Joshua Chamberlain’s "Early Memoir."
Typescript with holograph corrections (copy) [before 1905], Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain Collection.
Subsequently published as: “Blessed Boyhood!” The “Early Memoir” of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Brunswick, Maine, 2013).
In his memoirs, written late in life, Joshua Chamberlain paints a vivid picture of the wild pigeons he hunted as a child in Brewer, Maine, in the 1840s:
Gunning was one of the accomplishments of those days. Game abounded and was not too gamey. The fields were broad, but the woods were near. The partridges were plenty in the edges of the clearings, and they stayed with us the year ‘round. The wild pigeons came in flights like clouds and whirlwinds to help gather the grain harvests. It was a beautiful and boy-thrilling sight to see a great flock of them settling down in the top of a big, dead-dry tree at evening-fall for their night's roost, their graceful forms swaying down the branches like the sudden renewal of luxuriant foliage, and their ruddy bosoms thick as they could crowd, reddening deeper with the sunset glow. Good for the birds. For many of them their driving up and down the earth was well nigh ended….