Some Mamluk Details and Natural History Details

Been researching history of the Mamluks for a collaboration with some people in the Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Found some cool resources on the web:

• Reuven Amitai-Preiss' book on the Ilkhanid Mongols and the Mamluks
• An old German History of Islam

In communicating with my collaborators, I revisited the Timbersnake argument from my dissertation, and found some additional resources for that, including

• Mark Catesby's Natural History of  the Carolinas,Florida, the Bahamas etc etc with a cool depiction of a rattlesnake from volume 2, published in London in 1756.
• The travels of Linneus student Peter or Pehr Kalm of Sweden, who helped classify rattlesnakes for Linneus (as did Catesby's drawings)
• An analysis of his journal (including on rattlesnakes)
• His three volume travel journal is available here in German for the First Part. Indubitably other parts are on Archive.org as well. 

Peliminary Notes toward a Piscian Fauna of Upstate New York

The Turner History of the Pioneer Settlement of the Gorham-Phelps purchase has quite a bit to say on some fish as well. These were the types of fish noted initially

• The pickerel 
• The pike 
• The trout 
• The salmon 

These need to be tied back to page references now.

Preliminary Notes toward an Avian Fauna of Upstate New York

The Turner History of the Pioneer Settlement of the Gorham-Phelps purchase has quite a bit to say on some types of birds as well. The main types of birds mentioned so far seem to be:

• The carrion birds 
• The duck 
• The goose 
• The hawk 
• The owls 
• The pigeon 
• The quail 
• The raven 

This list needs to be fleshed out and populated of course.

Toward a Mammalian Fauna of Upstate New York

Another source of fauna information is the Turner History of the Pioneer Settlement of the Gorham-Phelps purchase, were anecdotes and vignettes of encounters with wolves and mountain lions (called panther) abound. More work is needed here.

• The bear was an ambiguous animal to encounter. They were attracted by the hogs of the earlier settlers (p.191; p.203; p.409) and sometimes the children would meet them when retrieving the cows (p.191), or the grown-ups when splitting rails (p.192). The beasts were tough enough that an angled axe blow to the head might only wound the animal (p.192), though a hand-spike could break their back (p.192). Farmers had to chase them out of their fields as well (p.192); in general it seemed possible to shoo them off. People lived isolated enough that wolves and bears were considered their "nearest neighbors" (p.209). Bears were also attracted to other fatty foods, such as the cheeses of Mrs Dean, who had established the first cheese press in Genesee county (p.225 Note). Feral hogs however were able to battle bears successfully (p.265 Note). Elisha Sennder crossed Irondequoit Bay in his canoe when a bear climbed into the canoe to catch a lift (p.412). Near Monroe, the hunter John Parks failed to kill when shooting a bear, and was mauled badly when defending his life with his knife; having to crawl lacerated several miles to the house of William Henscher (p.412). Their furs were traded at Brighton, by Judge Tyron in his Indian store, with the Indians and trappers (p.429). 
• The hog was a domesticated animal that had been introduced to the area by the white settlers and let "of necessity" roam in the forest to feed itself (p.191). Hogs also attracted bears (p.191f; p.203). Sometimes the roaming hogs escaped and became feral (p.191; p.265 Note) and turned into a fearsome adversary of dogs and Indians (p.191), even capable of holding its own against the bear and the wolves (p.265 Note; p.426), almost becoming the "lord of the forest" (p.412), and requiring hunting by the humans with dogs (p.426; p.425). Edward Holbrook in North American Herpetology, (1838, v.2, p.84) [= 1842, v.3, p.13] had pointed out that they were the greatest enemy of the rattle snakes as well. They were plentiful around Sodus Bay (p.396). 
• The panther was an indication of wild nature (see Ode, p.vi) to the settlers, especially in its terrifying "scream" (p.86) or "yell[ed]" (p.vi). The grace of its deadly movements was used figuratively in similes for the (equally as wild perceived) Indians (p.81). When the village of Avon was settled, several panthers were killed in the area (p.375). At Dumplin Hill, near Monroe, an Indian managed to kill a panther that had just gorged itself on a hunted deer (p.409). At Irondequoit near Monroe, John Parks and his mulatto Dunbar ran found a panther in a tree by accident, when coon hunting, used fires to keep it in the tree all night, and shot it by daylight (p.412). Dr Joel Brace, the early physician of Victor, was riding home along the old Indian Trail with his horse, coming from Norton's Mill. Dr Brace encountered a panther at a location then known as Miller's corners, but was able to confuse it into leaving him alone when opening and shaking his umbrella. (p.532).
• The wolf ...  James Sperry recounts for Bloomfield that the farmers would lose their sheep to the wolves (p.191; p.409) if they did not build tight and tall sheep pens (p.191). When combining the bounties offered by the state, the county and the town, each wolf "scalp" was worth $20. However, when Asahel Sprague killed ten in one expedition, that basically settled the problem for Bloomfield. (p.191) "John Stimpson, a trapper, caught on Capt. Treat's farm, 9 wolves in one night, for which he received a bounty of $90 ; a large sum of money in those primitive times." People lived isolated enough that wolves and bears were considered their "nearest neighbors" (p.209). When Nathan Pierce of Farmington Township, then Manchester, came home from the grist mill after 1795, a wolf pack followed him to the door of his block house (p.209). When Brice Aldrich of Farmington Township was taking fresh meat to Canandaigua, a wolf challenged him for possession (p.209). Feral hogs however were able to battle wolves successfully (p.265 Note). They were plentiful around Sodus Bay (p.396). Wolves pursued Capt. Treat one night for miles ...." (p.532)

Not all mammals are scary in the same way as these life-threatening animals, of course. And some of the mammals were mostly interesting for their fur production.

• The beaver
• The black squirrel  
• The chipmunk was often the food of the rattlesnakes (p.412).
• The deer was a basic food of the early pioneers (p.409) and their leather provided the shoes for the winter time (p.192).
• The elk 
• The fox 
• The moose 
• The minks 
• The muskrat 
• The opossum 
• The otter 
• The [ra]coon was a pest for the corn harvest around Monroe (p.409), but hunting them paid off due to their fine pelts.
• The squirrel 
• The skunk meat was valued (p.425).
• The wildcat 
• The wood chuck 

Dangerous Snakes of New York

In putting together a picture of the environment in which Joseph Smith Jr lived his teenage years and early years of manhood, I have begun looking at the dangerous animals that existed then.

One source of information that was unexpected was the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which mentions dangerous reptiles (p.38), which I take to mean snakes. At the present time, as Kim-Giám Huỳnh of Quora pointed out, the three poisonous snakes of New York are:

• the timber rattlesnake (crotalus horridus Linneaus, 1758); 
• the massasauga (Sistrurus catenatus Rafinesque, 1818), erroneously called "pygmy rattler";
• the copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix, Baird & Girard 1853)

In order to track these back to how contemporaries would have envisioned them, I located a book by Spencer Baird about Snakes of New York (1858), which provided a convenient table of all then-noted snakes of New York (p.7). That book makes reference to the Catalog of North American Serpents, that Baird had published with Girard at the Smithsonian, as well as to  the more famous 5-volume North American Herpetology, published in Philadelphia starting in 1836, by John Edward Holbrook, with a second edition in 1842.

What then do these books tell us about the poisonous snakes?

• The timber rattlesnake, which Holbrook classified as crotalus durissus Linneaus 1758, occurs in volume 2, (1st ed, 1838), pp.80-85 [= volume 3, (2nd ed, 1842), pp.8-15] (plate at NYPL). Holbrook noted that the timber rattlesnake then lived "in his native woods" (p.82) [= 2nd ed, p.11], and was attested as far north as Lake Champlain in Vermont (p.84) [= 2nd ed, p.14], feeding on "rabbits, squirrels, rats, etc." (p.82) [= 2nd ed, p.11]. Even though it can kill dogs, its greatest enemy is the hog (p.84) [= 2nd ed, p.13], which may mean the feral hogs of the white settlers (Turner, History of the Pioneer Settlement, p.412).
• The copperhead is classified by Holbrook as Trigonocephalus contortrix Holbrook 1838, in volume 2 (1st ed, 1838), pp.69-72  [= volume 3, (2nd ed, 1842), pp.39-42] (plate at NYPL); Holbrook include in its habitat the "western part of New England" as well as along the "borders of the Alleghany mountains" (p.71) [= (2nd ed, 1842). p.41].  
• Baird and Giraud in their Catalog of North American Serpents (1853) coined the modern name agkistrodon contortrix, of which ancistrodon contortrix is a synonym that Baird used 1854.
• Baird (1859) simply states that the range of the copperhead is the same as for the "northern rattlesnake" (p.13), which presumably means the timber rattlesnake. 
• The massasauga rattlesnake is classified by Holbrook as crotalophorus tergeminus Gray 1825, in volume 3, (2nd ed, 1842), pp.29f (plate at NYPL); it is a new-comer to the 2nd edition. 
• The species was first described by Thomas Say in the description of Long's Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, which took place 1819-1820 (Three Volume edition (1823), volume 2, pp.183f; Single Volume edition, 1823, pp.499f). 
• The genus crotalophorus was suggested in John Edward Gray's A synopsis of the Genera of Reptiles and Amphibia, with a description of some new species, Annals of Philosophy, 1825, specifically p.205.
• Holbrook in 1842 gives "the region of the country bordering on the Rocky Mountains, near the sources of the Missouri" (p.30) as its habitat; not New York.  
• Holbrook volume 2, (2nd ed, 1842), pp.31f, recognizes an Ohio-specific variant (crotalophorus kirtlandi Holbrook 1842) (plate at NYPL), which he named after the naturalist Jared Potter Kirtland of Ohio who had provided the first description in his Report on the Zoology of Ohio (1838) [WorldCat] of the species, as well as reporting the Indian name "massasaugua" (of which the English dropped the last 'u').  
• Baird (1858) expected crotalophorus kirtlandi to wander west from Northern Ohio (p.12), where it was colloquially known as the black massasauga, into New York State (p.7).
• Baird (1858) (p.12) was not aware of any locale other than the white Cedar swamp near Byron, Genesee County, where the massauga rattlesnake was then found in the state of New York.
• As of 2014, the massasauga rattlesnake is considered threatened in Ontario---suggesting that it made its way across the state, just as Baird had predicted.

Notice that the Turner History of the Pioneer Settlement of the Gorham-Phelps purchase has quite a bit to say on snakes as well.

• Mrs Farnum from Pittstown recalled that the rattle snake stories were too numerous to mention, but felt there had been a snake that must have been a relative of the rattle snake, using a horn rather than a rattle to produce its sound (p.204). 
• When William Henscher II recounted his experiences in settling Monroe, he noted the dens of the rattle snakes along the banks of the river below the falls (p.412). [Henscher II presumably means the High Falls on the Genesee River in Rochester, NY, where there is still a Rattle Snake Point].  Henscher II said that the rattlesnakes would come out of their winter quarters to bask on the banks of the rivers during the spring sun (p.412). Since they were still sluggish from their winter rest, they were easy to kill (thus reducing the problem for the settlers for the summer time). Henscher reports killing forty himself at one time, and gathering up a hunting party for a roundup, going up the river in canoes to take out 300 in a day at another time (p.412).