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The Solution

by Dave Ambrose

More than 60 years ago, the state of Illinois faced what it considered an environmental problem at the newly acquired Mississippi Palisades State Park in Carroll County. The solution state bureaucrats chose would horrify modern day conservationists, but a look back provides an interesting insight into how popular perceptions can sometimes shape public policy with disastrous results.
The way state bureaucrats dealt with the issue of rattlesnakes at Mississippi Palisades 60 years ago would horrify today's naturalists
Rattlesnake

"Improve Mississippi Palisades State Park" trumpeted the headline in the June 18, 1931, edition of the Savanna Times-Journal. The accompanying article spoke glowingly of the new picnic shelters, rustic foot bridge and other amenities in place for the opening of Illinois' newest state park. Almost as an afterthought, the story mentioned 2,000 rods of woven wire fencing installed at the top of the dolomite limestone bluffs facing the Mississippi River—the "palisades" for which the park is named.

State officials were able to keep the reason for the fencing out of the newspapers. The implication to the public was that it was erected to help protect delicate wildflowers. In truth, its purpose was to hold herds of sheep and hogs brought to the park to eradicate what officials feared would be a threat to the safety of park visitors—a thriving population of timber rattlesnakes.

Soon after the state acquired the initial 420-acre tract in 1929, Harry H. Cleaveland, then director of the Department of Public Works, became concerned about the "rattlesnake issue" at Mississippi Palisades. Though the area had been a popular picnicking site for local families for years, the rocky crags and outcroppings that people found attractive were alive with timber rattlers (Crotalus horridus horridus). Residents from nearby Savanna and the surrounding area were accustomed to them and knew which areas to avoid, but Cleaveland fretted that less experienced visitors would be in significant danger.

"This park is visited by several thousand people each week, most of whom are from the large cities like Chicago," Cleaveland wrote in a letter in the spring of 1931. "They know nothing about

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The Palisades
The craggy limestone cliffs of Mississippi Palisades State Park provided ideal habitat for timber rattlers (opposite) until the early 1930s when the state acquired the property. Fearing that park visitors might be bitten, state officials undertook a systematic program to eradicate the reptiles.

rattlesnakes and the Department feels that it is extremely dangerous to turn people loose in a large area like this where the hazard of being bitten by rattlesnakes is so great."

Cleaveland apparently had been told, although it's not clear by whom, that hogs and sheep could rid almost any area of rattlesnakes. "While I do not claim to be an authority, I am reliably informed that hogs are immune to the bite of reptiles and are destroyers of snakes," Cleaveland wrote in one of the flurry of letters he wrote defending his position in the spring and summer of 1931. "The claim is made that sheep will not destroy the snakes but they do clean up the undergrowth so that the snakes have no shelter and therefore are more easily observed by pedestrians."

The public works director's plan to fence off areas of the park where suspected dens were located and allowing sheep and hogs to range over the area met with almost immediate resistance—not from defenders of the rattlesnake, but from wildflower enthusiasts incensed about the damage the livestock would do in a particularly lush area of the park called Fern Hollow.

"That area is now part of a dedicated nature preserve." said John Jachino, now site superintendent at Mississippi Palisades State Park. "To think that 60 years ago the state fenced off part of it and ran hogs in there. It boggles the imagination."

Opposition to Cleaveland's plan came primarily from wildflower enthusiasts. Beginning in April 1931, Cleaveland began receiving letters and telegrams from representatives of the Garden Club of Illinois, Wild Flower Preservation Society, Chicago Academy of Sciences, Chicago Conservation Council, Izaak Walton League of America and other conservation groups.

Eleanor Baroody of Chicago, one of the most outspoken critics of the plan, wrote to Cleaveland reporting her visit to the site.

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Part of Cleaveland's concerns had to do with the rattlesnake's ability to blend in with its surroundings—a trait he believed made the reptiles even more dangerous to park visitors. He proposed bringing in sheep to overgraze scrub and understory to make the snakes more visible.

Timber Rattlesnake

"I followed a marked trail over a newly made, good looking, rustic bridge, thence into a trail to a look-out," she wrote. "This path had been cut through the finest of fern beds, blood-roots, hepaticas, etc. As I walked over exposed Dutchmen's breeches bulbs, I knew how it must feel to walk on dead babies. Finally reaching the top of the bluff I looked out upon the river view and at the same time encountered a hog tight fence."

Baroody urged Cleaveland to leave the fence in place and post signs warning of the presence of rattlesnakes. "That will help protect the flowers," she said.

"If the rattlesnakes must be killed why do it with such relentless grazers as sheep?" Baroody continued. "Why not build a pig pen of an acre or two or three around the snakes' den? Or why not blast out the outcropping and get them without sacrificing two thirds of the shady north slope to the sheep?"

Visitors to the area had known about the Palisades rattlers for more than 40 years, Baroody pointed out, and "trespassed at their own risk." In that time, she knew of only one reported bite—sustained by a small dog which survived.

C.W.G. Eifrig, then president of the Illinois Audubon Society, minced few words in declaring his opposition to Cleaveland's plan to bring sheep to the Palisades. "It is a fantastic idea, to say the least, to employ sheep, these four-footed locusts, to preserve a park, natural or otherwise," Eifrig wrote to Cleaveland. "It's very unfortunate that associations of public-spirited citizens must so often protest against some despoliation of a fine natural habitat on the part of well-meaning, but misinformed public officials."

While the controversy brewed, Cleaveland contacted famed herpetologist Raymond Ditmars, curator of reptiles at the New York Zoological park, for advice on how to get rid of the Palisades rattlers. He may have been led to Ditmars by an editorial appearing in the Springfield Journal in the spring of 1931 which included a telling commentary on the popular attitude toward venomous snakes: "Raymond L. Ditmars, curator of reptiles and mammals of the New York Zoological park and regarded as the world's greatest authority on snakes, made a foray into southern Illinois from his St. Louis base the other day and captured some fine specimens of rattlesnakes and cottonmouth moccasins. Illinois is grateful, hopes that Mr. Ditmars will come often and catch a lot of snakes."

Ditmar's response was brief and cursory: "I know of no means to rid the property of snakes other than to kill each specimen encountered. They will not take poisoned food if there is live prey on the grounds for them."

Some of those writing letters objecting to Cleaveland's plan offered alternative suggestions for ridding the park land of rattlesnakes. One suggested offering a bounty on rattlesnakes killed in the park. Another recommended introducing the Australian mongoose to curb the snake population—a suggestion that created yet another tempest for Cleaveland to deal with.

In a letter to Cleaveland, Dr. R.A. Cahn of the Ecological Society of America called the mongoose idea "nothing short of insanity."

"No animal alive is more bloodthirsty, vicious, destructive or harmful," Cahn wrote. "If by any unlucky chance this horrible pest is introduced into Illinois, be prepared to have the names of those concerned go down to posterity as the performers of the most insane experiment ever tried on this continent."

For Cleaveland's part, the public works director stuck to his guns. Plans to bring sheep and swine to the park continued undeterred and a bounty was instituted to bring about the demise of as many snakes as possible. The wildflowers, he said, could be reseeded later.

Vernon Joy, Centralia, a member of

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the Public Works Department's Board of Park Advisors, cited the official view of the problem in a written response to one of Cleaveland's critics: "The Board regards the life of a child, or an adult, of more consequence than the life of a wild flower. Much as we appreciate the beauty and the place in life flower beauty brings, we maintain that the protection of children and careless adults from rattlesnakes is more important."

Robert Kingery, secretary of the Park Advisors Board, echoed the official sentiment in a letter to Cleaveland. "Somehow," he wrote, "I don't get very excited over some of the protests that come from some of our conservationists."

In retrospect, it's doubtful Cleaveland's hogs and sheep had a great impact of the Palisades rattlers. More likely, actions taken by the Civilian Conservation Corps a few years later to pour concrete into known rattlesnake dens took more of a toll.

"The state ordered workers at the park to kill as many as they could and to pour concrete down den sites," Jachino said. Recent research on timber rattlers suggests they use the same den site generation after generation and that they may take as long as eight years to reach sexual maturity. "Each of those den sites may have had 50 to 100 snakes using it, so it thinned the population in a hurry."

In 1931, a nervous Cleaveland ordered rattlesnake antivenom stocked at the Savanna City Hospital. By 1936, when hospital supervisor Erma Morey contacted the Department of Public Works to acquire replacement reserves, State Parks Superintendent George Luker approved the purchase, but assured Morey that she probably would not need the supplies.

"Very few rattlesnakes have been seen in the park the last two years," Luker wrote. "When the CCC camps were at Mississippi Palisades, the rattlesnake dens were all filled in with cement in order to prevent their exit. I don't think you will be troubled very much more with rattlesnakes."

At the height of the eradication program, the park custodian reported killing 30 rattlesnakes in one summer, and sent Cleaveland the skin from one specimen as a curiosity. Just 25 years ago, when Jachino was an interpreter at the park, staffers still reported seeing as many as 20 timber rattlers a year.

But in recent years, the program begun by Cleaveland six decades ago seems to have succeeded. Jake Getz, 81, who has worked at the park since 1969, dealt with rattlers from the time he started working for the state. He once found a good-sized specimen denned up in an empty bird house stored in the park's mechanical shop.

"Every year, you'd go in there and find his skin," Getz said. "He was gone, but he left his hide."

But in the last 10 to 15 years Getz hasn't seen a single rattler at Mississippi Palisades. "The last one I saw was down by the pump house in the 1980s," he said.

"I was never afraid of them," Getz acknowledged, though he did respect them and used caution when he thought there was a chance of encountering one. Stacked firewood next to a chalet that has since been torn down was a favorite haunt for the rattlers, he said. "You had to be doggone careful when you went to get wood."

Still, despite his many encounters with rattlesnakes, Getz was never bitten. "You don't bother them, and they won't bother you."

Likewise, Jachino says it has been years since he has seen a timber rattler at the Palisades.

"Two or three times a summer, someone will come in and say they saw a big rattlesnake," Jachino said. "I'll go down there as quick as I can just to see, but there's never one there."

"I think what they're seeing now are big bullsnakes," added Getz.

Between 1989 and 1990, graduate student Brian Jay Bielema conducted a study on the status of rattlesnakes at Mississippi Palisades. In two years of surveying, Bielema did not encounter a single specimen and concluded the population is small or nonexistent. With park visitors totaling more than 675,000 a year, Jachino believes that someone would see one if the rattlesnakes were still a presence at the park.

Without rattlesnakes, Mississippi Palisades is something less than it once was—less wild, less natural. As Bielema points out in his paper, "The lofty rock bluffs of the Mississippi River will not be truly wild without the threat of a chance encounter with this creature." It is a sentiment only hinted at in 1931 when the popular opinion was that man had dominion over nature.

"An interesting idea that seems slowly to be sinking into the minds of conservationists has to do with the value of some of the poison species," wrote V.O. Graham of the Illinois Academy of Science, arguing to leave the rattlesnakes unmolested. "I believe that poison ivy and the rattlesnake will in the long run prove to be friends, rather than enemies in the conservation of wildlife."

Graham's was the lone voice for protecting the rattlesnake for its own intrinsic value in 1931. His thoughts dovetail with the views of modern conservationists who believe all species are worthy of protection and that it is presumptuous to value some species over others.

"The scientists are debating what the reason for the decline is," Jachino said. "Some of it probably is the presence of man. Some of it may be because of vegetation encroaching on the rock outcroppings. If you look at some of the old photographs of the park, there are no trees going up the sides of the bluffs."

Bielema cites a peculiar shortage of chipmunks as a possible contributing reason for the decline.

Whatever the reason, Mississippi Palisades is now safe for humans—but at the cost of a species.

Dave Ambrose is a staff writer for Outdoor lllinois, a publication of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

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