By Steve Roark
Volunteer Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

Our native wild turkey has been in the Americas for a very long time. Fossil records show they have been around for eons and were once distributed continuously from the middle latitudes of North America to northern South America. The Aztec Indians were the first to domesticate the bird and it became an important staple to their diet. The Navajo gave up on keeping the hungry birds away from their scanty desert corn crops, and instead began to feed the turkeys and fence them in and provided a dependable source of protein and ornamental feathers.

Nomadic Indians of the northeast did not bother to domesticate the wild turkey, since it could live on the abundant native vegetation and thrived without agricultural welfare. The wild birds were "called up" by imitating their calls, and then grabbed by a child hiding behind some logs or in a pit or shot with a bow and arrow or blow gun.

In 1519, Cortez and his fellow Spanish Conquistadors found the Aztecs raising turkeys around their homes and took the domesticated birds back to Europe where they became a popular meat producing livestock. In 1620, the Pilgrims disembarked from the Mayflower and began searching for food sources. They were fortunate to be on friendly terms with the local Native Americans, who shared their knowledge of hunting the large fowl. The delicious meat of the wild turkey helped the colonists survive and maintain a toe hold in the New World.

As pioneers pushed west and cut and cleared forests, the turkey's habitat changed, and their numbers dwindled. In the late 1700s, turkeys were harvested without restraint and marketed in big cities for consumption. By the mid-1800s the Civil War brought a shortage of food and the big bird had been eliminated from nearly half of its original range. In the early 1900s, only around 30,000 turkeys remained, working towards extinction.

But in the 1920s things began to improve. Millions of acres cleared for farming was abandoned and began to regenerate into woodlands. Farsighted leaders began enacting conservation laws and restocking programs began. In 1994, almost all the forests of the eastern United States and much of the West had been restocked. Today, five million big birds roam 49 states.

Domestication and selective breeding of the wild turkey have gradually turned the noble bird into a walking breast meat factory that we now buy for Thanksgiving. But thankfully the original is till out there, and if you eat a turkey leg you might get some idea of what the native bird tastes like.