On September 7, 1899, Karl wrote a letter to sister Mattie on the paper from the “Office of the DILL & HILL CO., Limited, General Merchants
Dear Mattie; I start in a few minutes for the west with a wind in my face blowing at the rate of 67 ½ miles an hour. The winds out here are a caution, always blowing from the west, so hard that I can scarcely move more than 4 miles an hour, where if I had a fair wind, I could make 10. It is frightful.
Please send me a letter to Rossland B.C. I will be there before a great while. By the time you get this letter I will be at the foothills of the rockies, fighting with bears, wolves, snakes, cattle etc. I expect to see some tall scenery in the mountains.
I see lots of prairie dogs and wolves as well as ducks, plover, snipe and prairie chickens. The country is one stretch of backcountry as far as you can see and for miles sometimes. I never see a house.
Karl may not have seen a house while travelling through the prairies, but he was lucky to see a prairie chicken. The Prairie Chicken — Tympanuchus cupido — is a bird related to the grouse family. When Karl was biking through the prairies, there was an estimated million prairie chickens in southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Prairie Chickens were found in the tall grasses of the prairies. However, in the early 1900s, these birds — at the rate of up to 150 per day — were shot and exported to markets in eastern Canada.
The hunting of the Prairie Chicken and the increase in agricultural land started the population's demise. Today, we no longer have any Prairie Chickens in Canada, with the last unconfirmed sighting in the 1990s. Populations of the birds still exist in some US states on managed prairie land — while less than ½ million remain, I did have a sighting.
Rothsay, Minnesota, between Fergus Falls and Moorhead, northwest of Minneapolis, is designated the Prairie Chicken Capital of Minnesota. A large concentration of the protected bird can still be found on prairie meadows of the Rothsay area.
But in case you can’t find them, Rothsay also has the “World's Largest Prairie Chicken”. This statue of a booming prairie chicken stands 13 x 18 feet and weighs 9,000 pounds. In the early spring, the male prairie chicken performs his mating ritual called booming. He spreads his wings and tail feathers, stomps his feet then inflates orange air sacs in his neck and struts while making the booming sound.
Essentially, this is a giant chicken statue getting ready to mate!
The official objective is to alert area visitors and remind local residents of the beauty to be found on the native prairie grasslands. There is a plaque on the chicken stating: Prairie chickens moved ahead of the settlers to inhabit the prairies of Minnesota.
So although Karl saw the real thing, seriously, dear reader, I bet he wished that he could have told his sister all about the giant prairie chicken in its booming state.
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