Splitting hares: Eastern Oregon pest control and the urban/rural divide, 1900-1925

Jason Hogstad

Between 1900 and 1925, homesteaders in isolated Eastern Oregon engaged in an unusual, violent, and frequent act of community building: ritual rabbit slaughter. Every winter rural newspapers east of the Cascades invited townspeople and local homesteaders to meet at predetermined locations before cooperatively herding and bludgeoning thousands of jackrabbits. These articles painted rabbits as pests; threats who would overwhelm and destroy local dryland farmers without concentrated community action. And so, rural Eastern Oregonian farmers repeatedly recruited city dwellers and townspeople from across the state to help them in their rabbit eradication activities. Their actions were, at best, a temporary solution. The logistical limitations of recruiting and organizing several hundred participants prevented rabbit drives from occurring in sufficient number and jackrabbit infestations continued to plague Eastern Oregon farmers for much of the earl twentieth-century. That is, until, the Oregon Agricultural College and the Extension Service created farm bureaus and sent County Agents to the far reaches of Eastern Oregon. Armed with technical expertise and strychnine, these Progressive-era technocrats revolutionized pest control east of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. Agents organized workshops on the use of strychnine, organized poison districts, and strategically directed poisoning campaigns. The transition from rabbit drives to poisoning dramatically reduced jackrabbit numbers in the agricultural portions of Eastern Oregon. But, such perceived success also came at a cost: by the mid-1920s, rural Eastern Oregonians reported to their local County Agent when rabbit number rose instead of enlisting the aid of outsiders. I argue that this shift in how Eastern Oregonians responded to jackrabbit pests helps explain the emerging urban/rural divide in early-twentieth century America. As such, my examination of rabbit slaughter reveals the complicated ways in which culture, nature, and identity played out in the American West during the early twentieth century.

Splitting hares: Eastern Oregon pest control and the urban/rural divide, 1900-1925

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