No larder can be drawn upon indefinitely, and even as Manly was eating his way across the continent, he was helping to make that practice infeasible. In the 1850s, Thoreau lamented the extirpation from New England of moose, cougar, beavers, and wolverines: “Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with?” Woods that were once thick with wild turkeys were, by the 1860s, all but empty of them. Eastern elk, once plentiful from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, were gone by the 1870s. Passenger pigeons, which formed such immense flocks they blocked the sun, were eliminated around
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