The Great Richland Rabbit Roundup
Community members organize a massive drive to protect orchards from an overwhelming pest invasion.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The rabbit drive held Tuesday was a great success and as a result the rabbit population of the Richland district is depleted by 540 of these pests. Otto Haueisen bagged the largest number and won the beautiful silver cup offered by the F. G. Bier Hardware company to the man who had the best luck on the drive. Mr. Haueisen killed 52 jacks while Harry Wheelhouse led him a close race with a bag of 50. The men began to assemble at the high flume east of the hop yard about ten o’clock and from there hunted out as far as the Luelloff place at Fruitvale and thence back to the Geo. Taylor ranch about a mile north of town. Rabbits are a menace to the farmers of this district every year, destroying alfalfa in the field and hay in the stack and during the winter peeling the bark from the trees for food, thus causing valuable orchards to die in a short time.
“Otto Haueisen bagged the largest number and won the beautiful silver cup offered by the F. G. Bier Hardware company.”
While community rabbit drives were a common agrarian solution to crop protection in 1915, they highlight the intense struggle early Richland farmers faced in establishing fruit orchards in the desert landscape. Today, the irrigation that made those orchards possible remains a central, sometimes contentious, part of Tri-Cities civic infrastructure.
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