My dog has been busy lately chasing raccoons off the porch. Almost every night I am roused from my slumbers when the dog gives chase to coons trying to open the dog food bin.
On the rare occasions when I manage to catch one in a live trap, I release it in the Ouachita National Forest. My ancestors would have killed the varmint, carefully saved the hide, and cooked the carcass for supper.
The raccoon (Procyon lotor) is a native of the Americas and is found in every single state as well as Canada and Mexico. It's an intelligent animal, built to survive. Averaging about 20 pounds in weight, coons are omnivorous and opportunistic feeders. In addition to the dog food on my back porch, coons will eat anything from acorns to snakes. According to John Sealander and Gary Heidt in their book Arkansas Mammals (UA Press, 1990), raccoons get through the lean winter months eating fruits, insects, acorns, and crayfish.
Anyone who has a vegetable garden soon discovers that coons love nothing better than corn. One Arkansas hill farmer described how "a bunch of coons will ruin a field of corn, tear it down. Lots of times, they'll tear into [an] ear of that corn ... and jist eat a little--ruin hit--then go on to the next ear."
There is a common belief that coons wash their food before eating it, but that misconception arises from their tendency to forage along creeks. Coons have remarkably dexterous feet, with toes capable of being spread widely. This enables them to gain entry into chicken coops, attics, and trash cans.
Settlers killed raccoons in huge numbers. Silas Turnbo, whose family settled along the upper White River well before the Civil War, recalled that the Jones family living near Bradley's Ferry in Marion County killed 13 coons one morning before breakfast.
While the settlers certainly killed coons for their meat, it was their pelts that were valuable. It was no accident that the rustic settler pictured in Edward Payson Washbourne's famous 1850s Arkansas Traveler painting is wearing a coonskin cap while another skin is tacked to the wall of his leaky cabin.
As with fox hunting, raccoons were also hunted simply for the thrill of the chase. Dogs played a crucial role in coon hunting, and it was not unusual for rural residents to have two or three coon dogs. The hunt usually took place at night when the coons were active. A good coon dog would eagerly run ahead of the hunter; once he got a scent of his quarry, the chase was on.
An experienced hunter could determine how well the chase was going by the dog's barking. An observer of a 1931 coon hunt on Crowley's Ridge noted: "When a dog hits the trail, his bark is excited, piercing, and in fact, so different from his other yelps that both man and dogs know that he has found the trail."
The raccoon is a wily animal, and it is adept at outsmarting dogs. They were known to repeatedly cross streams in order to confuse pursuing dogs. Eventually, when the coon tired or the dogs got too close, it would seek refuge in a tree--known as "treeing." Once the coon was treed, the dog would circle the tree while baying loudly.
Sometimes the coon was shot from the tree, but it appears from historical accounts that trees were often cut down. When the tree fell, the coon found himself on the ground and surrounded by snarling dogs. Coons are fierce fighters and can inflict severe wounds.
Here is how one newspaper reporter described the scene during a coon hunt in the Ozarks in 1930: "A coon sometimes whips the most experienced hound, and he puts more than one young dog to rout. He is a biting, scratching, clawing ball of fur, and old hunters say that when a coon gets a dog in the water, he'll drown him sure. Encouraged by their leader's success, the other dogs pitch in and the battle becomes a squirming, yelping mass."
The price paid for coon skins has varied a great deal through the years. The popularity of raccoon coats during the 1920s drove up prices. Prices rose again during the 1950s with the success of the Davy Crockett television series starring Fess Parker in a coonskin cap.
Today the raccoon is closely associated with the small east Arkansas town of Gillett, which since 1942 has held a yearly coon supper to raise money for the local school. Politicians come from far and wide to chow down on barbecued raccoon and the traditional accompaniment of sweet potatoes. Over 800 pounds of raccoon were served at this year's supper in January.
Raccoons, though native to the Americas, are a scourge in modern Germany, with numbers growing in nearby countries. A common myth is that Nazi leader Hermann Goering ordered the introduction of raccoons to Germany to provide prey for German hunters. The real story is dramatic and unlikely, but has nothing to do with Nazis.
Two pairs of raccoons from the United States were purposefully introduced into the German countryside in the years before World War II. Then, in an amazing stroke of misfortune for future Germans, an errant bomb during World War II struck a farm near Berlin where raccoons were being raised for their fur. About 20 critters escaped, and from that score of animals the numbers have grown to more than 1 million. German authorities have declared war on the raccoons in an attempt to protect the native flora and fauna, but results have not been encouraging.
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in Hot Spring County. Email him at [email protected]. An earlier version of this column appeared July 28, 2013.
Editorial on 05/06/2018