A Hare of Difference
Down here on the creek we ate a lot of fish and game, including rabbit. Feasting on rabbit was only in the winter and usually during a snowfall. I still recall my Dad closely examining the flesh as he skinned the game as if he was scrutinizing it for some disease. The meat was placed in the icy snow beneath a wash tub and the tub was weighted down with a rock to protect the kill from dogs or other predators.
The next day the hare’s carcass would be bleached as white as the snow it was nestled in. The rabbit was then fried and served with cream gravy or marinated and prepared as hasenpfeffer. More than once I have heard dad say we were having “Hoover Pork” for supper. A term I didn’t understand at the time but in later years learned it was lingo left from the “dirty thirties” and hard times in the great depression.
The great depression affected almost every American in one way or another and here in the Ozarks it was marked with inescapable heat and a parching drought. A dry heat that often prevented most garden plots from producing and thus left families facing a winter with no food preserved in the fruit cellar. No crops had been raised so there was no food to sustain the stock through the harsh winter months. It was reported that in the summer of 1936 some farmers on the Osage had witnessed their cattle actually consuming smart weeds along the river banks. Vegetation that had never been eaten by livestock before was now ravenously utilized.
As strange as it may sound, live rabbits were actually a good “cash” crop in the Ozarks in those hard times. One example was Vol Brashears who started a lumber mill in Berryville, Arkansas in 1935. He began making wooden traps for children to catch cottontail rabbits. He would pay kids thirty-five cents per live rabbit and then he shipped the little critters to parts of the country bereft of rabbits. He received anywhere from one dollar to two dollars and fifty cents per head. Despite the fact that the children were only receiving thirty-five cents they were making more money catching rabbits than their parents earned at the lumber mill.
The rabbit exporting business brought in much needed money during the lean years and continued to thrive afterwards. Until their railroad went out they were the largest shipper in the United States of wild, live cottontail rabbits. A shot rabbit only brought ten cents as the real money was for the live rabbits.
But across the state line in Oklahoma and Kansas, the only good rabbit was a dead rabbit. It was the days of the dust bowl and the black blizzards of dirt that plagued Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. Marginal land had been plowed during World War one when wheat was bringing two dollars per bushel and when the rains stopped the land lay bare, plundered and eroded. The residents of sturdy pioneer stock had experienced drought and crop failure before but they had never seen their land in danger with the topsoil blowing away. The land had always been the one stable thing when everything else was a big “roll of the dice.”
The only way to explain the amounts of earth moved in a dust storm was made by Kansas State College. They said: “A 96 mile line of 1 ½ ton trucks could be put to work hauling 10 loads apiece daily, it would take them a year to haul back to western Kansas the dirt that was blown over to the eastern half of the state.
If blowing topsoil, sweltering heat and zero prices weren’t enough, Kansas was plagued by jack-rabbits. They could be compared to grasshoppers that had plagued the early settlers. The rabbits ate everything in their path, including the roots of plants. The few farmers who had minimal crops watched as rabbits demolished their last hopes for a livelihood. In early years rabbits had been a blessing, providing meat for the settlers.
The warm dry weather had eliminated the conditions that killed young rabbits. By 1935 it was estimated there were 8,000,000 rabbits in 30 western Kansas counties. The rabbits were eating what few crops had survived and depriving cattle of badly needed feed.
Drives to control rabbit population was organized and were often held on a Sunday afternoon. The size of a drive varied from one or two sections to massive efforts covering several square miles. One drive involved 10,000 people in an eight square mile area. They killed approximately 35,000 rabbits. People would line up every 20 feet along four sides of a square and make noise as they walked. A fenced area in the center was the object of the drive. The size of the enclosure varied. People closed in toward it, coming closer all the time. By the time they reached the enclosure, people were shoulder to shoulder which blocked the rabbits escape. The rabbits were then clubbed in the fenced enclosure.
People across the country were outraged and didn’t have a clear concept of the destruction created by the rabbits. Farmers tried to ship live rabbits to eastern states but game and wildlife officials realized how destructive jackrabbits were and put a halt to the plan.
Despite the criticism cattlemen estimated that feed for 200,000 cattle had been saved by the drives. Rabbit drives were a means by which farmers could directly improve their economic conditions in the 1930’s. This all sounds gruesome by today’s standards but the drives offered an outlet for frustration and anger brought on by forces the farmers could not control. Drought and extreme temperatures were felt here in the Ozarks too but we escaped the dust storms. Here rabbits were a blessing not a problem, which taught us all, there was certainly a difference in hares.
