Early Marietta: On the Trail with an Allegheny Mountain Mudbug
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Spruce Knob, the tallest peak in West Virginia, is 4,863 ft high. Easy to drive to the top; not so easy walking up to the top on foot carrying a backpack. That was our recent hiking trip itinerary: hike down 1,500 ft to beautiful Seneca Creek, camp that night, then hike back up to Spruce Knob. We hiked down and set up camp. After a pleasant evening by a robust campfire, a midnight thunderstorm, and sleep by the gurgling stream, we awoke to a misty cool morning.
We began the the return trip, not looking forward to the all-uphill trek. After the first hour, the steepest, muddiest part was behind us. I paused to get my breath and rest my protesting hip flexors. Something caught my eye on the trail. It was a blue….crawfish? Blue, at nearly 4,000 ft, far away from the nearest water? It didn't move; perhaps it was a plastic artificial bait dropped by a fisherperson. I picked it up and discovered that it was NOT artificial, and not happy being in my grasp. I put it down and took a picture.
A trusty app identified the miniature alpine lobster: an Allegheny Mountain Mudbug, unique to parts of West Virginia and Virginia. Would this have been seen by our Ohio pioneers, I wondered? Yes, though not the blue variety. Crawfish (also, crayfish, crawdads, mudbugs, etc.) have been around for millions of years – before the first humans wandered our planet.
Pioneers knew of the more common brown or greenish variety. A few place names bear witness to their presence. Big Darby Creek near Columbus had been known as Crawfish Creek. Moravian missionary John Heckewelder in the 1700s said that the Delaware name Chickiswalungo meant "place of crawfish," the derivation of Chickies/Chiques Creek in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Chickamauga, Georgia was originally called Crawfish Springs.
Ohio settlers and natives saw crawfish, used them for bait, and ate them. Jonathan Alder was kidnapped by Indians in 1782. During one period, attacks by whites forced his Indian village of mostly women and children to flee. Alder recalled, “we were compelled to subsist on papaws, muscles, and crawfish.” An expedition in 1758 by John St. Clair into western Pennsylvania reported that the area was a “perfect paradise” with “Cat fish, white salmon, Buffalo Fish, Carp and Crawfish.” Marietta pioneers used crawfish as bait.
Thomas Wallcut’s journal at Marietta in 1790 captured the wonder of discovering a crawfish: “The doctor showed me, as a natural curiosity..., a complete lobster in miniature, about two inches in length…found in plenty in streams and springs of water.” Some unusual features of crawfish: they use urine to show dominance or attract mates, can regrow a lost leg or claw, have blue blood, have a built in set of teeth in their stomachs to grind food, can move lightning fast backward with a tail flip when threatened, and have eyes completely independent of each other. Now you know.
Crawfish were were commonly prepared by boiling, and the tail meat eaten from the shell. Some elaborate crawfish dishes appeared in colonial and European cookbooks. One was a crawfish soup was created by thoroughly crushing entire crawfish in a mortar and straining the mixture through cloth to make a flavored broth. Sometimes that was served with roasted fish, garnished with whole crawfish.
Today, crawfish ("mudbugs") are most popular in Louisiana as part of the Cajun culture. Legends say that when the French migrated south to Louisiana from Nova Scotia, their beloved lobsters followed them, morphing into crawfish along the way. While much has changed from early pioneer days, some things changed little: crawfish and nature.