Egan repeats at various times the imagery of rabbit drives held during the Dust Bowl era. His word choice seems to conjure a picture of a bunch of wild-eyed maniacs on the warpath...mad at the black dusters...but only able to take out their wrath on the innocent little bunnies.
page 8 "On Sundays, a mob of people with clubs herded rabbits into a corral and smashed their skulls." Using "mob" to describe the people.
page 9 "Melt White was sickened by the rabbit drives, the plagues of hoppers, a town of random death and no comfort from the sky. Melt was not sickened by the hoards of rabids (like he was the hoards of grasshoppers), rather he was sickened by the rabbit drives.
On Pages 116-117, Egan goes into more detail on how the "people saw the rabbits as a scourge, a perpetual motion of mastication, indifferent to the human alterations that were blowing away." He goes on to describe a bloodbath where the "rabbits panicked" and Melt White heard "the rabbits cry."
Egan writes how "it seemed such a shame to let all those dead rabbits go to waste when so many people were hungry in the cities"...."the rabbits were left to buzzards and insects or shoveled into pits and buried."
It seems almost like a backward attempt to villify the (dumb) people of the Great Plains for their cavemen-like behavior...while still maintaining the sympathy for the victims of their behavior...like Melt White with his Native American ancestory.
But the rabbits weren't just innocent bystanders and these weren't the little cottontail bunnies we're accustomed to seeing. These were wild jackrabbits. A big difference. The weather had allowed them to multiply in unforeseen magnitude. The Kansas Historical Society published an article in March 1998 about the rabbit drives.... "Jumpin' Jackrabbits: The Drive to Control Longears"
Rabbits are cute and furry sure, but a million of 'em...not so much. According to the article, "cattlemen estimated that feed for 200,000 cattle was saved by these attempts to control the jackrabbit."
The rabbit drives were brutal and ugly...by the standards of people who weren't living with them and by the standards of today.
But they weren't just wild, willy-nilly murderous rampages.
Other sources:
Nebraska State Historical Society
Ford County Dust Bowl Oral History Project
Life in Western Kansas
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