July 21, 2025 • 35 mins
On this episode of Backwoods University, we are going to learn about one of the most extraordinary, impactful, and bold conversations to ever live. And here's the twist, you probably have never heard of her. Fannye Cook was a Mississippian born into a farming family that grew an early love for the natural world. When the demise of most all of the state's forests and game animals faced seemingly eminent peril, she was there to save them.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
In this episode, we're going to learn how influential we
as humans can be on wildlife populations and habitats. And
we're going to accomplish this by learning about an incredible
woman named Fanny Cook, one of the most extraordinary, impactful
and bold conservationists to ever live. And when you get
to the end of this story, you'll realize I'm not exaggerating,
(00:24):
So grab a seat or hold on to something, because
this story is going to blow your mind. It's a
(00:49):
Friday afternoon and I'm walking into the Mississippi Museum of
Natural Science. I have an appointment with a man named Scott,
who is the collections manager, to see some of the
original work that literally shaped the conservation history of the
state of Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
And she loved you know, a project from you mid
nine thirteen thirties early nineteen forty and documented Plasson islams
hereout the states right working.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
For As I followed mister Scott through the maze of
museum hallways, my eyes are constantly being pulled to different sites.
A paleontology room on the right, filled with prehistoric bones,
murals of wildlife hanging on the walls, until finally he
opens a door on the right hand side of the
hallway and walks in. We enter a small room that
reminds me of the biology labs that I sat in
(01:35):
during my years as a wildlife science.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Student at Mississippi State.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
On one of the work tables, they are laid out
an assortment of collected and preserved plant and animal specimens.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
So she did a lot of bird collecting.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, she got a green wing teal there, the.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Green wing till. This one was collected in nineteen twenty four,
which preducts the museum by.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah, number of years, nineteen twenty four. I'm holding a
preserved green wing teal from nineteen twenty four that's one
hundred and one years old. If that isn't crazy enough,
This specimen was part of the first wildlife research ever
done in Mississippi. This was done in a time when
there was very little known about wildlife populations, distributions, what
(02:16):
all types of species lived in a state. It was
a different world and it's crazy to think about.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
This was a beaver skull that she collected from. This
was nineteen forties.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
It, man, I know, it's wild to me because I've
done so much research on this woman at this point,
it's just crazy, to say, crazy to see something that
she collected herself.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
That's good. I've got some more specials on another room.
These are all dry specimens, but I've got fish reptiles.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Yeah, pretty incredible woman.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
The work Fanny Cook would have done would have been
kind of the first baseline.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Is that great?
Speaker 4 (02:49):
I would have been baseline from Mississippi.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I went with Scott down several more hallways, into several
more rooms, checking out preserved fish specimens that also back
to the early nineteen hundreds, preserved plants like the first
documented kadzu in the state, and several more than that.
More than I have time to mention. To be fully honest,
the collection size was pretty astounding. But now I bet
y'all have a lot of questions, like why am I
(03:16):
so interested in these old animal and plant collections? Who
is this mysterious woman that myself and the museum collections
manager keep referring to. Well, don't worry, because I'm going
to answer all of your questions. But first I have
to set the stage. In nineteen twenty nine, Mississippi was
the only state in the country that did not have
(03:38):
any game laws. There were no seasons, no bag limits,
no regulations, no game wardens, no wildlife biologists. There was
no game and fish department. Market hunting was rampant, plume
hunting was rampant, timber harvest was unchecked, and the state,
my home state, was on a steady path towards complete
and utter destruction of its natural resources. How do we
(04:00):
oh this? Because it's very well documented. Auto Leopold, which
I'm confident is a name most of you already know,
made a trip down to Mississippi during this time and
wrote a report on it. I'm going to quote Leopold's
report directly as he gives his account of the condition
of Mississippi's natural resources in nineteen twenty nine. The game
(04:20):
situation in Mississippi quailer holding in their entire available range,
but in decreasing abundance due to overshooting unaccompanied by cultural measures.
While turkey are still decreasing, they have been cleaned out
of the upland ranges, and there's barely a seed stock
left in the larger swamps. The factors determining the turkey
crop are imperfectly known, but it is a safe guess
(04:42):
that they are overkilled in this state. Refuges Education law
enforcement and fact finding are badly needed. White tailed deer
are in light case, but the decimation of the remaining
stock is more complete. Waterfowl are not especially investigated, but
it is obvious that they need refuge if the shooting
is to hold up. Pheasants have been tried but so
(05:03):
far failed. It is probably not possible to introduce them.
By and large, small game conditions are fair and big
game conditions bad. In Mississippi, the present game supply, except
for a few private preserves, so far, is the result
of accident rather than design. There is no state game
department and only the beginnings of a conservation movement. There
(05:24):
is no refuge system, very little law enforcement. While there
are beginnings of game management on a few preserves, the
people of Mississippi are still a long way from either
wanting or understanding conservation end quote. So if Mississippi was
in that core of a state in nineteen twenty nine,
it leads me to ask the question of what happened?
(05:46):
I mean, something must have happened, right, I mean, look
at Mississippi now in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
We have an.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Incredibly dense deer population, so much so that the Wildlife
Department is actually asking hunters to shoot more deer. We
have a very popular spring turkey, we have duck and
goose seasons, and many many others.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
So what happened? What turned the ship around?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
It's time for all of you to learn about the
incredible life and work of Miss Fanny Cook, the woman
who saved the natural resources of Mississippi. Fanny Cook was
born in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, in eighteen eighty nine. She
(06:26):
grew up amongst six sisters and three brothers and one
of the biggest farming families in the city. When Fanny
was a child, she showed early interest in the natural world.
There's a biography written on the life of Miss Cook
that is titled Fanny Cook, Mississippi's Pioneering Conservationists, and in
it it makes note that her father told her about
the plight of the passenger pigeon when she was just
(06:48):
a child, explaining to her how the sky once upon
a time would literally fill up with flocks of these pigeons,
billions of them, and now they were gone. It's always
been believed that this had an effect on When Fanny
got older she moved away from Crystal Springs. She spent
some time teaching in Panama, she moved up to Wyoming
for a spell. She eventually would wind up in Washington,
(07:09):
d c. Where she planned to get a PhD in ornithology,
the study of birds. It was during this time that
she got a job working at the Smithsonian and received
her first formal training in collecting plant.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
And animal specimens for scientific use.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
This would end up being a very important part in
Fanny's life, as her path would eventually lead her to
a place where her scientific knowledge of wildlife would be invaluable. Okay,
we've covered all the preliminaries. We've set the stage, and
now we get to the real meat of the story.
(07:45):
In nineteen twenty six, Fanny Cook returned home to Mississippi
to find it in a severely depleted state in terms
of its natural resources. It was then that her real
work began. And I feel like there's one more important
factor that cannot go unmentioned. Like I said earlier, Fannie's
most important work started around nineteen twenty six. During this time,
(08:07):
in our country, the treatment of women was very, very different.
The Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote,
had just been passed six years prior. In nineteen twenty.
This was a different culture. Remember that as we move
forward in this story, because not only does it make
her accomplishments more impressive, but it also comes into play
(08:27):
in this story several times. To help me tell this story,
I enrolled the help of a very special woman. Her
name is Miss Libby Hartfield, and she was the director
of the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science for thirty seven years.
I want to kick this off by letting Miss Hartfield
tell you a few funny stories about Fanny Cook. They'll
make you laugh, but they'll also give you an idea
(08:49):
of the kind of energy and attitude that Miss Cook had.
Speaker 5 (08:52):
The first story her sister told us. She said, we
were going to Georgia Bell Carpet's and Fanny was driving us,
a group of ladies from Crystal Springs, and she was
always slowing down and grabbing her binoculars to look at
something on the road, and we were all mad at her.
And she says, so she pulls the car over, and
she says, I gotta have that bird. She had her
(09:13):
gun in the back of the car. She shoots the bird.
So they're all, you know, getting mad and standing there
by the side of the road. By a pond, and
she said she stripped down and got that bird, and
she says, we were so mad. She says, I didn't
talk to her for two days after that. But it
was and she had never been a good driver. She
(09:33):
was a legendary bad driver, because they said she's always
looking over there at a bird, and she'll run you
in the gravel in a minute, they would say. So
her friends didn't really like her to drive them. The
biologists and the conservation officer sort of took turns going
with her to the field because she was getting older.
You know, she's in her sixties. So then the conservation
(09:56):
officer tells the story. He said that she shot a bird.
She asked the officer to go get it because it
fell in the water, and he said that water's too cold,
miss Cook, I'm not going out there to get it.
And she said, well, then turn around, I'll get it.
And so they said she stripped down and ran out
there and not that bird came back. And that's when
(10:18):
she was real mad. She says, I've always said there
wasn't anything a man could do a woman couldn't do better.
And so.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
I know a couple of folks I could accuse of
being a bad driver, but none of which for the
sake of pulling over to collect a bird in the
name of science. Now that we have a better idea
of the kind of charisma Miss Fanny Cook possessed, let's
dig into her work. You can't appreciate miss Cook completely
until you understand what she fully pulled us out of.
Speaker 5 (10:47):
Why did we need She wasn't just creating a bureaucracy, right, ye,
she was really trying to save some things pretty much
from what she could tell, every state had a department
that was in charge of dealing with wildlife in each state,
and they had statewide laws. The most that Mississippi had
at that time were some counties that had an interest
(11:10):
in They had laws and the sheriff's department would enforce
those laws. And even by the admission of some of
the sheriffs, that was a very hard thing to do.
And so I don't think they minded getting some state
wide assistance with that too. You know, you didn't want
to be the one to go out and tell your
brother in law it couldn't be hunting at night. So yeah,
(11:30):
it made sense to have a dedicated agency to a
lot of people. So in nineteen twenty seven, she founded
what she called the Mississippi Association for the Conservation of Wildlife.
And we're not talking about a dozen people. She had
two hundred and eighty six charter members, and included in
(11:51):
those were judges and bankers and business owners from all
over the state. So she must have done some really
quick work if she came back to the state in
twenty six and a year later started this foundation that
had a really powerful board and a lot of people
already interested, they were bound to have been some people
(12:13):
all around that wanted conservation.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
To refer back to Leopold's quote from earlier, you may
remember him speaking of an early but small conservation movement
and that it was taking place on what he called
private preserves. This would have been private land that was
well managed and also relatively protected from market hunting. When
Fanny established her association, it's believed that many of her
(12:38):
first members were some of these same landowners. This association
would be kind of like today's equivalent of a local
Ducks Unlimited or NWTF chapter, and it was a significant
step forwards towards her end goal of getting an actual
game and fish department established in the state. You could
join this group of fine conservation minded folks for an
annual fee of one dollar. I'm going to read you
(13:01):
the bulleted list that Fanny put together as kind of
the mission statement for this association. This would have been
put out on pamphlets and posters for people to see
to help advertise it. I think this gives us a
very clear understanding of where her head was at from
the very beginning. This is Fanny's list. More sport for
the sportsman, more furs for the trapper. More fish in
(13:24):
the streams, more beneficial hawks and owls to eat, field
rats and mice. More songbirds in town and country. More holly,
wild crab, apples, dogwood and azalea to beautify roadsides and woodlands.
More boys and girls, men and women who love the
outdoors and who go there with seeing eyes and hearing ears.
(13:49):
I don't know about y'all, but that's something I can
get behind. I want to ask miss Hartfield about some
of the attitudes of the general public at the time.
How do they feel about a conservation movement, market hunting,
and so on. It's easy to throw stones at market
hunting now, and not that I like. I'm not trying
to draw up a picture that I'm a fan of
market hunting.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
I'm not.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
But one thing that I struggle with is I look
back at that and I go, should.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Be mad about that?
Speaker 1 (14:13):
But then you have to I'm like, man, if those
people were actually like, this is how I get food
for my family, then it's different.
Speaker 5 (14:21):
Oh definitely.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
So I'm looking at it like, if it's in the
middle of the depression and you have somebody pushing for
regulations on how you gather this wild game, there probably
had to be some friction there.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
And the key to that is that the market hunters,
the plume hunters, had just kind of gotten beat down.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
You know.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
At first they were collecting those feathers all over and
just killing rookeries and things.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Explain what a plume hunter is.
Speaker 5 (14:47):
Okay, plume hunter. Starting in I think about the eighteen
eighties and maybe even before that, feathers just became the
heights of fashion, even for some men's garments, men's hats.
You know, you'd always see that little feather in the hat.
A pheasant feather was popular in a man's hat. Women
would sometimes have a whole pheasant on top of their head.
(15:08):
You know, it was just gotten to the point of bizarre.
But when you think about how those those birds were collected,
they were it damaged bird populations really all over the world,
but particularly North America. I guess we had a lot
of millinery establishments at that point, so they were selling
(15:28):
the hats and birds. In England, they the English people
did pass laws first, but it may be that they
were decimated first too. And then so in the United States,
people were starting to cry out, you know, because the
hunters for the feathers would just go out and kill
(15:48):
everything in the rookery, and then adjacent landowner would go
down there and they said there were baby birds dying
in the nest. Nothing we could do, and so people's
feelings were hurt that that was happening, and they weren't
getting any money for wow, because they weren't paying the landowner.
This was out of state establishments evidently coming and just
(16:11):
traveling around hunting well, so the market hunting was similar.
Is what the way Fanny Cook's letters kind of lay
it out, is that out of state interests were coming down.
They would get close to a railroad line, they would
they might hire some local people to round up game, though,
and then they would slaughter it, put it on ice,
(16:32):
and take it all north. So local people when they
went out to hunt, the deer was gone.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Really what you're describing there, that sounds like a different world. Yeah,
like that, everything that you're describing sounds bizarre.
Speaker 5 (16:45):
Yeah. So maybe the landowner got paid something for him
doing harvesting is his deer, and maybe not much of anything,
But it sounds like a lot of the landowners decided
this is not the way to go either.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (16:59):
Whoever, these two hundred and eighty six people that joined
her organization, they were kind of making a stand against that, right, So.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
You had people that were obviously in favor of it,
but then obviously that she met some friction as.
Speaker 5 (17:10):
Well as I think so because it certainly slowed down.
It took seven years.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Seven years to do what to get her was obvious,
right right. Let me throw you a hypothetical situation. Imagine
you and your family own a chunk of hunting land
(17:35):
and you find out one day that a group of
guys from out of state that you don't even know,
came through your property and shot every dear they saw,
put it on ice, and shipped it off to be sold.
Aside from feeling enraged. It also sounds pretty bizarre and outlandish, right, Well,
if you were around Mississippi in the nineteen twenties, this
could be a very common reality. This is the complicated
(17:57):
and conflicted side of our history with our wife wildlife,
And while it's not the prettiest affiliate's important that we
know it.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
This is why Fanny.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Cook was on a mission to establish a game commission.
And if you caught the last bit of what Miss
Hartfield said there, she gave a little bit away. The
game and fish commission that Fanny Cook was determined to
establish would take her seven years to get done.
Speaker 5 (18:20):
She did two or three things that to me were
just a genius and I don't know if again there
was probably some luck involved, but also some intent. She
was always collecting things and she was a pretty good taxidermist,
so she made little wildlife scenes, diramas and things. She
started taking them to the fairs, county fairs and the
(18:42):
State Fair, and one year, I think it was it
was right there close to when the bill passed. That
last year she went to the state Fair and her
little building on wildlife was so popular that when the
fair closed, they had to keep it open because everybody said,
we haven't gotten to see it yet, So that, to me,
(19:02):
that was the beginning of the museum. Later, all those specimens,
because we've seen pictures of her fare exhibits as she
called them. Yeah, and she said I had to take
She said, you know, this means a lot to me
because I had to take my precious specimens out and
expose them to the dirt and dust of the state fairs.
But she did it.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Today, if you want to start any sort of organization,
start a movement, get the word out there, whatever, there
are all kinds of outlets at your disposal, the most
powerful among them being things like social media, podcast, email, blast, etc.
But when Fanny was doing all this, it was the
nineteen twenties. So this one determined woman was sending out
letters to legislators, forming wildlife conservation groups, taxidermying animals and
(19:49):
carting them around to fairs in the name of teaching
wildlife conservation, all in the name of trying to get
a game and Fish department established. That's some serious determination.
I'm curious about how she was managing to do all
of this. Did she get any funding for all of
her campaigning and going to the State Fair. Did she
(20:09):
have any help or was she just going upon her
own initiative to do all this.
Speaker 5 (20:14):
In nineteen twenty nine, she did an interview with the
Jackson Daily News, which is really, to me a very
well written. It was at Camp Kickapoo, which is close
over here. A reporter says that I interviewed Missus Cook,
and she says she said. Cook said Indian fashion on
(20:35):
a hillside and talked to me about it. And basically
what she said was, you know, this is a sorry
state of affairs in Mississippi. We've got to get this done.
But the reporter asked her, how do you fund your campaign?
And she laughed and said, I'm pretty much unfunded. She says,
(20:56):
I have a large, generous family that helps me a lot.
And she says, and if I'm low on funds, she says,
I stand pretty good with my family. And when I
get hungry, I hang my feet under my dad's tables.
If I fall out with him, I guess I'll go
visit him.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
So largely self propelled, Missus Cooke, self motivated, self initiative,
some help from families, some help with an office, but
mostly she did all this and that's what's so crazy
to me. Even if she was trying to save the
natural resources of her hometown, it would still be noble,
(21:34):
but it would make more sense because it's like she's
strugg but she's libbying for the entire state, and she's
libbying for and it's like, man like, where does she
get that drive?
Speaker 4 (21:44):
Where?
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Like, where did such a conviction to do this?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Where did it come from?
Speaker 5 (21:47):
Yeah, I've wondered that. Why did she think she could
do this?
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Yeah? Why? Talking about a different world?
Speaker 1 (21:53):
She's leading this charge in a culture that they're just
getting used to women being able to vote, and she's
leading the charge on all this. It's insane to me.
Where did she get the drive to do this? Self propelled,
self funded, with the exception of a little help from
her family, Fanny was for the most part, a one
woman force, and a force that was starting to get momentum.
(22:15):
And speaking of that, one of the biggest upticks Fanny
got in her campaign for wildlife conservation came in nineteen
twenty nine when the widely perceived father of wildlife management
and conservation, Aldo Leopold, made a trip down to Mississippi
to write a report. This would be the same trip
and report that resulted in the quote that we read
at the beginning of the episode, where Leopold is essentially
(22:37):
listing off the evident abuse of Mississippi's natural resources and
calling for change by way of a structured game and
fish system.
Speaker 5 (22:46):
Aldo Leopold went with her to like Chataqull when he
went to Crystal Spring.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Does not know that. I did not know that.
Speaker 5 (22:54):
We know that because in some letters, like here's when
I've got a quote in the letters referred to you
remember the partridge berries which you noticed in the woodland
near Lake Chautauqua. I'm sending you seeds.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Sent to live seeds for a partridge peek.
Speaker 5 (23:11):
For a partridge berries that he had seen at Lake Chautauqua.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
That's cool.
Speaker 5 (23:15):
So and obviously they they had kind of a friendly relationship.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (23:22):
See, we don't know if she even influenced him coming
to the stay. We have no proof that she did.
We don't have any letters or anything. But it was
just awfully coincidental, wasn't it. It makes me think that
it could have been that she knew somebody to ask.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah, because he sought her out when he came down here.
Speaker 5 (23:40):
Yes, and we have a list in his report of
the landowners that he went to see, and if you
lay it up against her board, it's pretty much identical.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
Really.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah, so there was definitely some coordination there.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Yeah, that is too cool.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
If you compare the list of landowners Leopold went to
visit when he came down to Mississippi to the list
of Fanny Cook's board of her Mississippi Association for Conservation
of Wildlife, it's pretty much identical. Leopold also sought her
out when he came down here and asked her for
help and reference with his report. Not to mention, by
the time he made it down here, she had been
(24:19):
on her campaign for three years. And while we can't
prove outright that she was a driving force in getting
him to come down here, I think we can all
agree there's an awful lot of evidence to suggest that
she played a huge role. There's also one more thing
I want to add while we're on the subject of Leopold.
The quote that we read earlier. You remember, the real
depressing one about the wildlife of Mississippi on the verge
(24:41):
of being wiped out. Well, there's a little more to it,
and I'm going to read it to you now begin quote.
There is one offset to all these defects, a widespread
and intense popular interest in game and hunting. In this respect,
Mississippi excels any other state so far, Sir by me endo.
(25:02):
Leopold then goes on to say, in so many words
that leveraging this popularity of hunting and using education and
agencies would be the only way to maintain a game
supply in Mississippi. I have to say, one of the
coolest discoveries I made while researching for this episode was
seeing the clear lines that both out of Leopold and
Fanny Cook drew, connecting hunters and conservationists as the clear
(25:25):
pathway for saving wildlife. And they also drew a hard
line between market hunters and conservationists. In fact, the term
they used to explain the two were game hogs and sportsmen.
The momentum gain by Leopold's nineteen twenty nine trip and
report would carry through until the year nineteen thirty two.
(25:46):
In January of nineteen thirty two, the newly elected governor
of Mississippi stated in his first address that he wanted
to see a Game and Fish Commission established, and while
there was no physical evidence to prove he had been
influenced by Fanny Cook. She had been on a self
propelled campaign for seven years at this point, pushing for
this exact thing, writing to legislators, visiting legislators, attending fairs,
(26:10):
the displays, the presentations, the clubs, the associations, the Aldo
Leopold expeditions.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
So y'all believe what you want to believe.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
But me personally, I'm rolling with miss Cook on this one.
She convinced the governor to push for the commission, and
you can't lead me to believe otherwise. The woman was
a needle mover, the commission gets established. Yeah, in my
purview or like my understanding, it's like you have this
woman that was obvious to everybody, was the main one
(26:38):
pushing for it. I would think that she's obvious to
be like, all right, well you're in charge of this commission.
You're the one that's been pushing for it for seven years.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
That that didn't happen.
Speaker 5 (26:52):
Yeah, And once again we have some letters she wrote
to There's a doctor BArch who was pretty well known,
and he lucky is luck would have it. And I
think this was just luck. He was one of her
professors and she helped him at the Smithsonian as well.
(27:12):
In this letter to doctor BArch, she says, you know,
we've done it. We've got this, We've got her organization now.
And there were letters from him all along where she
was talking about her work and he was always encouraging
her to keep pushing and keep pushing, and so it
was like, hallelujah, We've got it. And she says, they've
offered me a job within the agency and asked me
(27:35):
what I wanted to be, and she says, I don't
think I want to be a commissioner because they don't
get paid, and it's just going to be a temporary kind,
you know, it'll be just for a term. She says,
I think I want to do something more permanent with
the agency. She says, I can't imagine being head of
(27:55):
the agency because you would be so involved in law enforcement.
He says, so I think I would probably be better
suited in something in research and education. So she chose
not to be in a way. She did, but you
could tell she wasn't positive. So he writes her back
(28:16):
and basically says, congratulations, you've done so much hard work.
You've really earned this, and then he just lays it
right out there. He says, if you were a man,
any of those statutory positions that are in the law
would be perfect for you, he said. But he said,
you women are hard creatures to place, which is a
(28:39):
strange thing way to put it, isn't it. He says,
I think that you would be better suited for education
and research. And he says, and you don't want to
take the chance of damaging the very thing you've spent
all your time creating. Wow, So that's kind to be
a little heartbreaking. He's telling her it wouldn't be good
for your agency to put for you to be the
(29:01):
head of it now that you made it man. So
he said, you don't want to hurt the very thing
you've spent so much of your time and effort in creating.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
And again, it's like I'm trying to read the tone
of a letter that was sent so many years ago.
But in my head, it's like, even if he did
feel that way, which obviously he did, it's like Fanny
already said that she didn't really want to do that.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Anyway. He didn't have to say all that. He didn't have.
Speaker 5 (29:29):
To say no, he didn't, But somehow he just laid
it out there. Maybe he didn't want her to take
the chance of saying, oh, I want to be executive director.
He thought that would be wrong.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
So in one letter he fully acknowledges, like he credits
her for working really hard earning it. You're the one
that got this here, that got this agent. He credits
her to creating it. And the same letter he says,
you would damage it if you let it.
Speaker 5 (29:54):
When I think it was I can't remember if it
was Milly or Cathy that found the letter, but I
remember that we both just cried when we read it.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
So you and miss Cathy found that original letter.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
I did not know that.
Speaker 5 (30:07):
In her papers. Yeah, I mean, you know, we just
we were working amongst all of her stuff. It was
all there. She I think she was fine with not
getting the credit, if that makes.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Sense, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Yeah, she was really in it for the sake of
the resource.
Speaker 5 (30:23):
She really was. Yeah, we could we could have lost
all the game in the state. I guess it could have.
I think things could have been decimated. You want to think, well,
if she didn't do it, somebody else would have stepped
up and done it. But I don't know who because
they hadn't done it yet.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
And we were at such a breaking point, and her
established in that commission. When the commission got established, I
do not one of the first things they started working
on was turkey re establishment. And everyone knows like how
important turkey hunting is down here. And it took her
seven years to establish that commission. So if she wouldn't
have done it, I don't think it's outlandish for me
to say we might have wiped him out completely.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
Oh yeah, I think we could have. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
When Loopol did this survey, there was an estimate of
twelve hundred deer in the state.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
She came at the nick of time.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
If anybody, anybody, not just a resident, if anybody has hunted, fished,
or enjoyed the natural resources of the state of Mississippi
in any way, you owe miss cooked your gratitude.
Speaker 5 (31:21):
Oh, I think that's definitely true. Yeah. The beginnings of
all the wildlife management areas, she laid them out there
with that first staff at the agency WMA's. Yeah, the
WMAs would not be there without game.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
They hadn't done it game reintroductions. I mean, so she
had she had like first like hands on involvement in
establishing public land. She had hands on involvement in reintroductions
of several game species. Yeah, the Fishes of Mississippi, land,
mammal snakes in Mississippi.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
She did all of this.
Speaker 5 (31:56):
Yeah, Horn Island, Ship Island. You know, evidently those things
would not have been saved, that would have been just
sold to private landowners if she hadn't been there.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
How long did she stay with the agency? Was she?
Speaker 5 (32:10):
She stayed involved for Yeah, and at that time there
was no elder rights. I guess at that time you
had to retire at seventy Okay. And there is a
remark somewhere that says she was the oldest person in
the Game and Fish Commission when she retired.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
So once she started, she didn't leave.
Speaker 5 (32:26):
Didn't She stayed until they pretty much state government forced
to retire because she had to, But she kept working.
One of the reasons that I think she was okay
with retiring she was trying to finish this.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
Book, okay, the Fishes of Mississippi.
Speaker 5 (32:39):
Fishers of Mississippi. And she was not the greatest pipist,
and so she wrote to mister Gandy and asked him
if she could use his secretary at the museum to
finish her book. And he said yes, and so she,
you know, drove back and I guess back and forth
from Crystal Springs until she and the secretary finished the
(33:00):
book and it was published the next year in fifty nine.
And then she died in sixty four.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
The day before she passed away, she was on a tour.
She was on a bird tour.
Speaker 5 (33:11):
Is that she led a group of boy Scouts on
a birding trip the day before she died.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
So she never stopped, she never stopped doing it.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
I almost feel like you could look at the end
of miss Cook's life and feel like it was something
out of a movie script. She spends years creating this commission.
When the commission gets established, she's told she can work there,
but she's not allowed to run it. But she doesn't care.
She cares so much about the work that she stays
there until she's forced to retire, and then spends her
retirement taking kids out on bird viewing tours and finishing
(33:48):
books that would aid Mississippi's wildlife and wildlife biologists for
years to come. Case in point, the collected work of
hers that I went and saw at the museum that
still being used today and the very day before her
passing of a heart attack she was taking a group
of boy Scouts on a bird tour. I'm just gonna
come right out and say it. This woman does not
get the credit she deserves. But I'm curious how Miss
(34:12):
Libby Hartfield feels about this.
Speaker 5 (34:14):
I would agree, of course, I do think she does,
but I also think that that wouldn't matter very much
to her.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
How long did you work at the museum?
Speaker 5 (34:23):
Thirty seven years?
Speaker 1 (34:25):
It's clear Fanny Cook means something to you. You and
Miss Cathy, Why does she mean so much to you?
Speaker 5 (34:33):
I don't know exactly. I think we felt like if
if she did that, we could too.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Miss Fanny Cook a naturalist, a wildlife biologist, an establisher
of public lands, and the woman who saved the natural
re sources of Mississippi. One of the greatest conservationists to
ever live. I told y'all I wasn't exaggerating. I want
to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University
(35:13):
as well as Bear Greece in this Country Life. And
I want to give a big shout out to Onyx
Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you liked this episode,
share it with a friend and stick around because there's
a whole lot more on the way.
In this episode, we're going to learn how influential we
as humans can be on wildlife populations and habitats. And
we're going to accomplish this by learning about an incredible
woman named Fanny Cook, one of the most extraordinary, impactful
and bold conservationists to ever live. And when you get
to the end of this story, you'll realize I'm not exaggerating,
(00:24):
So grab a seat or hold on to something, because
this story is going to blow your mind. It's a
(00:49):
Friday afternoon and I'm walking into the Mississippi Museum of
Natural Science. I have an appointment with a man named Scott,
who is the collections manager, to see some of the
original work that literally shaped the conservation history of the
state of Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
And she loved you know, a project from you mid
nine thirteen thirties early nineteen forty and documented Plasson islams
hereout the states right working.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
For As I followed mister Scott through the maze of
museum hallways, my eyes are constantly being pulled to different sites.
A paleontology room on the right, filled with prehistoric bones,
murals of wildlife hanging on the walls, until finally he
opens a door on the right hand side of the
hallway and walks in. We enter a small room that
reminds me of the biology labs that I sat in
(01:35):
during my years as a wildlife science.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Student at Mississippi State.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
On one of the work tables, they are laid out
an assortment of collected and preserved plant and animal specimens.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
So she did a lot of bird collecting.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, she got a green wing teal there, the.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Green wing till. This one was collected in nineteen twenty four,
which preducts the museum by.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah, number of years, nineteen twenty four. I'm holding a
preserved green wing teal from nineteen twenty four that's one
hundred and one years old. If that isn't crazy enough,
This specimen was part of the first wildlife research ever
done in Mississippi. This was done in a time when
there was very little known about wildlife populations, distributions, what
(02:16):
all types of species lived in a state. It was
a different world and it's crazy to think about.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
This was a beaver skull that she collected from. This
was nineteen forties.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
It, man, I know, it's wild to me because I've
done so much research on this woman at this point,
it's just crazy, to say, crazy to see something that
she collected herself.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
That's good. I've got some more specials on another room.
These are all dry specimens, but I've got fish reptiles.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Yeah, pretty incredible woman.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
The work Fanny Cook would have done would have been
kind of the first baseline.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Is that great?
Speaker 4 (02:49):
I would have been baseline from Mississippi.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I went with Scott down several more hallways, into several
more rooms, checking out preserved fish specimens that also back
to the early nineteen hundreds, preserved plants like the first
documented kadzu in the state, and several more than that.
More than I have time to mention. To be fully honest,
the collection size was pretty astounding. But now I bet
y'all have a lot of questions, like why am I
(03:16):
so interested in these old animal and plant collections? Who
is this mysterious woman that myself and the museum collections
manager keep referring to. Well, don't worry, because I'm going
to answer all of your questions. But first I have
to set the stage. In nineteen twenty nine, Mississippi was
the only state in the country that did not have
(03:38):
any game laws. There were no seasons, no bag limits,
no regulations, no game wardens, no wildlife biologists. There was
no game and fish department. Market hunting was rampant, plume
hunting was rampant, timber harvest was unchecked, and the state,
my home state, was on a steady path towards complete
and utter destruction of its natural resources. How do we
(04:00):
oh this? Because it's very well documented. Auto Leopold, which
I'm confident is a name most of you already know,
made a trip down to Mississippi during this time and
wrote a report on it. I'm going to quote Leopold's
report directly as he gives his account of the condition
of Mississippi's natural resources in nineteen twenty nine. The game
(04:20):
situation in Mississippi quailer holding in their entire available range,
but in decreasing abundance due to overshooting unaccompanied by cultural measures.
While turkey are still decreasing, they have been cleaned out
of the upland ranges, and there's barely a seed stock
left in the larger swamps. The factors determining the turkey
crop are imperfectly known, but it is a safe guess
(04:42):
that they are overkilled in this state. Refuges Education law
enforcement and fact finding are badly needed. White tailed deer
are in light case, but the decimation of the remaining
stock is more complete. Waterfowl are not especially investigated, but
it is obvious that they need refuge if the shooting
is to hold up. Pheasants have been tried but so
(05:03):
far failed. It is probably not possible to introduce them.
By and large, small game conditions are fair and big
game conditions bad. In Mississippi, the present game supply, except
for a few private preserves, so far, is the result
of accident rather than design. There is no state game
department and only the beginnings of a conservation movement. There
(05:24):
is no refuge system, very little law enforcement. While there
are beginnings of game management on a few preserves, the
people of Mississippi are still a long way from either
wanting or understanding conservation end quote. So if Mississippi was
in that core of a state in nineteen twenty nine,
it leads me to ask the question of what happened?
(05:46):
I mean, something must have happened, right, I mean, look
at Mississippi now in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
We have an.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Incredibly dense deer population, so much so that the Wildlife
Department is actually asking hunters to shoot more deer. We
have a very popular spring turkey, we have duck and
goose seasons, and many many others.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
So what happened? What turned the ship around?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
It's time for all of you to learn about the
incredible life and work of Miss Fanny Cook, the woman
who saved the natural resources of Mississippi. Fanny Cook was
born in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, in eighteen eighty nine. She
(06:26):
grew up amongst six sisters and three brothers and one
of the biggest farming families in the city. When Fanny
was a child, she showed early interest in the natural world.
There's a biography written on the life of Miss Cook
that is titled Fanny Cook, Mississippi's Pioneering Conservationists, and in
it it makes note that her father told her about
the plight of the passenger pigeon when she was just
(06:48):
a child, explaining to her how the sky once upon
a time would literally fill up with flocks of these pigeons,
billions of them, and now they were gone. It's always
been believed that this had an effect on When Fanny
got older she moved away from Crystal Springs. She spent
some time teaching in Panama, she moved up to Wyoming
for a spell. She eventually would wind up in Washington,
(07:09):
d c. Where she planned to get a PhD in ornithology,
the study of birds. It was during this time that
she got a job working at the Smithsonian and received
her first formal training in collecting plant.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
And animal specimens for scientific use.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
This would end up being a very important part in
Fanny's life, as her path would eventually lead her to
a place where her scientific knowledge of wildlife would be invaluable. Okay,
we've covered all the preliminaries. We've set the stage, and
now we get to the real meat of the story.
(07:45):
In nineteen twenty six, Fanny Cook returned home to Mississippi
to find it in a severely depleted state in terms
of its natural resources. It was then that her real
work began. And I feel like there's one more important
factor that cannot go unmentioned. Like I said earlier, Fannie's
most important work started around nineteen twenty six. During this time,
(08:07):
in our country, the treatment of women was very, very different.
The Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote,
had just been passed six years prior. In nineteen twenty.
This was a different culture. Remember that as we move
forward in this story, because not only does it make
her accomplishments more impressive, but it also comes into play
(08:27):
in this story several times. To help me tell this story,
I enrolled the help of a very special woman. Her
name is Miss Libby Hartfield, and she was the director
of the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science for thirty seven years.
I want to kick this off by letting Miss Hartfield
tell you a few funny stories about Fanny Cook. They'll
make you laugh, but they'll also give you an idea
(08:49):
of the kind of energy and attitude that Miss Cook had.
Speaker 5 (08:52):
The first story her sister told us. She said, we
were going to Georgia Bell Carpet's and Fanny was driving us,
a group of ladies from Crystal Springs, and she was
always slowing down and grabbing her binoculars to look at
something on the road, and we were all mad at her.
And she says, so she pulls the car over, and
she says, I gotta have that bird. She had her
(09:13):
gun in the back of the car. She shoots the bird.
So they're all, you know, getting mad and standing there
by the side of the road. By a pond, and
she said she stripped down and got that bird, and
she says, we were so mad. She says, I didn't
talk to her for two days after that. But it
was and she had never been a good driver. She
(09:33):
was a legendary bad driver, because they said she's always
looking over there at a bird, and she'll run you
in the gravel in a minute, they would say. So
her friends didn't really like her to drive them. The
biologists and the conservation officer sort of took turns going
with her to the field because she was getting older.
You know, she's in her sixties. So then the conservation
(09:56):
officer tells the story. He said that she shot a bird.
She asked the officer to go get it because it
fell in the water, and he said that water's too cold,
miss Cook, I'm not going out there to get it.
And she said, well, then turn around, I'll get it.
And so they said she stripped down and ran out
there and not that bird came back. And that's when
(10:18):
she was real mad. She says, I've always said there
wasn't anything a man could do a woman couldn't do better.
And so.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
I know a couple of folks I could accuse of
being a bad driver, but none of which for the
sake of pulling over to collect a bird in the
name of science. Now that we have a better idea
of the kind of charisma Miss Fanny Cook possessed, let's
dig into her work. You can't appreciate miss Cook completely
until you understand what she fully pulled us out of.
Speaker 5 (10:47):
Why did we need She wasn't just creating a bureaucracy, right, ye,
she was really trying to save some things pretty much
from what she could tell, every state had a department
that was in charge of dealing with wildlife in each state,
and they had statewide laws. The most that Mississippi had
at that time were some counties that had an interest
(11:10):
in They had laws and the sheriff's department would enforce
those laws. And even by the admission of some of
the sheriffs, that was a very hard thing to do.
And so I don't think they minded getting some state
wide assistance with that too. You know, you didn't want
to be the one to go out and tell your
brother in law it couldn't be hunting at night. So yeah,
(11:30):
it made sense to have a dedicated agency to a
lot of people. So in nineteen twenty seven, she founded
what she called the Mississippi Association for the Conservation of Wildlife.
And we're not talking about a dozen people. She had
two hundred and eighty six charter members, and included in
(11:51):
those were judges and bankers and business owners from all
over the state. So she must have done some really
quick work if she came back to the state in
twenty six and a year later started this foundation that
had a really powerful board and a lot of people
already interested, they were bound to have been some people
(12:13):
all around that wanted conservation.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
To refer back to Leopold's quote from earlier, you may
remember him speaking of an early but small conservation movement
and that it was taking place on what he called
private preserves. This would have been private land that was
well managed and also relatively protected from market hunting. When
Fanny established her association, it's believed that many of her
(12:38):
first members were some of these same landowners. This association
would be kind of like today's equivalent of a local
Ducks Unlimited or NWTF chapter, and it was a significant
step forwards towards her end goal of getting an actual
game and fish department established in the state. You could
join this group of fine conservation minded folks for an
annual fee of one dollar. I'm going to read you
(13:01):
the bulleted list that Fanny put together as kind of
the mission statement for this association. This would have been
put out on pamphlets and posters for people to see
to help advertise it. I think this gives us a
very clear understanding of where her head was at from
the very beginning. This is Fanny's list. More sport for
the sportsman, more furs for the trapper. More fish in
(13:24):
the streams, more beneficial hawks and owls to eat, field
rats and mice. More songbirds in town and country. More holly,
wild crab, apples, dogwood and azalea to beautify roadsides and woodlands.
More boys and girls, men and women who love the
outdoors and who go there with seeing eyes and hearing ears.
(13:49):
I don't know about y'all, but that's something I can
get behind. I want to ask miss Hartfield about some
of the attitudes of the general public at the time.
How do they feel about a conservation movement, market hunting,
and so on. It's easy to throw stones at market
hunting now, and not that I like. I'm not trying
to draw up a picture that I'm a fan of
market hunting.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
I'm not.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
But one thing that I struggle with is I look
back at that and I go, should.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Be mad about that?
Speaker 1 (14:13):
But then you have to I'm like, man, if those
people were actually like, this is how I get food
for my family, then it's different.
Speaker 5 (14:21):
Oh definitely.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
So I'm looking at it like, if it's in the
middle of the depression and you have somebody pushing for
regulations on how you gather this wild game, there probably
had to be some friction there.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
And the key to that is that the market hunters,
the plume hunters, had just kind of gotten beat down.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
You know.
Speaker 5 (14:40):
At first they were collecting those feathers all over and
just killing rookeries and things.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Explain what a plume hunter is.
Speaker 5 (14:47):
Okay, plume hunter. Starting in I think about the eighteen
eighties and maybe even before that, feathers just became the
heights of fashion, even for some men's garments, men's hats.
You know, you'd always see that little feather in the hat.
A pheasant feather was popular in a man's hat. Women
would sometimes have a whole pheasant on top of their head.
(15:08):
You know, it was just gotten to the point of bizarre.
But when you think about how those those birds were collected,
they were it damaged bird populations really all over the world,
but particularly North America. I guess we had a lot
of millinery establishments at that point, so they were selling
(15:28):
the hats and birds. In England, they the English people
did pass laws first, but it may be that they
were decimated first too. And then so in the United States,
people were starting to cry out, you know, because the
hunters for the feathers would just go out and kill
(15:48):
everything in the rookery, and then adjacent landowner would go
down there and they said there were baby birds dying
in the nest. Nothing we could do, and so people's
feelings were hurt that that was happening, and they weren't
getting any money for wow, because they weren't paying the landowner.
This was out of state establishments evidently coming and just
(16:11):
traveling around hunting well, so the market hunting was similar.
Is what the way Fanny Cook's letters kind of lay
it out, is that out of state interests were coming down.
They would get close to a railroad line, they would
they might hire some local people to round up game, though,
and then they would slaughter it, put it on ice,
(16:32):
and take it all north. So local people when they
went out to hunt, the deer was gone.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Really what you're describing there, that sounds like a different world. Yeah,
like that, everything that you're describing sounds bizarre.
Speaker 5 (16:45):
Yeah. So maybe the landowner got paid something for him
doing harvesting is his deer, and maybe not much of anything,
But it sounds like a lot of the landowners decided
this is not the way to go either.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (16:59):
Whoever, these two hundred and eighty six people that joined
her organization, they were kind of making a stand against that, right, So.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
You had people that were obviously in favor of it,
but then obviously that she met some friction as.
Speaker 5 (17:10):
Well as I think so because it certainly slowed down.
It took seven years.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Seven years to do what to get her was obvious,
right right. Let me throw you a hypothetical situation. Imagine
you and your family own a chunk of hunting land
(17:35):
and you find out one day that a group of
guys from out of state that you don't even know,
came through your property and shot every dear they saw,
put it on ice, and shipped it off to be sold.
Aside from feeling enraged. It also sounds pretty bizarre and outlandish, right, Well,
if you were around Mississippi in the nineteen twenties, this
could be a very common reality. This is the complicated
(17:57):
and conflicted side of our history with our wife wildlife,
And while it's not the prettiest affiliate's important that we
know it.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
This is why Fanny.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Cook was on a mission to establish a game commission.
And if you caught the last bit of what Miss
Hartfield said there, she gave a little bit away. The
game and fish commission that Fanny Cook was determined to
establish would take her seven years to get done.
Speaker 5 (18:20):
She did two or three things that to me were
just a genius and I don't know if again there
was probably some luck involved, but also some intent. She
was always collecting things and she was a pretty good taxidermist,
so she made little wildlife scenes, diramas and things. She
started taking them to the fairs, county fairs and the
(18:42):
State Fair, and one year, I think it was it
was right there close to when the bill passed. That
last year she went to the state Fair and her
little building on wildlife was so popular that when the
fair closed, they had to keep it open because everybody said,
we haven't gotten to see it yet, So that, to me,
(19:02):
that was the beginning of the museum. Later, all those specimens,
because we've seen pictures of her fare exhibits as she
called them. Yeah, and she said I had to take
She said, you know, this means a lot to me
because I had to take my precious specimens out and
expose them to the dirt and dust of the state fairs.
But she did it.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Today, if you want to start any sort of organization,
start a movement, get the word out there, whatever, there
are all kinds of outlets at your disposal, the most
powerful among them being things like social media, podcast, email, blast, etc.
But when Fanny was doing all this, it was the
nineteen twenties. So this one determined woman was sending out
letters to legislators, forming wildlife conservation groups, taxidermying animals and
(19:49):
carting them around to fairs in the name of teaching
wildlife conservation, all in the name of trying to get
a game and Fish department established. That's some serious determination.
I'm curious about how she was managing to do all
of this. Did she get any funding for all of
her campaigning and going to the State Fair. Did she
(20:09):
have any help or was she just going upon her
own initiative to do all this.
Speaker 5 (20:14):
In nineteen twenty nine, she did an interview with the
Jackson Daily News, which is really, to me a very
well written. It was at Camp Kickapoo, which is close
over here. A reporter says that I interviewed Missus Cook,
and she says she said. Cook said Indian fashion on
(20:35):
a hillside and talked to me about it. And basically
what she said was, you know, this is a sorry
state of affairs in Mississippi. We've got to get this done.
But the reporter asked her, how do you fund your campaign?
And she laughed and said, I'm pretty much unfunded. She says,
(20:56):
I have a large, generous family that helps me a lot.
And she says, and if I'm low on funds, she says,
I stand pretty good with my family. And when I
get hungry, I hang my feet under my dad's tables.
If I fall out with him, I guess I'll go
visit him.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
So largely self propelled, Missus Cooke, self motivated, self initiative,
some help from families, some help with an office, but
mostly she did all this and that's what's so crazy
to me. Even if she was trying to save the
natural resources of her hometown, it would still be noble,
(21:34):
but it would make more sense because it's like she's
strugg but she's libbying for the entire state, and she's
libbying for and it's like, man like, where does she
get that drive?
Speaker 4 (21:44):
Where?
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Like, where did such a conviction to do this?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Where did it come from?
Speaker 5 (21:47):
Yeah, I've wondered that. Why did she think she could
do this?
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Yeah? Why? Talking about a different world?
Speaker 1 (21:53):
She's leading this charge in a culture that they're just
getting used to women being able to vote, and she's
leading the charge on all this. It's insane to me.
Where did she get the drive to do this? Self propelled,
self funded, with the exception of a little help from
her family, Fanny was for the most part, a one
woman force, and a force that was starting to get momentum.
(22:15):
And speaking of that, one of the biggest upticks Fanny
got in her campaign for wildlife conservation came in nineteen
twenty nine when the widely perceived father of wildlife management
and conservation, Aldo Leopold, made a trip down to Mississippi
to write a report. This would be the same trip
and report that resulted in the quote that we read
at the beginning of the episode, where Leopold is essentially
(22:37):
listing off the evident abuse of Mississippi's natural resources and
calling for change by way of a structured game and
fish system.
Speaker 5 (22:46):
Aldo Leopold went with her to like Chataqull when he
went to Crystal Spring.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Does not know that. I did not know that.
Speaker 5 (22:54):
We know that because in some letters, like here's when
I've got a quote in the letters referred to you
remember the partridge berries which you noticed in the woodland
near Lake Chautauqua. I'm sending you seeds.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Sent to live seeds for a partridge peek.
Speaker 5 (23:11):
For a partridge berries that he had seen at Lake Chautauqua.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
That's cool.
Speaker 5 (23:15):
So and obviously they they had kind of a friendly relationship.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (23:22):
See, we don't know if she even influenced him coming
to the stay. We have no proof that she did.
We don't have any letters or anything. But it was
just awfully coincidental, wasn't it. It makes me think that
it could have been that she knew somebody to ask.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah, because he sought her out when he came down here.
Speaker 5 (23:40):
Yes, and we have a list in his report of
the landowners that he went to see, and if you
lay it up against her board, it's pretty much identical.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
Really.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah, so there was definitely some coordination there.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Yeah, that is too cool.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
If you compare the list of landowners Leopold went to
visit when he came down to Mississippi to the list
of Fanny Cook's board of her Mississippi Association for Conservation
of Wildlife, it's pretty much identical. Leopold also sought her
out when he came down here and asked her for
help and reference with his report. Not to mention, by
the time he made it down here, she had been
(24:19):
on her campaign for three years. And while we can't
prove outright that she was a driving force in getting
him to come down here, I think we can all
agree there's an awful lot of evidence to suggest that
she played a huge role. There's also one more thing
I want to add while we're on the subject of Leopold.
The quote that we read earlier. You remember, the real
depressing one about the wildlife of Mississippi on the verge
(24:41):
of being wiped out. Well, there's a little more to it,
and I'm going to read it to you now begin quote.
There is one offset to all these defects, a widespread
and intense popular interest in game and hunting. In this respect,
Mississippi excels any other state so far, Sir by me endo.
(25:02):
Leopold then goes on to say, in so many words
that leveraging this popularity of hunting and using education and
agencies would be the only way to maintain a game
supply in Mississippi. I have to say, one of the
coolest discoveries I made while researching for this episode was
seeing the clear lines that both out of Leopold and
Fanny Cook drew, connecting hunters and conservationists as the clear
(25:25):
pathway for saving wildlife. And they also drew a hard
line between market hunters and conservationists. In fact, the term
they used to explain the two were game hogs and sportsmen.
The momentum gain by Leopold's nineteen twenty nine trip and
report would carry through until the year nineteen thirty two.
(25:46):
In January of nineteen thirty two, the newly elected governor
of Mississippi stated in his first address that he wanted
to see a Game and Fish Commission established, and while
there was no physical evidence to prove he had been
influenced by Fanny Cook. She had been on a self
propelled campaign for seven years at this point, pushing for
this exact thing, writing to legislators, visiting legislators, attending fairs,
(26:10):
the displays, the presentations, the clubs, the associations, the Aldo
Leopold expeditions.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
So y'all believe what you want to believe.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
But me personally, I'm rolling with miss Cook on this one.
She convinced the governor to push for the commission, and
you can't lead me to believe otherwise. The woman was
a needle mover, the commission gets established. Yeah, in my
purview or like my understanding, it's like you have this
woman that was obvious to everybody, was the main one
(26:38):
pushing for it. I would think that she's obvious to
be like, all right, well you're in charge of this commission.
You're the one that's been pushing for it for seven years.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
That that didn't happen.
Speaker 5 (26:52):
Yeah, And once again we have some letters she wrote
to There's a doctor BArch who was pretty well known,
and he lucky is luck would have it. And I
think this was just luck. He was one of her
professors and she helped him at the Smithsonian as well.
(27:12):
In this letter to doctor BArch, she says, you know,
we've done it. We've got this, We've got her organization now.
And there were letters from him all along where she
was talking about her work and he was always encouraging
her to keep pushing and keep pushing, and so it
was like, hallelujah, We've got it. And she says, they've
offered me a job within the agency and asked me
(27:35):
what I wanted to be, and she says, I don't
think I want to be a commissioner because they don't
get paid, and it's just going to be a temporary kind,
you know, it'll be just for a term. She says,
I think I want to do something more permanent with
the agency. She says, I can't imagine being head of
(27:55):
the agency because you would be so involved in law enforcement.
He says, so I think I would probably be better
suited in something in research and education. So she chose
not to be in a way. She did, but you
could tell she wasn't positive. So he writes her back
(28:16):
and basically says, congratulations, you've done so much hard work.
You've really earned this, and then he just lays it
right out there. He says, if you were a man,
any of those statutory positions that are in the law
would be perfect for you, he said. But he said,
you women are hard creatures to place, which is a
(28:39):
strange thing way to put it, isn't it. He says,
I think that you would be better suited for education
and research. And he says, and you don't want to
take the chance of damaging the very thing you've spent
all your time creating. Wow, So that's kind to be
a little heartbreaking. He's telling her it wouldn't be good
for your agency to put for you to be the
(29:01):
head of it now that you made it man. So
he said, you don't want to hurt the very thing
you've spent so much of your time and effort in creating.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
And again, it's like I'm trying to read the tone
of a letter that was sent so many years ago.
But in my head, it's like, even if he did
feel that way, which obviously he did, it's like Fanny
already said that she didn't really want to do that.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Anyway. He didn't have to say all that. He didn't have.
Speaker 5 (29:29):
To say no, he didn't, But somehow he just laid
it out there. Maybe he didn't want her to take
the chance of saying, oh, I want to be executive director.
He thought that would be wrong.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
So in one letter he fully acknowledges, like he credits
her for working really hard earning it. You're the one
that got this here, that got this agent. He credits
her to creating it. And the same letter he says,
you would damage it if you let it.
Speaker 5 (29:54):
When I think it was I can't remember if it
was Milly or Cathy that found the letter, but I
remember that we both just cried when we read it.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
So you and miss Cathy found that original letter.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
I did not know that.
Speaker 5 (30:07):
In her papers. Yeah, I mean, you know, we just
we were working amongst all of her stuff. It was
all there. She I think she was fine with not
getting the credit, if that makes.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Sense, gotcha.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Yeah, she was really in it for the sake of
the resource.
Speaker 5 (30:23):
She really was. Yeah, we could we could have lost
all the game in the state. I guess it could have.
I think things could have been decimated. You want to think, well,
if she didn't do it, somebody else would have stepped
up and done it. But I don't know who because
they hadn't done it yet.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
And we were at such a breaking point, and her
established in that commission. When the commission got established, I
do not one of the first things they started working
on was turkey re establishment. And everyone knows like how
important turkey hunting is down here. And it took her
seven years to establish that commission. So if she wouldn't
have done it, I don't think it's outlandish for me
to say we might have wiped him out completely.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
Oh yeah, I think we could have. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
When Loopol did this survey, there was an estimate of
twelve hundred deer in the state.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
She came at the nick of time.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
If anybody, anybody, not just a resident, if anybody has hunted, fished,
or enjoyed the natural resources of the state of Mississippi
in any way, you owe miss cooked your gratitude.
Speaker 5 (31:21):
Oh, I think that's definitely true. Yeah. The beginnings of
all the wildlife management areas, she laid them out there
with that first staff at the agency WMA's. Yeah, the
WMAs would not be there without game.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
They hadn't done it game reintroductions. I mean, so she
had she had like first like hands on involvement in
establishing public land. She had hands on involvement in reintroductions
of several game species. Yeah, the Fishes of Mississippi, land,
mammal snakes in Mississippi.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
She did all of this.
Speaker 5 (31:56):
Yeah, Horn Island, Ship Island. You know, evidently those things
would not have been saved, that would have been just
sold to private landowners if she hadn't been there.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
How long did she stay with the agency? Was she?
Speaker 5 (32:10):
She stayed involved for Yeah, and at that time there
was no elder rights. I guess at that time you
had to retire at seventy Okay. And there is a
remark somewhere that says she was the oldest person in
the Game and Fish Commission when she retired.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
So once she started, she didn't leave.
Speaker 5 (32:26):
Didn't She stayed until they pretty much state government forced
to retire because she had to, But she kept working.
One of the reasons that I think she was okay
with retiring she was trying to finish this.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
Book, okay, the Fishes of Mississippi.
Speaker 5 (32:39):
Fishers of Mississippi. And she was not the greatest pipist,
and so she wrote to mister Gandy and asked him
if she could use his secretary at the museum to
finish her book. And he said yes, and so she,
you know, drove back and I guess back and forth
from Crystal Springs until she and the secretary finished the
(33:00):
book and it was published the next year in fifty nine.
And then she died in sixty four.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
The day before she passed away, she was on a tour.
She was on a bird tour.
Speaker 5 (33:11):
Is that she led a group of boy Scouts on
a birding trip the day before she died.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
So she never stopped, she never stopped doing it.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
I almost feel like you could look at the end
of miss Cook's life and feel like it was something
out of a movie script. She spends years creating this commission.
When the commission gets established, she's told she can work there,
but she's not allowed to run it. But she doesn't care.
She cares so much about the work that she stays
there until she's forced to retire, and then spends her
retirement taking kids out on bird viewing tours and finishing
(33:48):
books that would aid Mississippi's wildlife and wildlife biologists for
years to come. Case in point, the collected work of
hers that I went and saw at the museum that
still being used today and the very day before her
passing of a heart attack she was taking a group
of boy Scouts on a bird tour. I'm just gonna
come right out and say it. This woman does not
get the credit she deserves. But I'm curious how Miss
(34:12):
Libby Hartfield feels about this.
Speaker 5 (34:14):
I would agree, of course, I do think she does,
but I also think that that wouldn't matter very much
to her.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
How long did you work at the museum?
Speaker 5 (34:23):
Thirty seven years?
Speaker 1 (34:25):
It's clear Fanny Cook means something to you. You and
Miss Cathy, Why does she mean so much to you?
Speaker 5 (34:33):
I don't know exactly. I think we felt like if
if she did that, we could too.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Miss Fanny Cook a naturalist, a wildlife biologist, an establisher
of public lands, and the woman who saved the natural
re sources of Mississippi. One of the greatest conservationists to
ever live. I told y'all I wasn't exaggerating. I want
to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University
(35:13):
as well as Bear Greece in this Country Life. And
I want to give a big shout out to Onyx
Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you liked this episode,
share it with a friend and stick around because there's
a whole lot more on the way.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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