hemisphere. This was a man driving a flock of five hundred turkeys. Not far from their destination, they witnessed a peculiar sight that impressed them as much as any buffaloes, antelopes, or Indians they had so far encountered. Hurd, were following the trail along the South Platte in northeastern Colorado, on their way to the gold-rich young boom town of Denver. In June, 1863, George Bruffey and his partner, a Mr.
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