A concerned citizen warned in February 1857 that Cahawba would die if a railroad from Marion was not extended there and nearby Selma monopolized the cotton trade. Cahawba built the railroad and prospered, but during America's Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, the Confederate government seized its rails and locomotive for use elsewhere. Without that transportation route, Cahawba could not recover from the war and a major flood in 1865, and after the county seat moved to Selma in 1866, it quickly became a ghost town. Owls, bats, and other wild creatures moved into its vacant, decaying buildings, while traces of former human life remained in ruins, abandoned cemeteries, and exotic plants. Much of the wildlife now found there also reflects human history: deer and turkey, nearly gone from Alabama by the 1920s because of overhunting and habitat destruction, rebounded after the Alabama Wildlife Federation was founded in 1935 and supported game protections; freshwater mussels, badly reduced in the early 1900s by unregulated harvesting and still harmed by river impoundment, channelization, pollution, erosion, and siltation, are now being reintroduced by Alabama's Aquatic Biodiversity Center; bald eagles, gone from Alabama by 1950 largely because of DDT, returned along the Cahaba River after DDT was banned in 1972 and a reintroduction effort began in 1984; nine-banded armadillos spread into the southern United States from the late 1800s as humans removed predators and built roads; coyotes expanded in the Southeast after humans brought them there for hunting and eliminated wolves, becoming an established part of Alabama's landscape by the 1960s; and fire ants, introduced from Argentina and southern Brazil through Mobile in the early 1930s in imported plant soil, spread across the Southern U.S. and proved difficult to eradicate.