IT WAS THE DRIEST<\/span><\/strong> year on record when 21-year-old Paul Gatschet saw the advertisement in the local paper.<\/p>\n Volunteers wanted, <\/em>announced the Hays Daily News<\/em>. Farmers near La Crosse, Kansas, had a jackrabbit problem and they needed help corralling the crop-destroying critters. So one afternoon, Gatschet and his younger brother, George, drove south from Hays to join the rest of the volunteers. Neither Gatschet had participated in a rabbit drive before, but they were willing if it kept local farmers from losing their crops.<\/p>\n This particular drive was slated to comb four sections of rolling prairie. Organizers loaded nearly 80 volunteers\u2014all boys and men this day\u2014into cars and farm trucks, then dropped them off again along the perimeter. By the time everyone was in position, the hunters had formed a spindly square, each side stretching 2 miles long across the countryside. Then they started walking.<\/p>\n One of the many remarkable things about this rabbit drive was precisely how unremarkable it was in that era. During the height of the Dust Bowl\u2014sometime between 1934 and 1936\u2014the Kansas Emergency Relief Committee reported more than 98,000 men, women, and children took part in 269 drives across 13 counties in western Kansas. More than 2 million jackrabbits were killed or captured across 1,974 sections, with an average of 923 rabbits killed per drive. They were, by all accounts, slaughters.<\/p>\n The chaos and brutality of the drives bore little resemblance to what any modern hunter would call rabbit hunting. Still, the cooperation required to pull off the largest organized game drives in North America\u2019s written memory is astounding. Western rabbit drives remain a fascinating, if mostly forgotten, chapter in the history of small-game hunting. They\u2019re also just one way Americans coped with what was arguably the worst ecological disaster<\/a> in our nation\u2019s history.<\/p>\n Although hundreds of thousands of Kansans took part in the drives, Gatschet is one of few participants still alive today. Now 88, Gatschet figures that drive occurred, by his best recollection, in 1956\u2014a full two decades after the Dust Bowl. But the severe drought conditions of the 1950s had replicated the failing crops and overwhelming jackrabbit numbers<\/a> of the 1930s. Apart from the clothing the men wore to the rabbit drives that year\u2014jeans cuffed above the ankles, white T-shirts, the occasional black leather jacket\u2014it played out just as hundreds of drives had across western Kansas over the previous 50 years.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not too proud of it,\u201d says Gatschet. \u201cBut this is what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul Gatschet was born in October 1934, smack in the middle of the Great Depression and just in time to weather the worst of the Dust Bowl<\/a>. Wall Street had crashed on Black Tuesday exactly five years before to send the global economy spiraling. The Black Sunday dust storm<\/a>, named for its suffocating, sun-blotting conditions, would howl across the High Plains at 60 mph by the time Gatschet was six months old. Drought<\/a> was the new reality. Plows from Nebraska to Texas had ground the region\u2019s fertile topsoil into oblivion. Native grasses had all but vanished, along with their deep roots that held the prairie in place. Wind blew away whatever was left.<\/p>\n Gatschet remembers those years as mostly dry and hot. Swarms of hungry grasshoppers and blowing dust descended on his hometown of Hays and surrounding Ellis County. Many children developed dust pneumonia\u2014a chronic and sometimes fatal condition\u2014from inhaling all those tiny silt particles.<\/p>\n \u201cMy mother told me she covered my crib with a wet sheet to keep me alive,\u201d says Gatschet, who grew up in a three-bedroom house on 11th Street. \u201cReal fine dust would come in through the walls. As a baby I didn\u2019t know anything about that, but as I got older, I remember we had dust storms. It got pretty thick, and of course that wasn\u2019t good for your lungs.\u201d<\/p>\n Like most rural boys of his generation, Gatschet spent his childhood hunting with his father. There were no deer in the region yet, but Kansans could hunt ducks and geese. And rabbits. Lots of rabbits.<\/p>\n Black-tailed jackrabbits (which are actually hares, not rabbits) can grow up to 2 feet long and reach speeds of up to 40 mph. Oversized hind legs launch them across desert sage and grassy prairie, and their giant ears release heat to cool their bodies. Jackrabbits are prey animals, with often-bulging amber eyes that can scan nearly 360 degrees for predators. They have a knack for speedy replacement. Females can produce multiple litters each year, with up to eight young in each.<\/p>\n Jackrabbits are primarily desert dwellers, so it\u2019s not particularly surprising that their numbers swelled when drought settled over the prairie. The critters ransacked already struggling crops like wheat and sugar beets and stripped bark from precious shelterbelt trees. It was common to see jacks in the daytime and easy enough to shoot them with pistols as they fed in the fields.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen it was hot and dry, we saw a lot of rabbits,\u201d Gatschet says. \u201cWhen the coyote population got low, the rabbit population seemed to go up too.\u201d<\/p>\n Gatschet\u2019s father was a schoolteacher and his mother was a good cook with five children to feed, so their boys brought home whatever they could during and after the Depression. Gatschet remembers those jackrabbits\u2014fried, baked, stewed\u2014tasted pretty good.\u00a0<\/p>\n By the time the Gatschet brothers spotted the newspaper ad in 1956, Paul was in college studying English. Drought worse than the Dust Bowl<\/a> had returned to the prairie. That meant rabbits had, too.<\/p>\n Like the jackrabbit drives before it, organizers didn\u2019t allow guns. They were much too risky with so many people and so many rabbits running around. Instead, volunteers carried clubs, resulting in a mob\u2019s stockpile of sticks, baseball bats, and splintered 2x4s, some even wrapped in barbed wire. The Gatschets hadn\u2019t brought anything like that, so someone passed Paul the spoke of an old hickory wagon wheel. The wood felt heavy in his hands.<\/p>\n The drivers began walking toward the center of the four sections, where an enclosure of chicken wire had been erected. Their plan was to funnel the rabbits into the pen and dispatch them there.<\/p>\n At first it felt to Gatschet like they were corralling cattle. They started kicking up jacks, which leapt and hopped ahead of them. Coordinators kept an eye on the drivers, nudging or checking their pace to ensure the pests didn\u2019t squirt back through the lines. When the men closed on the final square mile, the driven jackrabbits began to converge. But it wasn\u2019t until the rabbits saw their own kind running toward them that chaos broke out.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could tell the rabbits were confused. As the group got smaller and smaller, it got to where there were just solid rabbits in the middle\u2014about 50 yards square. Now and then you\u2019d see a rabbit just go\u2014like, Oh, he\u2019s taking off.<\/em> And he would go, because we didn\u2019t have any guns.\u201d<\/p>\n One nearby rabbit made a run for it, and Gatschet reacted out of instinct.<\/p>\n \u201cI threw my hickory spoke at him.\u2026 It was substantial, and dagnabbit if I didn\u2019t hit the rabbit in the head and roll him.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the boiling jackrabbits were two or three coyotes that had gotten swept up in the drive. As the coyotes made their own bids for freedom, they burst through the human wall only to be met by a knot of coyote hunters. Those men hadn\u2019t been allowed to carry guns either. Instead, they\u2019d brought their dogs.<\/p>\n \u201cThe greyhounds got beat up pretty well,\u201d says Gatschet, recalling a coyote that ripped one dog\u2019s slender jaw. \u201cIt got pretty gory. But usually those hunters had one or two Russian wolfhounds with them, and the wolfhounds would come in for the kill. It was a dual hunt.\u201d<\/p>\n By now the square of drivers had pushed the rabbits into the chicken-wire trap. Most Dust Bowl corrals were octagonal, built 54 feet across and anchored by sturdy posts. As the size of the rabbit drives tapered into the 1950s, so did the corrals.<\/p>\n \u201cThe little square got smaller and smaller, and the rabbits inside the fence started jumping but they couldn\u2019t make it over. And what surprised me was\u2014I just thought it was like cavemen. Some of the guys started to holler, \u2018We\u2019ll get you SOBs!\u2019 And a call went up among the men. They all just rushed the rabbits, clubbing them left and right,\u201d says Gatschet. \u201cThe rabbits could tell it was the end.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to pinpoint the beginning of jackrabbit drives in American history, but one thing is clear: hunters were driving rabbits long before Europeans arrived.<\/p>\n Many early media reports credit<\/a> the Paiute-Shoshone with developing the jackrabbit drives. This is true enough based on archaeological evidence<\/a> and firsthand accounts of modern Paiute drives in Nevada, but the Paiute-Shoshone corralled rabbits for subsistence.<\/p>\n \u201cThe old rabbit drive was and still is a favorite means of producing food for these desert people,\u201d Harry W. Gilmore wrote<\/a> in American Anthropologist<\/em> in 1953. \u201c\u2026Each person tak[es] his station about 50 feet from those next to him. This line circles around toward a lake or river, thus forming a semicircle. By closing in gradually, the semicircle becomes smaller and smaller, and the animals are unable to escape. Finally they are trapped between a solid line of people and a body of water and are easy prey for arrows and ordinary sticks.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the first mentions of controlling native jackrabbits as vermin appeared in Michigan\u2019s South Haven Messenger<\/em> in 1846. The newspaper column, \u201cSlaughter of Jack Rabbits: The Western States Are Alarmed About the Pests,\u201d explained that while Colorado and California\u2019s rabbit drives \u201chave a certain element of sport and general frolic, [the drives] are nevertheless a very serious business.\u201d<\/p>\nKansas Rabbit Drives During the Dust Bowl<\/h2>\n
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Rabbit Drives in the West<\/h2>\n
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