RECOLLECTIONS of MY FIFTY YEARS HUNTING = FISHING by WILLIAM B. MERSHON a a a c 4 ffor indicates, this book relates the author s hunting and fishing experiences covering half a century THE hunting stories begin before the author was old enough to shoot and they describe the plentifulness of quail and wild turkeys in Michigan at that time. Then there are chapters about old deer hunting parties, quail shooting, the dance of the sandhill crane, wild fowl and goose shooting on the Dakota prairies in the old days, Sora rail shooting and wild pigeon hunting. From a fishing standpoint this book will be of great interest and value to many readers, for the history of the first brook trout in Michigan is given. There is also much information about grayling fishing and salmon fishing. The volume is profusely illustrated 1923 The Stratford Company, Publishers BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS a a c c c Cl VM, 11. MER8.HON Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013 http://archive.org/details/recollectionsofmOOmers RECOLLECTIONS OF MY FIFTY YEARS HUNTING AND FISHING v <2 THE LAST OF HIS RACE Michigan Wild Turkey Gobbler. Killed 1 8 8 6. Weight 23.34 lbs. Photograph taken from (he mounted bird, still a wonderful bouquet of colors. RECOLLECTIONS of MY FIFTY YEARS HUNTING and FISHING % WM. B. MERSHON 1923 THE STRATFORD COMPANY, "Publishers Boston, Massachusetts Copyright, 1923 The STRATFORD CO., Publishers Boston, Mass. The Alpine Press, Boston, Mass., U. S. A. DEDICATION Dedicated to The memory of my old hunting companions Farnham Lyon, Watts Sherman Humphrey, Waldo Avery, Abner P. Bigelow, George Dan Seib, Eben N. Briggs and Charles H. Davis Contents Page Shooting Notes ........ I The Michigan Wild Turkey . . . . . .19 The Last of His Race . 30 Pigeons and Squabs ....... 36 Grouse and Quail ........ 39 Duck Shooting 57 The Witchery of the Saginaw Marshes . . . .74 Rail Shooting 82 Nichols Deer Hunting Camps 89 The Michigan Sportsman's Association . . . .98 Hunting and Camping Trips with Jack Morley . . 103 The Old Hunting Car 112 Hunting at Dawson, N. D 116 Western Trips . . . . . . . .129 The Dance of the Sandhill Crane . . . . .139 Trout Fishing in Michigan . . . . . .142 The Michigan Grayling . . . . . . .168 Salmon Fishing ........ 194 Mr. David C. Sanborn and His Llewellin Setter Dog Count Noble 200 Pilgrimage of the Saginaw Crowd 204 Illustrations Opposite Page No. The Last of His Race Frontispiece My First Gun 10 The Last of His Race 18 Pigeon Shooting ........ 36 Band Tailed Pigeon ....... 38 The Nichols Deer Hunting Camp on the Au Sable River in 1876 88 The Nichols Deer Hunting Camp on the Sturgeon River, Dickinson County, Upper Peninsula, Michigan, 1886 98 At the Portable House 102 Hunting Car "City of Saginaw" 112 Digging Goose Holes near Dawson, N. D. . . .116 The Portable House, Buffalo Lake, Sask. (1912) . .128 Great Whooping Crane 138 Michigan Grayling . . . . . . .142 The "Peggy" 156 Dorsal Fin of Michigan Grayling . . . . .168 Michigan Grayling . . . . . . .172 Dorsal Fin of Michigan Grayling 182 David C. Sanborn ........ 200 Count Noble, N. A. K. C. S. B., 1509, by Count Wind'em 202 The Jerome Marble Party of Worcester, Mass. . .214 The Hanging of the Deer ...... 244 Introductory HERE are several reasons why I have written this book. I have hesitated to undertake it for a long time. I am aware that I can not paint in glowing colors commonplace events. I know I have very little literary talent, but I have had such a glorious time afield with rod and gun for half a century, I feel that others should enjoy some of these memories with me. The better reason mayhap why I have undertaken to tell these stories is that in the years to come com- parison can be made with the past and future, and even the contrast of today with those days I have written about is so great that the younger sportsman will marvel. Then again the history of the brook trout in Michigan should be preserved. We have much writ- ten about the grayling; nothing of the introduction of the brook trout; and how few anglers of today know that this fish was not native to the streams of the Lower Peninsula where now it is found. Little has before been written about hunting the Michigan wild turkey. I have not said much of the wild pigeon for I covered that subject about as fully as I could in The Passenger Pigeon, a book written by me in 1907. A considerable time has elapsed between the writing of several of the titles of the within, and some of them 11 Introduction have been printed in the sportsman's magazines. The reader will understand why there are some repetitions. And, too, there is a preponderance of local description and minutiae that will not appeal to the general reader, but all of it is necessary to enable me to tell my stories in my own plain, every-day conversational way. Also it enables me to stick closely to facts, and that would not have been as easily done had I generalized more. Some of the pictures and size of the bags will at once suggest "game hoggishness" and would be unpardon- able, even if today they were possible, but in the old days they were not so regarded, and I very much doubt if the bag of the sportsman of old was any cause for the diminishing supply of wild life. Environment, and not the gun of the sportsman — I will not exempt the market hunter entirely — must be the explanation. The buffalo had to go. Had no wild pigeons been killed where could they feed in numbers now? Wild fowl are today plentiful, yet there are few on the Saginaw marshes. The Kankakee — the greatest of all duck grounds of old — is now no longer a duck marsh. The plow has taken the place of the paddle and punt pole, as it has in countless places in the Dakotas where from ponds and marshes of fifty years ago ducks and geese darkened the sky when they arose. Our covers around Saginaw that homed thousands of ruffed grouse, and swampy woodlands and beech groves where the wild turkey dwelt are now fenced with wire and as clear and clean as a billiard table. The tangle Introduction iii of the rail fence corners where lurked the quail and rabbit in shelter and safety from the marauding hawk are no more, and the rail fence was the best game cover we ever had. Another thing to be remembered before condemning the old-time sportsman for the size of his bag — do not overlook this: There was not one man hunting then where there are hundreds today. There were endless hunting and fishing grounds then inaccessible that are now easy of access. Reaching the hunting ground by horse and wagon was quite another thing than going by automobile. Today all of the game covers and fishing streams and rivulets are combed fine and close. In the old days I have written of, three-quarters of the marshes, woods, bogs and prairies never heard a gun, and the cedar swamps and far-away branches of our trout waters were inaccessible to the angler. These places maintained the supply. When the forests were lumbered, burned and cleared for the farm, when the lakes and marshes were diked and drained, when roads and Fords both came to the trout nursery in the cedar swamp, when the rail fence gave way to the barb wire, then there had to be a change in what inhabited these regions. Future generations should have hunting and fishing. These incentives to the life out of doors should be per- petuated. It is late, very late — but not altogether too late to make the start. Game refuges, protected from fire and vermin, will do wonders. The State should iv Introduction own, or purchase now if it does not own, large areas and set them aside forever for the people to enjoy the grand, health-giving, mind-purifying sport with rod and gun. NOTE : I have used in abbreviated form the names of the different rail- roads in the course of my narrative, although it is customary to always use the full name in a work of this kind, I presume, but we always spoke of the Flint & Pere Marquette Railway as the F. & P. M. The old Jackson, Lansing & Saginaw was the J. L. & S. afterwards owned by the Michigan Central and is today the Mackinaw division of the Michigan Central running from Jackson to Saginaw and from Saginaw to Mackinaw. The D. & B. C. was the Detroit & Bay City, now the Michigan Central. The S. T. & H. was the Saginaw, Tuscola & Huron — the old narrow gauge that ran from Saginaw to Bad Axe. That too was sold to the Flint & Pere Marquette and made a standard gauge road. Later on the Flint & Pere Marquette disappeared to become the Pere Marquette Railroad. This explanation is made for the benefit of the readers in the years to come. Shooting Notes MY FIRST remembrance of going hunting other than with my father and before I could go alone, was an episode that caused quite a com- motion in the household and is indelibly fixed in my memory. I think it was the only time I ever ran away from school. George Thompson, an elder brother of a chum of mine, owned a single barrel muzzle loading shotgun of unknown parentage. One day the informa- tion was conveyed to me that down by the Old Salt Works — that was the ground just below where the Carlisle tannery now is — there were lots of plover and that if I would get out of school early that after- noon, George would take me shooting, so instead of returning to my studies at the time of the afternoon recess, I skipped and George and I hiked it to the Salt Works shooting grounds. This was the location of the first salt manufacturing institution in Saginaw and the salt was made by the solar process. Instead of evaporating the brine in kettles or pans, shallow wooden vats covered a con- siderable area. These vats had removable covers which rolled back and forth on wooden rollers and on sunny, fair days, the cover was rolled back and the surface of the brine in the vats exposed to the air and l 2 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing sun. A slow evaporation took place and formed large crystals of what is known as solar salt. There was more or less leakage to these vats and the brine gradually ran towards the bayou, killing all vegetation, but somehow or other it made a very attractive ground for the various waders. Kildeer, yellowlegs, tip-ups and a half dozen more of the smaller sandpipers and plovers frequented this ground in the early autumn or late summer in large numbers. The trouble was to get the birds after they were killed. George did the shooting and I was to be the retriever. The ground was soft and of the blackest, dirtiest nature. My mother was pretty particular to send me to school in clean clothes and this day I had on a suit of white cotton goods — I think she said it was marseilles — with a little golden square in it. How well I remember that suit of clothes. Instead of taking my pants off and going in bare legged, I rolled them up and of course didn't roll them up far enough, for after an unusually successful pot shot that George had made, getting quite a number of birds dead or flutter- ing on the bog, in I went. An unforeseen log or an extra soft spot threw me down and I was completely plastered. Neither my mother or father ever whipped any of the children. We were either sent to bed sup- perless or given a lecture and shamed into behaving ourselves, but I got a double dose of lecture and early bed because of both my misdeeds — playing hookey from school and nearly ruining my clothes. Another time before I was allowed to use a gun, I Shooting Notes 3 had become quite expert with the bow and arrow, and begging to go hunting, my mother and grandmother took their knitting and sat on a log while I. tried to shoot the plover with bow and arrow. This was at a little marsh where the roundhouse of the Pere Mar- quette Railway now stands, and the old Garrison mill was nearby. The first bird I ever killed on the wing was a wild pigeon. They frequented the Saginaw Valley in thousands from early spring until after the harvest. I had been taken with my uncle and father pigeon shooting many times to pick up birds. It was no trick for them to get seventy-five or a hundred birds before breakfast, and soon after I was given my 16-gauge double barrel gun I was taken out to shoot pigeons. The flocks were dense, as I now recall, so it was not a difficult feat to bring one down, and at the very first discharge a pigeon from my shot came fluttering to the ground. I grabbed it and admired it and was satisfied for that morning to have it my entire bag, and proudly took it home to show to my mother. It was not long before I was going pigeon shooting regularly every morning, for the flight began at daylight and was gen- erally over by seven o'clock. Then I would get my breakfast and be off to school. My pigeon shooting continued every spring until about 1880, when it was gone forever. Another sport that I prized very much was jacksnipe shooting. After the family had moved to the west side to be near the sawmill of which my father was the 4 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing Superintendent and Manager, I had a great deal of jacksnipe shooting. I was then fourteen years old. A water course that commenced somewhere to the north of the "Mud Road" that ran through John Winters' farm and then going southward emptied into the bayou at the foot of where Davenport Street now is, was a great game cover and was near by. After school late in September or in October I used to go down to the boggy edges of this water course and flush jacksnipe, and frequently would come home with a dozen. I had become quite expert by that time and could kill these twisters on the wing very well. It was not long after that my father and I were running a race to see who could kill the greatest num- ber without a miss and I beat him by killing twenty- three straight. This was on a snipe bog below Zilwaukee. I was always on the lookout for some snipe ground, and the best of all was where the marsh hay had been cut and cattle pastured. This was sure to be good ground for them. I had these places located well ahead, to be ready when the frosty nights set in and the flight was on. The creek or marshy water course that I have spoken of that was near my home gave me occasionally a duck or two. It might be a flock of bluewinged teal that I put up in early September, or going up farther where the tree growth began, a wood duck, and among the alders there was always sure to be a woodcock, and sometimes a dozen of them. In the early spring the high water backed up from Shooting Notes 5 the river and made this a pretty wide stream. It would overflow the grassy meadows, and grass pike, or pick- erel as we called them, came up to spawn and you could see them moving in pairs along the shallow margin in the grassy overflow. That was great sport for me. Taking the shot gun and old spaniel dog "Sport" who was my greatest chum, I would watch for a riffle or a protruding back fin and fire a charge of shot at it. Instantly there would be exposed on the surface one or two of these pike, belly up. Then old Sport would go in and fetch them out. He would bring five or six all right, but gradually would shake his head and spit and make all sorts of faces and refuse to pick them up. He could stand a little of the fish retrieving but not a great deal. What fun a boy and a dog can have together. Our woodcock season began July 5th. The first Michigan game law fixed that as the opening date, and there must have been a game law when I was a boy of fifteen or sixteen, for I have no recollection of wood- cock not being protected by law. Of course it was far too early, but the argument was that we must have something to shoot, that the birds were fully grown then ; in August you couldn't find them anyhow and by October they were gone. In recent years we have had fairly good October cock shooting around here. My father was very fond of woodcock shooting. I never made much of a fuss about it. I remember once, how- ever, going with Leander Lee, a local fur buyer who always had good dogs, was an excellent shot and did 6 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing a great deal of shooting. It was half way surmised that he shot for the market, but if he did he was ashamed of it and never admitted it. We found them that time in the corn fields. It was hot and hard work and we met frequently and rested, but we had twenty- four birds when along early in the afternoon a farmer appeared and drove us out of the corn field, for he said he was working nearby and our shooting frightened his horses. My father once asked Leander how he cooked his woodcock and he replied that uhe generally b'iled 'em." Such sacrilegious treatment of woodcock was horrible to contemplate, I judged, from the con- versation that took place between my father and my mother in relation thereto. In the early autumn golden plover frequented the fields and commons around Saginaw. I could always find them and I thought them the most delicious bird that ever came to the table. I would drive out to some field where the plover were gathered in great flocks and walk towards them. Nearly always I could get in range and get in one shot and then they would circle, giving you chance for a raking shot every now and then. A soft mellow whistle quite like the call of the yellowleg would frequently bring them within range. They seemed to have no knowledge of the source of the danger. Ten or a dozen was about as many, how- ever, as I ever got. Ruffed grouse shooting, next to wild turkey shoot- ing, I considered the best of all sport. That sport has Shooting Notes 7 continued until this day, and I think I will leave that bird for another chapter. At times quail shooting was exceedingly good around Saginaw. When I was a very small child, at least sixty years ago, I recall my father coming in with a tremen- dous lot of quail — over a hundred. He had been away two or three days down near Flint, Michigan. They were strung and hung up in the woodshed and allowed to freeze, so we had quail until long after Christmas. Then there was a long period that quail were very scarce. One was hardly heard of for ten or fifteen years, but with the more general clearing of the forests and the increase in farms, they came back again, and would be here in plenty for two or three years and then would disappear and get scarce, and so it went. Now, at the time I am writing, 1923, quail are exceed- ingly plentiful, but the Michigan law no longer allows them to be shot. The hard winters kill the quail, not the shooting. Snow and crust doom these birds. Only the hardiest would live through and then it was a good while before they would build up in sufficient quantity to become plentiful enough to shoot. The law pro- tected them at odd times during these seasons of scarcity, as it should, but our legislators had more com- mon sense in the old days, for when the quail came back, they allowed them to be shot once more. They don't do that now. The survival of the hardiest quail built up a race of strong, sturdy birds, larger than the southern quail, and they have learned to take care of 8 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing themselves better. At first one found them only in the open fields — buckwheat fields, wheat stubble or a corn field in which the corn was still in the shock. That was sure to be the place to look for quail. Of late years they are rarely found in the fields, but in the densest thickets and back in the woods in the tangles of the swamp grass. My early recollection is, that upon flushing them in the fields they would scatter and hide along the ditch margin or in the grassy edges of the rail fence, but of late years this is not so. At the very first they scatter into the deepest woods so that it is the hardest kind of shooting, and not very heavy in- roads can be made on any single covey. Neither have the birds become wiped out or anywhere nearly extinct in a good many years as they did in the past, because of this change of habit — taking to the woods for greater protection and because of the breeding by selection of a stronger race of birds. I have shot quail in Texas, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, but in none of these places did I ever have as good quail shooting and as grand sport as I had around Saginaw years ago. I have come to my office and opened the morning mail and about ten or eleven o'clock taken the old dog and gun and walked out just back of the mill through the farmers' fields, not going, at the greatest distance, more than a mile or mile and a half, coming back at three or four o'clock with twelve, fifteen or twenty quail. I have done this time and again. There was no bag limit in those days. Maybe we shot too much, but Shooting Notes 9 I recall one day when three of us shooting north of Merrill, Michigan, had 104 quail and a few ruffed grouse as the result of our day's shooting. The biggest shooting I ever did on quail, and while I ought to be ashamed of it I am not particularly — for birds were plentiful, and, as I said before, we had no bag limit and had not been educated to the need of con- servation as we have now, was one week when I was out three times. It was near Fairgrove, a little station down on what we called the Narrow Gauge Railway, sixteen or eighteen miles from Saginaw I believe. On Tuesday I shot 32; going again on Thursday, which was Thanksgiving Day, I got 28; and on Saturday 24. On one of these days I made nearly a clean score. My recollection is that I missed only one or two birds all day. With our quail shooting we sometimes got a woodcock or two or three grouse, and the same was true when we went grouse shooting — we frequently had a dozen or so of quail to add to the bag. There were a great many deer around Saginaw in the old times. The first deer I killed ran through our dooryard. We were then living near the sawmill on the west side. That was fifty-three years ago. I was standing at the window one day late in November; a light snow was on the ground, when a deer came run- ning from the west, jumped over the yard fence, ran through the yard and in the direction of the river. I hastily grabbed the gun. My old spaniel dog "Sport" started with me and he took the trail and yipped ahead io Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing of me. We came to the river bank and there the deer was floundering in the ice. He had attempted to cross the river, but there was just enough ice so that he had broken through and it held him. I made a pot shot then and there, and my father, following soon after, helped me drag the deer ashore and back to the house where it was fastened to one of the rounds of an inclined lader and dressed. I thought at the time that it was a tremendous buck, but know now that it did not weigh to exceed 100 pounds. Since then I have killed dozens and dozens of deer, but none caused the excite- ment to me or to our household that this — my first deer — did. It was no rare occurrence for black bear to come into the city, especially when forest fires were burning. In the fall of 1872, I think it was, we had tremendous forest fires in this part of the state. For weeks the air was so filled with smoke that it was like a fog; everyone had sore eyes. The bear, either losing their way or driven by fire, came into the city. On Water Street the old Merrill foundry stood, a long narrow building with windows opposite each other. Those to the east faced the street and to the west the river brink. A bear came lumbering down through the town, jumped through one of the windows, then out of the window directly opposite and into the river and swam across to the west side. I am mentioning so many of these things in detail so that in the years to come whoever reads may know Shooting Notes 1 1 something about the wild life near Saginaw from 1855 to about 1875, for that is the period that most of these early day happenings that I have recorded took place. I have mentioned pigeon shooting. This was my chief sport for many years. The passenger pigeons were numerous in the Saginaw Valley from the begin- ning until the late 7o's. In 1907 I got together all of the data that was then to me available relative to this remarkable bird and published it in book form under the title of The Pas- senger Pigeon, and as that treated of the subject fully, I shall not say much about it here. Every spring there was a pigeon flight. I don't know how broad the belt was. At the time I was fourteen years old I was living on the west side of the river near the crossing of the J. L. & S. and F. & P. M. Railways. The forest completely encircled the town and the near- est woods to my home was on the north and west, less than one-half mile away. The pigeons always came in the morning from the east side, crossed to the west side and followed the woods out to a point where would now be the intersection of the Shattuckville Road and Hermansau Street. Then they flew southwesterly to Pine Hill and thence across the Tittabawassee River, in the direction of Oakwood Cemetery. That was the original route as I recall it when I first went shooting with my uncles down near the old Saginaw Salt Works. Of course there were other flights going in the same 12 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing general direction that skirted the woods on the south edge of town, several miles distant. The birds arrived late in March and every morning this flight of pigeons going the same direction and at the same hour, namely just after daylight, the flight lasting about an hour, continued for several weeks, year after year. They must have had a nesting some- where in the Thumb down in the Bad Axe-Sebewaing district, but we have no record of it; we don't know. That country was a long way off in those days, but it must have been a flight from a nesting to the feeding ground. Possibly the first arrivals were merely passing through to a nesting ground farther north, for we al- ways noticed that for the first few days the flight was heaviest. Another strange thing: they didn't return by the same route, as we found that by going three or four miles west on the Shattuckville Road we would meet a flight in the afternoon going in the opposite direction from that in the morning. My impression is that this morning flight were males, but I can not at this distance and time assert positively. Along in midsummer young pigeons appeared and we would find them on the stubble fields. The old ones by that time had gone, probably moved to another nesting, and the fact that we had these young pigeons during the summer would indicate that the first nesting was not far away. For a bird as plentiful and in such enormous masses as the passenger pigeon, we know very, very little about its life history. The flight was not in regular flocks; Shooting Notes 13 there was no leader or regular formation. They flew as it happened, one flock after another, in all shapes and at various heights. I have seen them when they were making their distance flight; that is, going to some nesting point far beyond Saginaw, pass over for hours flying in different stratas, layer upon layer, so it was possible in looking upwards to see two or three flocks in depth. These flights were high and out of gunshot. They had a habit when they came to an open commons or prairie of swooping down from above the treetops and just skimming the ground. The passenger pigeon raised but one young at a nest- ing. They were gregarious and could not exist in single pairs very long. There undoubtedly were workers or feeders in the nesting that helped take care of the orphans, for it has been authentically noted that sev- eral birds came to feed one single squab. The pigeons went a long way for their feeding. The food they brought back was partially digested and the young were fed by regurgitating, or pigeon's milk, so-called. This, of course, is the only way the food could be brought back from the distance at which it was obtained. The nearby food was left for the young birds when they were able to leave the nest. The pigeons had no regular wintering place in the south. They went wherever there was food, raising but one young at a nesting and then leaving that to shift for itself. It can readily be understood that if the large colonies were broken up and but few left to raise young how difficult or impossible it would have 14 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing been for these stray or scattered young ones to have found mates, because of that habit of having no com- mon migrating spot like many birds who migrate south to the same locality year after year. Pigeons were considered a choice morsel in our fam- ily, pigeon potpie taking preeminence. Sometimes the young squabs were broiled, and my father used to take the breasts and corn them in brine for a day or so, take a thorn bush and stick it full of pigeon breasts and it was then inverted and hung in a hogshead and smoked lightly with hickory bark. These were put away for later use and being but lightly salted when broiled over the coals made a very choice morsel. It was a common habit for the pigeon shooters to steal one another's birds. Shooting into a flock and only one or two birds coming down, the unscrupulous rushed to gather the dead, irrespective of whether they had done the killing or not. Frequently men went out without guns and relied upon their bulldozing to steal enough pigeons to satisfy them. I was at the mercy of these pirates when I went alone, but when I went with my father or my uncles I had a protector that could stand up for my rights. It wasn't long after I began shooting pigeons alone that I got a spaniel dog, "Sport" by name, and taught him to retrieve. After that he could accumulate not only my pigeons but some of those that the others shot, and I was always on the safe side. I used a muzzle loading 16-gauge gun, and I loaded usually with an ounce of No. 8 shot and three drams of Dupont or Curtis & Harvey's powder, using Shooting Notes Ely's central fire caps, the black edged felt wad over the powder and a cardboard wad over the shot. Later on pink edged wads came into vogue and I felt quite rich when I had my first box of them. It was my custom to get up in the morning at four o'clock, go to the fringe of woods about half a mile away, and soon after the first streak of dawn the pigeons would come through the treetops. It was sporty shooting if you stood in the margin of the woods, for you had to pick out fast-flying, darting birds, singles; but if you got away from the woods a little way, then you could take a shot into the flock and trust to luck, but they flew lower within the woods, that is, some mornings. The common topic, however, amongst the pigeon shooters was as to whether they were flying high or flying low that morning, for some mornings they flew so high that very few birds were killed, but if the report spread around that the pigeons had begun flying low, then the number of shooters in- creased next morning. It was all over with by six- thirty or seven o'clock and I was back home for break- fast and off for school. My morning bag ranged from a dozen to twenty birds, as I recall it now. We tied them up in bunches, taking the long tail feathers, tying the tips of four feathers together, then slipping the quill through the soft part of the under mandible. After stringing six or eight birds the quills were knotted together and you could slip your finger through and carry this bunch conveniently. The last pigeon shooting I did was at Oxford, Mich., 1 6 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing a station on the Detroit & Bay City Railroad. It was two or three years after we had any pigeon shooting in Saginaw, that word came there was a flight of pigeon at Oxford, so my father and I and someone else went down there and stayed overnight and came home the next night, and I know we had two or three grain bags filled with pigeons. This must have been about 1877, maybe a year or two later. Another sport of my boyhood was shooting squir- rels, mostly black squirrels. Next in quantity were the gray squirrels and least the fox squirrels. All of the woods were filled with them, especially those woods that contained nut trees, and nearly all of our forests were well filled with oak, beech, hickory, walnut and butternut. Some of the finest oak that ever grew out- doors was cut from the forests near Saginaw — great big trees that would make a square stick of timber 30" x 30" x 40 feet in length. These magnificent oak trees were felled and squared with broad axes, gen- erally by Frenchmen from Canada, and rafted to Bay City. They had to be separated by putting big pine logs between the oak to prevent the latter from sinking. Vessels came from Quebec; they had great doors or hatches in their sterns and with tackle and windlass these enormous sticks of oak were pulled endways into these stern holds. When loaded the ship sailed away to Quebec where later on, the timber found its way to the English shipyards. Worlds of white oak staves, too, were made for export to Spain. What forests Michigan had! Shooting Notes 17 Once I went over to John Winter's woods, scarcely a half mile from home, and sat down. It was late in October, the nuts were falling, and pretty soon I spotted a black squirrel. I shot it, waited a moment and saw another one. I got seventeen squirrels that afternoon. All of them were out of the one big oak tree. I think the squirrels preferred the hickory nuts, just as the pigeons in the late fall preferred beech nuts. Now and then a deer would be seen, but I did not do a great deal of deer shooting. Nearly everyone shot deer with buckshot in the old days, ran them with hounds and had no scruples about running them into the water. I think it was as late as 1878 when the records of the railroads showed that 70,000 deer were killed in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan alone. Market hunting was in vogue, the lumber camps em- ployed professional hunters to keep their crews fed up on venison all winter long, and the slaughter was ter- rific. My first deer hunting trip was on the Au Gres River with Frank Millett, the engineer of a neighbor- ing sawmill, and John Thornwaithe, who lived in Arenac, then in Bay County. We met at Whitney's mill at the mouth of the Au Gres. Millet and I went up on the old steamer Forbes, a little bit of a topheavy craft, and as the bay was rough I know we nearly rolled overboard. The mill was idle, there was no one around, and we made camp near by. Thorn- waithe generally put out the dogs and they ran the deer into Saginaw Bay provided we did not get a shot and kill them before they got to the water. We later 1 8 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing moved camp upstream into Au Gres swamp and it froze up while we were there and we had a dickens of a time getting out, but we had good shooting, each of us getting several deer. Another time I was invited with some older men, and one of the party objected to eat- ing the mince pie because brandy had been put into it. He should have lived since the passage of the Volstead Act. All these localities I have mentioned are now without a tree large enough to make a saw log. What the lumberman did not get, the forest fire destroyed. The Michigan Wild Turkey MY FIRST recollection of the Michigan wild turkey was when my father returned from a hunting trip near Flint, bringing with him a wild turkey that was killed by a Mr. Perry and given to my father. It weighed either thirty or thirty-two pounds. That was a long while ago — somewhere around fifty-seven or fifty-eight years, but I do know that I heard my father tell my mother that it weighed either one or the other of these weights. The last Michigan wild turkey I saw or ever heard of, was one I have been pleased to call "The Last of His Race," although it may not have been literally so. This gobbler I had mounted. He is in my possession still, as gorgeous a bird as one ever looked upon. He, too, was a gobbler, weighing twenty- three and three-quarters pounds. I will tell of the shooting of it later on. I have other recollections of this grandest of all game birds. I had become old enough to be entrusted with a gun and had gone into the heavy tangles and thickets of the Ferguson Bayou margin. It must have been sometime late in the summer for we had summer woodcock shooting them — the season opening the 5th of July for many years. The claim was that you never could find the woodcock in August, which I guess was 19 * 20 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing true, for it was their moulting time, and that by Sep- tember they had mainly gone, which was not true, but they had changed location, so to get any shooting it must be had in July. The woodcock is a very early breeder and its young are full grown by the then open- ing day. To return to the wild turkey. I was in this tangle after woodcock. I had a spaniel dog with me and suddenly there was a racket and out of the bushes on all sides appeared in rather clumsy flight a number of birds I did not at first recognize. I stood in open- mouthed wonder as one after the other, these awkward birds took wing and made a short flight to disappear in the thicket again. It took but a moment, however, to recognize them as half-grown turkeys. The spaniel dog had suddenly run into the brood and scattered them in this manner. Another incident was when I was hunting partridges with my father. It was in December, for in those days seasons were long and our partridge season began the first of September and ended the 31st of December, and after the snow came we thought it was great fun going after the ruffed grouse. On this particular trip, with old Dolly drawing the old-fashioned box sleigh or cutter and warmly wrapped in a buffalo robe, we were going west along what was known as the Gratiot Plank Road. I might digress here to say that the Gratiot Plank Road was built from Saginaw to St. Louis when the St. Louis mineral springs were in their heyday of glory, The Michigan Wild Turkey 21 way back in the 6o's, and notables from all over the country flocked to St. Louis to be cured of rheumatism and other ailments because of the marvelous magnet- ism of this deep well water. The story of old was, that all you had to do was to hold your penknife in the overflow for ten minutes and it would pick up a ten- penny nail by magnetism. Well, they would have a plank road for means of connection, for there was no other way of getting into St. Louis from this direction. All four-inch white pine planks were used, many of them clear pine at that. Frank Glasby had the con- tract. The road was under construction and was built as far as Hemlock City where we were going to spend the night at the hotel kept by Bob Sproul. How little incidents fix themselves in boyhood's mind and mem- ory ! Frank Eastman was doing the engineering work for this new plank road. It was a cold night when we gathered around the big box stove in the sitting room, bar-room and everything else of the hotel, and my memory goes back to one of his stories. I think East- man was just back from the war where he had served with distinction in the Engineering Corps. He laid aside a pair of fur gloves as he came in and some one of the sitters around the stove attempted to put them on and I remember his stopping him. He turned to my father and said, uThe only time I ever really enjoyed having a man pull on my gloves was when I was in the army and had the itch in my hands." While Hemlock City is only sixteen or eighteen miles from Saginaw, it was at that time a great center for deer hunters, many 22 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing camping in the surrounding woods, and game of all kinds, including deer and bear, was plentiful. I have digressed purposely so that the reader will recognize the tremendous change that has taken place, for now all around Hemlock are old farms and there is hardly timber enough left in that locality to hide a chipping sparrow. The old rail fence has given place to fields that are now like a billiard table surrounded with wire fences. We left Saginaw right after breakfast and had jogged along the Gratiot Plank Road six or eight miles when ahead of us we saw turkeys crossing the road. They were only two or three hundred yards distant and there was a tremendous flock of them. My father stopped the horse and computed, from the tracks, the probable size of that flock and his conclusion was, there were about forty of them. While the wild turkey is quite generally accorded a position of eminence, I am sure that the Michigan wild turkey was a little bit the best of any of the wild turkeys of the United States. Probably the same bird that we had here in Michigan was found in western Ontario, for I do not think they extended a great way north of the lake shore. I do not mean that the Michigan wild turkey was larger or furnished larger specimens than are found elsewhere, but as a general thing he was a sturdier, nobler bird than the turkey of the south and southwest. He must have been a hardier bird to withstand Michigan winters. To my notion he com- pared with the more southern birds about the same as The Michigan Wild Turkey our Michigan quail compares with that of Georgia and Florida. I think our Michigan quail will weigh at least thirty percent more than the birds I used to find around Thomasville, Georgia — big, strong-flying, hardy birds. In full plumage and the height of his glory, there was no more gorgeous bird than these Michigan gobblers. At first glance the jewels in his raiment may not shine forth, but with a little shifting so that a different angle of the sunlight strikes him, he at once is a blaze of rubies, emeralds, sapphires and opals — a perfect shimmer of scintillating color, and as to grace and shape, no thoroughbred of the turf was his equal. Wary and cunning, and most difficult to approach, yet at times it would do one of the most foolish things imaginable, almost as bad as the ostrich that hides its head in the sand and imagines it is in- visible. I never believed in shooting wild turkeys at night or as they flew out of the trees coming from their roosts, and while willing to admit that it requires skill and patience to call a turkey, it never seemed to me just right to shoot him after you had called him; as if this method lacked in sportsmanship. We had two ways of hunting wild turkeys here in Michigan, or at least my father and I had, for it was our greatest sport. The first method was employed before snowfall, when there was no tracking snow. Take the setter or pointer that had been well broken to the game or liked it naturally — and I had one such setter in little Nippy, one of a brace — Nip and Tuck. 24 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing Tuck did not care anything about turkey hunting, but to Nippy, as I called her, for she was a little thing, it was the cream of all sport. We would go to the local- ity where we might expect turkeys, going to the beech- nut ridges where in October we were liable to find them scratching for beechnuts, or to the edge of the woods bordering on a buckwheat field, and if Nippy got the footscent of turkeys, instantly it was made known. Her tail would begin wagging at a very lively rate and she would be all grins and smiles. She would follow along not too fast and if they had been scattered and were hiding, we would get points as staunch as though we were hunting quail, and in some instances the turkeys would lie as closely as quail, but if they had not been scattered it might be a long chase after the flock until they were scattered and then picked up as singles from points. That meant an all day's hunt, for we might go a mile or more before getting the birds scattered, and it might take hours to pick up the single birds. We would be mighty tired by the time we got back to the wagon with one turkey over a back. Father and I hunting together usually were well satisfied with one bird and that ended the hunt for that day. The other method of hunting was tracking on the snow. The very first tracking snow — usually just be- fore Thanksgiving Day — was the choice of the whole year in turkey shooting. My mother always depended on us to get a wild turkey for Tranksgiving dinner, for we all agreed with her that the wild turkey was so far superior to the domestic bird that they were not to be The Michigan Wild Turkey 25 mentioned in the same breath. The pink flesh of the breast was the only apparent difference in appearance, but the flavor of our beechnut turkeys is a most pleas- ant memory after all these years. So father and I would start out turkey hunting the day after the first tracking snow. It might be out the Watrousville Plank Road, or towards Frankentrost or Blumfield, up the bottom lands of the Cass River, or to the west on the Gratiot Plank Road. It didn't make much difference; there were wild turkeys all around Saginaw, but we generally went out on the Franken- trost Road in back of John Leidlein's mill and farm or over by Charlie Zilk's. We stopped on the way to have a visit with Mrs. Riedel. In the barn of some of these good old friends of ours the faithful Dolly was left. Dolly was a family horse for over twenty years. They don't have family horses any more and they miss a lot thereby. I am going to relate one trip that will illustrate the habits of the turkey. A Day with the Turkeys Back of Charlie Zilk's We had driven about eight miles from home and put the horse away and started down the road towards the swamp. Now the swamp in this instance, and pretty generally here in turkey country, was not a mass of cat tails, bogs and muskrat houses, but a low spot in the timber, and the forest generally consisted of black ash, elm, soft maple and occasionally an undergrowth of shrubs. The ridge adjoining might be covered with 26 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing oak, maple, and beech with now and then a hickory or butternut. Great stretches of timber land still existed back in the early 70's, the time of which I write, a half century ago, but the farmers' clearings were making rapid inroads in them. Back of the farms on both sides of the road we were traveling was a great forest and we rather hoped to find tracks of the turkeys passing from one patch of woods to the other that would decide us in the direction of our hunting. Sure enough, when we reached the swamp with its heavy growth of grass and down timber that made such good winter shelter and hiding and feeding places, we came across the tracks of nine turkeys. The tracks had been made within an hour. That was good luck. When we were hunting turkeys on the snow we never took the dog along. Father shot a 10-gauge gun and I a 16. Sometimes we used No. 2 shot in the left barrel but more generally No. 4 and a good stiff charge of black powder. We took the track of the turkeys and followed along, paying no particular attention to keeping quiet and making no attempt to sneak upon them, as old Bill Mathewson, who first took my father turkey hunting explained, "Go along and sing and holler and make all the noise you want to; the turkeys will sneak off to one side thinking you will pass without seeing them." "Of course," said Mathewson, "it is no use trying to sneak up on them. They will see you and you can not do it." But by following them steadily and persistently The Michigan Wild Turkey 27 first one will separate from the flock and then another and if you take the track of one that has separated from the bunch and follow along it slowly, the first thing you know the bird will flush from almost under your nose. We hadn't gone far before we were aware that we had disturbed the birds. They had after winding through the swamp gone up on the hardwood ridge and had been scratching for their breakfast. We could tell that we had disturbed them for they seemed to have hurried a little way and then continued more leisurely. We probably had followed a quarter of a mile when one left the flock and took off toward the swamp. We followed this track and the bird led us a merry chase as they always do. They will pick out the most difficult traveling — the almost impenetrable thickets, under this old fallen log and out through an old tree top, doubling here and there until finally you come to where the track has apparently stopped. There is a clump of smart weed all covered with snow in front of you. You can apparently see where the track has gone into one side of it, but as you stand a few yards away trying to decipher the direction it had gone from there, you see no tracks beyond this little bunch of weeds that seems barely large enough to hide a turkey, yet maybe while you are trying to figure this out there is a sudden ex- plosion of the smart weed and almost in your very face, with the snow flung about you, rises on rapid, strong wing a great big turkey. If you are a novice you will have buck fever. You 28 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing may shoot and you may not, and if you do shoot you can not tell afterwards in what direction you had the gun pointed when the shot was fired, but if you are an old hand at it, you will be expecting something of this kind to happen and you will keep as cool as you can and steady yourself until the bird is at the proper dis- tance and have no difficulty in getting it down, although the old timer is occasionally fooled. I saw my father once miss a bird of this kind; he pulled off both barrels of his gun at once through some mischance. It is a wonder it did not knock him down, as he had four and one-half drams of black powder in each barrel. In this instance, however, the bird we were follow- ing laid closely. It was my father's shot and the bird was killed — a young one weighing about ten or eleven pounds. Father said that I should kill a turkey before we went home, so back we went and took up the tracks of the flock again. We hadn't followed far before we came to where three had separated from the others. One of the tracks was very large, evidently an old gobbler. After following for fifteen or twenty min- utes they in turn separated, but I kept in the lead on the track of the big fellow. He was a cunning old chap and led me a long chase. I probably followed him an hour, through one swamp and up over one ridge and then into another swamp. Once he had flown fully three hundred yards. I got a glimpse of him in flight and knowing its habit of making a straight flight, I had no difficulty in picking up the track again. A The Michigan Wild Turkey 29 turkey always will do this. If you don't see it in the air to mark the direction, take the direction from the last five footmarks, for he springs into the air after having run as fast as he can for five steps, giving him the momentum, I presume, to get his old aeroplane going, but you follow on in that direction and inside of five hundred yards you will pick up the track. There was an old elm tree that had fallen with its trunk raised about four feet off the ground. The track went under this. I had just got nicely on my knees crawling under the log when out of its very tree top the bird I had been following jumped into the air. I had to hustle and scramble to get on my feet and get a shot, but I did, and had the satisfaction of seeing him tumble — a fine gobbler that after our arrival home the scales showed twenty pounds. More time was consumed in this hunting than is apparent from the telling. I have followed an old gobbler from nine o'clock in the morning until four in the afternoon, shot at him several times during that time and yet it got away. I think that occurred with the biggest gobbler I ever saw — an old fellow that I thought surely would weigh thirty pounds. I saw him frequently but I was using a strange gun, was short of ammunition, and everything else was against me, but the greatest handicap was a case of buck fever, I guess, when I first flushed him. His enormous size completely threw me off my balance, and as it was a muzzle loading gun and I had but the two charges of coarse shot, a miss of both barrels in this case was a serious 30 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing misfortune. I slipped a pen-knife in the barrell in place of shot the next time and some cuff buttons and a fish- ing sinker in the other barrel. I had another good chance at him a couple of hours afterwards and missed, and had to let it go at that. For a good many years we had fair turkey shooting around Saginaw, but with the cutting off of the forests and the draining of the land for farm purposes, the birds became extinct, and I think those that lasted the longest and the final ones were the old gobblers — lone birds. We came across the tracks of one or two instead of a flock. The Last of His Race I think it was in the fall of 1886 that I killed the last wild turkey in Michigan. There may have been others after that date, but I have no record to show to the contrary that this bird that I got was not the last one shot. A light snow had come the night before — not more than half an inch. Bert Beach and I had planned to go partridge shooting and we took the old Detroit & Bay City Railroad morning train out of Saginaw and got off at a station nine or ten miles out of the city (I have forgotten what it was then called) intending to hunt from there to Reese and get a train on the S. T. & H. Railroad that would bring us home about half past four in the afternoon. It was about the middle of November. We had no expectation of seeing anything The Michigan Wild Turkey 31 other than ruffed grouse, but as it had in years past been the very heart and cream of the wild turkey dis- trict, as a precaution we each of us slipped some shells loaded with No. 2 shot in the left hand pocket of our hunting coats. We had my old Gordon setter Bob with us. After going about half a mile from the railroad we got into a good looking piece of partridge cover and had killed one or two birds when we came across the fresh tracks of three turkeys — and they were big tracks, too. We immediately shifted our shells and put in the heavier loads and keeping Bob to heel followed the turkey tracks, but the day was turning warm and the snow melting rapidly and before we could come up with them or get them scattered so they would hide, the snow had entirely disappeared and we could no longer follow them, although we had used two hours or more in the endeavor. Realizing that it was useless to try to find the turkeys, we resumed our grouse shooting. I know I had four or five in my pocket and Beach had about the same number. It was getting along in the afternoon and we went back into the edge of the piece of woods where we had found the turkey tracks in the morning. Beach was on the inside and I had taken the margin. Ahead of me was a big elm tree, almost at the edge of the field. It was lying on the ground with a big bushy top, and as I approached it Bob came to a point, but it was only for an instant for out of the treetop came a great turkey gobbler. He had hardly got into the air 32 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing before I shot, sending a charge of No. 7 shot well into his neck and head. Only the one barrel was necessary. It was a good shot, too, for he was fully thirty yards away. Bob attempted to fetch him to me but the turkey was thrashing around like a chicken with its head cut off and although old Bob valiantly strove to haul it to me by the neck and head, it was a bit too much for him. The old fellow had fetched turkeys to me in the past. Down in Indian Territory, I re- member one fell way out in the river and he swam out and towed it ashore. He was as much pleased I think with the result of my shot as I was myself. I was admiring the bird when Bert Beach came, and his con- gratulations were hearty and sincere. I knew I had a heavy bird and guessed his weight as around twenty pounds, but on weighing him found that I had under- estimated it, as his weight was twenty-three and three- quarters pounds. It was about three miles to Reese and we had none too much time left to get there for the home train. Tying a string to the turkey's head and to his feet made a sling that I put one arm, my shoulder and head through and started across fields and woods in an air line for Reese. With the four or five grouse in my pocket, my gun, shells and this turkey, I recall to this day what a hard lug it was, hurrying as we had to. We made the train all right and were home after a most successful day. This bird was mounted and is in my collection of mounted birds, and although all these years have The Michigan Wild Turkey 33 elapsed — some thirty-seven or thirty-eight — is still in perfect condition and as radiant as an oriental jewel box. In Conclusion Our Michigan wild turkeys rarely went into the trees, at least that was my experience in hunting them. Once in a great while if a dog suddenly rushed into a flock and scattered them, putting them on wing, one might take a tree, but I think in all my hunting ex- perience I only once have seen a Michigan turkey in a tree. They were very fond of buckwheat. If there was a buckwheat field in the turkey neighborhood, it would be pretty sure early in the morning that the turkeys would go to it to feed. They did not get out into the field any farther than they had to, always keeping under cover of the woods nearby, but they would scratch off the snow no matter how deep it was to get buckwheat, and the same was true of beechnuts or acorns. Then, too, they liked the swamps such as I have described before. These swampy places in the woodlands frequently had patches of coarse grasses, the seed of which the turkeys liked. No matter how heavy the snowfall, there were most always sheltered places in these swamps. A down tree along side of which this heavy swamp grass would grow made an ideal resting place and shelter for them. After feeding time in the morning (and I presume evening as well, but I never observed their evening feeding) the turkeys would go to these swamps for 34 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing shelter and probably safety. I have known of their gathering in great droves in one swamp — two or three flocks assembling there. The wild turkey never extended very far north in Michigan; in the eastern part of the state probably not beyond the Kawkawlin River in Bay County. They liked the hardwood forests, the pine and jack pine plains did not appeal to them, and the character of the land north of the Kawkawlin was a pine country pretty largely. The southern part of Michigan from the northern line that I have mentioned was well stocked with turkeys originally. The clearing off of the forests and the inroads of settlement caused their final exter- mination. In the Indian Territory years ago, back in the early 8o's, I had many successful turkey hunts. My com- panion and I once discovering turkeys feeding under the trees in a nearby grove rode rapidly amongst them; we were on horseback. The birds flew down into the river bottom where it was flanked by a high horseshoe bluff. They were scattered and we knew they would lie well to the dog. My companion had a black and tan Gordon setter, Mose by name, and old Mose gave us several points. We could have killed more turkeys but we only wanted two or three for camp use and these were easily obtained. Frequently during that fall did I shoot turkeys over points of Mose where they had been scattered in the manner as described above, but they were not our Michigan turkeys by a long shot. These southern birds were not feathered like our The Michigan Wild Turkey 35 native birds were. They were lighter in color, and to my notion did not come anywhere near the average size, but they were all grand, glorious game birds and it is too bad that they are gone forever here in Michigan. Pigeons and Squabs Extract from Paper Read Before the Michigan Sportman's Association at Battle Creek, Michigan, Feb. 6th, 1878, by Prof. H. B. Roney of East Saginaw HE last but one of the prominent deficiencies of our game laws has now been reached. I refer to the yearly slaughter of fledgling pigeons, known as 'squabs/ and the netting of live pigeons for trap shooting in this and other states. In 1875 Newaygo county contained a pigeon nesting of large proportions, partially upon the lands of the F. & P. M. Railway Co. Information of the destruction of the timber coming to the knowledge of the railway authorities, an agent was despatched to the locality to arrest the work. From this gentleman I obtained my information. "On arriving at the nesting he found a large number of persons, a portion of them Indians, some felling trees, each one of which contained from one to fifty nests, according to its size and branches, and others in gathering the birds. As fast as the trees fell the half feathered and fluttering fledglings, scarcely able to fly, were seized or knocked down with sticks, their necks quickly wrung, thrown into baskets, and from thence emptied into barrels. These were hauled to the station for shipment, two and three teams being required daily 36 Pigeons and Squabs 37 to transport the murdered birds as fast as killed. The warehouse, a building 20 x 60 feet in size, my inform- ant found literally full of dead young pigeons, the floor being covered in many places to a depth of three or four feet, all awaiting shipment. Over 1,500 acres of timber had been 'slashed over' in the merciless pur- suit after the young birds, and the entire shipments he estimated to be between forty and fifty tons of 'squabs' during the nesting. The responsible head of this in- human slaughter was a wealthy Ohio farmer who spent half his time in that business, and had for years fol- lowed up the pigeons to their nestings, from place to place, to slaughter the young birds by tons and entrap the old birds by tens of thousands for shipment out of the state, he having at that time on hand one thou- sand dozen live birds confined within some smothering lumber shanties awaiting shipment. "At another and larger nesting in Oceana county, of which I could not obtain statistical information, resi- dents and those qualified to speak said there were shipped ten barrels of ' 'squabs' for every barrel at the Newaygo county nesting. "At another nesting in Grand Traverse county, in the same year, there were 900 persons employed in entrapping live birds and slaughtering and shipping 'squabs' to market. To those who have never visited or seen one of those marvelous and gigantic colonies of the feathered tribe known as pigeon nestings, these statements may seem incredible. Those who have been so fortunate will corroborate them, as my information 38 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing is collected from those who have seen them with their own eyes. From the three nestings in Newaygo, Oceana and Grand Traverse counties in 1875 there were shipped to outside markets 1,000 tons, or 2,000,- 000 pounds of young 'squabs,' while not less than 200,- 000 dozen or 2,400,000 birds were entrapped and shipped to all parts of the United States and England. "At this rate how long will it take to kill every wild pigeon in Michigan? Were it not for the fact that they nest two and sometimes three times a year, and conse- quently give opportunity for more birds to escape, we might reasonably expect their almost immediate anni- hilation. Sportsmen of Michigan, if we do not protect our game, who will take care of it for us? "To the question of shooting live pigeons from a trap, I will not refer, as that does not come within the province of this article, but against supplying the rest of the United States with pigeons I do most em- phatically protest. It will not be until Michigan re- fuses to furnish to other states her game property, that those states will turn their attention to the better con- struction and the better enforcement of their own game laws." BAND TAILED PIGEON Often mistaken for the Passenger Pigeon. This is the pigeon of the Pacific Coast mountains. Note the square tail and distinctive band. Grouse and Quail IT IS almost unbelievable how plentiful ruffed grouse were in this part of Michigan, and by "this part" I mean that territory in which we could get a good day's hunting either by leaving Saginaw on foot or with horse and wagon, or as we did a little later on, going out ten or twenty miles on the early morning trains of the several railroads that reached towards the four points of the compass into partridge country. On the Michigan Central south as far as St. Charles and north to Kawkawlin, Saganing or Pinconning; west on the Pere Marquette to Freeland or Smith's Crossing, or southeast to Blackmar or Birch Run; east on the S. T. & H. Railroad to Creens, Kintner and Fairgrove; and last, but not least, there was the Saginaw Valley & St. Louis to probably the best and greatest of all the partridge country — around Hemlock, Merrill and Wheeler. One could go farther and still get into splen- did shooting territory, but I and my companions sel- dom went beyond the stations named. It was quite a long while before I learned the habits of partridge. (We generally said pa'tridge.) I hunted too much in the thick woods. Later on I found that they come out to the edges to feed. Follow along the edge of a popple thicket, especially where there was 39 4° Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing clover, or into an old chopping full of stumps, brush heaps and logs among which was growing clover, and there you were sure to find the birds, especially after three o'clock in the afternoon. Sometimes you would get them quite a distance from cover and the shooting was comparatively easy, but often the easiest shots are the ones you miss. One time when Eben N. Briggs and myself, for Eben and I hunted together many years, were up near Free- land, we came out at a place such as I have described without realizing at that time that the birds ever came into the open. We had been shooting in the densest of thickets when old Bob, my original old Gordon setter, came to a point at a brush heap some distance from the woods. We both went to him, not expecting par- tridge, when first one bird and then another got up. Bob made point after point and we made miss after miss. Whether it was the novelty of it and our surprise that rattled us we never could make out, but at any rate we put up twelve or fifteen birds in about as many minutes and succeeded in killing but two of them; just as open shooting as if we were shooting prairie chick- ens. We made the usual complimentary remarks to each other and then followed the birds back into the thick popples. We succeeded in finding quite a num- ber of them and my recollection is that we killed eight birds almost hand running in the thickest, hardest kind of cover to shoot in. Briggs and I hunted the Freeland and Smith's Cross- ing territory for many years. We could get a train Grouse and Quail 41 that left Saginaw at eight o'clock; it was only a half hour's run and we could begin hunting within less than a quarter of a mile of the little station and at four or four-thirty the return train to Saginaw got us home tired and happy in ample time for dinner. I think in those days, though, we called it "supper." We hadn't risen to the dignity of designating the evening meal as "dinner." Ten or eleven ruffed grouse was our usual bag. I know that we went up five times one fall and got fifty- five birds. Another time I was there alone and came home with my pockets well filled, for I had ten par- tridge and quail. We always had a few quail to mix with the partridge. I recall once I was at Smith's Crossing with Jack Morley. I had a great deal of shooting and by one o'clock when we met for lunch I had used up all of my shells. I don't know how many birds I had — my pockets were well filled — a dozen or fifteen anyhow of partridge alone and a plentiful trimming of quail. Jack had been shooting a good deal, but not as much as I, and he had not been shooting well, for he was quite blue, only having two or three birds. He was shooting a 12 and I a 16-gauge, so he could not give me any ammunition. I went along with him with my dog and when we would get a point, he would take a favorable location and I would go in from the other side and flush the bird. We were hunting back to the station, and the birds were just as plentiful as they were in the morning, and I know when we took the train we were 42 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing both satisfied that we had all the birds white men should have. I have had old Bob point quail when he was bringing another bird to me. He was a beautiful retriever, but it remained for Bob 2nd, a big, strong Gordon that I think was the best partridge dog I ever saw, to give me a staunch point on a partridge when he had one in his mouth that he was bringing to me. I was hunting with Archie McLeod near Merrill. We had but the one dog. The thicket was very dense and Bob had gone to fetch a bird that I had just killed. Archie, who was on the other side of the thicket, called to me and said Bob was on a point and he had a partridge in his mouth. I told him to go in and kill the bird. I could see the dog pointing staunchly with the partridge hanging from his mouth, but I was in no position to shoot. Archie put it up and killed it and Bob after fetching the orig- inal bird to me went back and got the second one. Another time McLeod and I were hunting south of Merrill. We got into a lot of birds. I killed more than Archie, because he allowed me more of the shots, but we had thirty-two quail and twenty-six grouse be- tween us for the day. These were big bags of course, but not anywhere near what the professionals or market shooters considered a good day. McLeod shot for the market in the old days, and then after the law stopped the selling of game he went to breaking dogs and guiding people and taking out hunting parties, and he was a most excellent companion. He knew the country and where to have the wagon meet us at night Grouse and Quail 43 — an invaluable aid to a sportsman shooting in a strange country where you had to get back to catch the evening train for home. More birds were shot in this same country for the market than any of the localities I have mentioned. We had a lot of market shooters in and around Saginaw in those days, men who did nothing else after the season opened. There were Gary Fleming, Leander Lee, Bode and Tom Ralph. The latter killed a great many woodcock. It was said that he used to anticipate a few days so as to have a lard can or two on ice filled with woodcock by the time opening day came. A good many of them were not very technical, I guess. I have induced C. E. Pettit, now one of the state game wardens, to give me an account of his early experiences as a market hunter. A number of the best game wardens of today were market hunters in the old days. You will recall how Jack Miner, if you ever heard him give his most interesting lecture, tells how he was a market hunter and then changed to one of the greatest game protectors that the country has ever known. Pettit's letter reads like butchery, of course, but you must remember the times. It was perfectly legal to market game, there was no bag limit, and no one realized that the cover was going to be cut off or burned off as rapidly and that with it wild life would become scarce almost to the verge of extinction. I had talked with Pettit a number of times and recalled some of his stories. I hunted one day with his brother 44 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing Rufus. He used a io-gauge gun and a handful of No. 10 shot and shot very quickly. He gave me a race to start with. I found that I had to speed up a bit. After that I held my own with him fairly well. So one day not long ago, I got Pettit to write a story of the old days of market hunting and here is his letter word by word. Don't criticize the individual, criticize the generation, if you will, that wasn't far-sighted enough to see what the inevitable result of unrestricted slaughter was bound to be; but read for yourself. Clare, Michigan, Jan. 16th, 1922. Dear Mr. Mershon: In looking over some of my old records and re- freshing my memory, I can give you some information regarding the market hunters of the village of Hem- lock during the seasons when partridge were most plentiful. There were five of us — Edward and Hank Beamish, George Wilkins, my brother Rufus Pettit, and myself. L. Thomas & Bro., storekeepers at Hemlock, bought all the birds the five of us killed for at least two or three seasons. One season in particular I remember Thomas Bros, shipped over 4,000 birds, mostly killed by us five hunters. The season of 1891 my brother and myself started out on the morning of September 1st, that being the first day of the open season. We made our favorite trip that we used to call "going around the world," being from Hemlock to Merrill, Merrill to Fremont,, Grouse and Quail 45 Fremont to Hemlock, this being a trip of twenty miles by section line. That day I killed forty birds, all par- tridge and I carried them all in my hunting coat, this coat being made to order with double game pockets clear round. I started out with seventy-five shells and a big lunch — some load to start with. That day I should think we put up about two thousand birds. We never followed them as we could find plenty on our regular course. The loungers at the store where we dumped our birds would make bets as to who would kill the most birds, and if any one of the five of us killed less than twenty-five, he would not show up at the store that night, but would sneak them in the next morning. The fall of 1894, the last season for market shoot- ing, my brother and I went to Highwood on the Mich- igan Central eight miles from Gladwin on the Titta- bawassee. That night we made arrangements to board with the section foreman stationed there. The fol- lowing morning we crossed the railroad bridge and went up the Tittabawassee one half mile to the mouth of the Molasses. We crossed the Molasses on saw- logs and found a tote road running parallel between the two rivers. We went up this road about three miles, shooting all the way up. We sat and ate our lunch and shot all the way back. On arriving at our boarding house we took inventory and found we had sixty-eight partridge. The next day we made the same trip and got only fifty-two. The third day we made the same trip, only going a little farther up the tote 46 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing road. We got forty-four this day. The fourth day we tried down the river but I do not remember what we got; I know it was not very successful. The fifth day we went back up again and got around forty again, but I never saw such shooting as there was along that tote road. As soon as the dogs would point we would walk in and commence to shoot and we could see the birds flying as far down the road as you could see. The dogs would retrieve the birds on command and we would start on again with the same result. It seemed like one continuous flock. As soon as the birds took flight they would make straight for the cedar swamp on both sides of the road. We stayed at this place until we had shipped three barrels of birds to H. T. Phillips, com- mission merchant at Detroit. This being the last season for market shooting, I sold my dogs and quit the business, and have killed but very few birds since. Most sincerely, C. E. Pettit. Inasmuch as I am writing these recollections of the old days, and knowing in the beginning that I will be called a game hog, I might just as well be hung for an old sheep as a lamb, and am reproducing an article written by Emerson Hough as it appeared in Forest and Stream in December, 1897. That is but twenty- five years ago, and this hunting took place after the very best nearby partridge cover had been cleared and turned into farms, but you will recognize that it was Grouse and Quail 47 in the Merrill district that I have before spoken of as probably the best partridge ground nearby Saginaw. The pointer, old "Jack," that Hough mentioned was "Jack of Naso" and bred in the velvet. The Gordon "Bob" was Bob 2nd. It was the hard winters that killed our quail. We never hunted 10% of the quail country around Merrill, and at the close of the season birds would be plentiful, what today would be called extra thick, worlds of them, but if we happened to get a bad winter, then it was all off and we would have to wait several years before we could begin quail shooting again. Hough went with me on a number of shooting and fishing trips. Once on the Little Manistee River a bear crossed the stream right in front of him. He was with me on the Black River at Camp Higgins and took his first and only Michigan grayling. This was the last year we caught grayling. The party during that trip took about forty. The next year they were gone. I think only one was taken and that was the last grayling that I ever saw in the Lower Peninsula. "Michigan Grouse and Quail" "Chicago, 111., Dec. 2, 1897. — Which he was the mayor, and they called him Pirate Bill, and he asked me to come along of him, so I came along. We took the train and rode and rode and rode till we got to the edge of the world, a place where the lumbermen had long since robbed the earth and left only stumps and burnings and slashings, all overgrown with hard- 48 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing wood trees and thickets and briers and brush, and with here and there a sad and solitary corn or wheat field thrusting out into the wilderness, where some farmer had gotten stranded and hadn't money enough to get back to his wife's folks. It was good, crispy, fall hunt- ing weather. We had two good dogs — Bob, a Gordon, and Jack, an old-time meat dog, a pointer over thirteen years of age, with both front feet swelled out of shape by rheumatism and a jowl pendulous with age, but with a heart untamed by anything. We had to help Jack over the fences, and he could only waddle a few yards ahead of us, but he kept on waddling right into points on grouse and quail, and when we killed a bird he would go and bring it in like a gentleman. I had just come from some field trials, and of course the subject of retrieving is taboo at a field trial. But at sight of this venerable old meat dog with his waddle and his point and his retrieve, I felt that the world was not without its recompenses after all. "The Pirate said he didn't care for any quail and that he was going to show me some ruffed grouse with a lot more fun. And we did find the grouse, plenty of them as that sort of thing goes — I think perhaps we put up fifteen grouse that day and bagged only five between us. But we had so much walking and so much fun with these fellows that we hardly stopped to think about the quail. Once in a while we would blunder over a bevy of quail at the edge of a slashing we were working for grouse, and would mark them down a quarter of a mile in the thicket — I never saw quail Grouse and Quail 49 fly so far — and then we would go after them until we put up a grouse and followed off after him. Towards evening we concluded to pick up a few quail, and we found a bevy on every stubble field that we struck. We would get our double shot on the rise over the point on the stubble, old Jack and young Bob both doing hand- somely for us, and then we would follow the singles into the worst sort of cover. It was hard shooting, but we found the pockets getting fuller little by little. The Pirate was a corker of a field shot, and he was fully posted on the local wrinkles of getting at the birds, so we had a lovely day. One odd little bit of shooting I remember very well. We had marked a bevy down at the edge of a little open wood, and killed one or two singles as they went up. All at once four birds sprang out together from the edge of a brush heap. Three went straight ahead and the fourth twisted over our heads and went back of us. We fired first at those going in front, and I killed with each barrel and the Pirate killed the third. Then he swung around quickly after the fourth bird, which had gone back of us, and with a pyrotechnic sort of shot killed that one also, a long way back of us, as it was topping the woods and going like a ghost. I do not think this little piece of work, on all four of the birds, would be soon seen re- peated, even by so distinguished a pair of shots as our- selves. Anyhow, we did it. "At night we counted up our birds and found that we had twenty-six in all, five ruffed grouse and twenty-one quail. We had gone over very good quail country 5° Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing that had not been shot very much, and we thought that we could have killed fifty birds between us if we had cared to hunt quail. Our friend, Mr. McCarthy, had poorer luck on his round, and got but few quail. Two other gentlemen were shooting at the same place, and one, Mr. Davis, with his guide, killed, if my memory serves me, nearly fifty quail that day. Mr. Davis did not care to hunt grouse. The other gentleman was Mr. Stone, who also had a local guide, and they got some twenty or thirty birds, I believe ; so that all in all we had a grand lot of game. "The next day the Pirate and I again took up our system of exterminating all the grouse, and we exter- minated them just about the way we did the day before, bagging five more glorious big fellows, every one fully earned and fully enjoyed. This was the finest ruffed grouse country I was ever in during all my life, and though we did not see more than a dozen or a dozen and a half of these birds in all, we had plenty to do with these. We missed but one fair or easy shot where I let a bird get away which Bob had pointed right under our feet at a log, and which went up in broad daylight and in full view for a wonder. This bird I think had had a leg broken by an earlier shot from my compan- ion's gun, but you have to break a leg or two on a grouse before it forgets how to fly, so we never got this fellow at all, much to our sorrow, though we put him up again in thick cover. We did not strike such good quail country this time, for the bevies had been shot into and broken up, and the birds were wild as hawks, Grouse and Quail 5i flying to all sorts of distances when put up. Our bag that night was five grouse and only sixteen quail, I think. Mr. McCarthy improved his score this day, and our friend Mr. Briggs had better luck, getting five grouse himself and over a dozen quail. Dr. Davis and his guide had top bag, if I recollect, about sixty quail, and Mr. Stone and his man brought in over a dozen each, if the figures remain in memory correctly. I know the total was a very large one that night and showed very plainly that we were in a remarkably good game country. "The next day the Pirate went home and I went out for a little hunt with Mr. Davis and Archie, his guide, an old market hunter. The latter I found to be a rat- tling good field shot. He used a Winchester pump gun, close choked, but he never lost any time getting onto his bird, and when he fired he usually got meat. I always think that a man who kills half his quail is a good shot, and that three out of five is excellent. Whether Archie can always do it or not I do not know, but I am sure he killed over 80% of his birds that day, in all sorts of cover. I don't think I ever saw any man shoot quail so well. So much could not be said for Mr. Davis and myself, who each had a bad streak. The dogs, Monk of Elmo (Tony for short) and Doc, per- formed perfectly. We bagged to the three guns — mostly Archie's — forty-two birds that day, I think, and of these, nine were ruffed grouse. Think of that! We killed three grouse almost before we got started. Then Archie got off from us in the wood and put up 52 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing four grouse, and only killed them all ! A while later we heard him shoot once in a bit of brush near by, and perhaps half an hour afterward thought to ask him what he was shooting at. " 'Pa'tridge,' said Archie. " 'Why didn't you kill it?' (This in would-be deri- sion of him.) " 'Oh, I did kill it," said he, innocently. And, in fact, we found that when he shot at a grouse he rarely did anything but kill it. It is all right to talk about the wonderful skill of this bird in evading man, and it is certainly a hard bird to kill, but after this it is in my mind forever shorn of its glory. It can not only be killed easily and in good average, but it can be killed in a great big per cent by a man who knows how to shoot. Archie did not miss any more grouse than he did quail, and he shot a close choked gun at that. I learn more about these things as I get older. Had Mr. Davis and I shot as well as Archie did, we would have had more birds than I should have liked to see. Mr. Stone and his man shot near us, but in poor luck, only getting about a dozen birds. This closed my trip, a very plea- ant one indeed, with quite enough shooting in it to make it eventful. "But this does not end the record of that country, as I shall go on to show. Since my return the Pirate has written me about a little further shooting he has had in the same spot. When I saw him last he was a very sad and penitent man. He said he had been neglecting his business shamefully, and he wished that Grouse and Quail 53 people like me would stay away and let him make a little money to keep the wolf from the door, and not be pestering him to go shooting all the time. At any rate, not under any consideration would he go hunting again that season, for he had had enough, and knew when he had enough. Such is the disposition of man! Who has not made similar resolves? His letter does not bear quite the same tenor, for he seems to have gone out for 'just one more day/ and then two or three more, according to the evidence. " 'We had two pretty good days, didn't we?' he says. 'I enjoyed it immensely. I feel, however, like an old bum that has deserted business entirely and become a backwoodsman. I just got back last night from seeing the season out and am glad the shooting is over with. Between now and the first of May when brook trout are ripe, I may be able to establish a repu- tation for hard work and attending to business; but it has been sadly shattered for sometime. " 'My friend, Dr. S., showed up on the noon train. It rained all that day, but the next morning we took the train for our place, with Briggs and McCarthy along. Archie went with the Doctor and myself, Glad- win with Mr. McCarthy; Mr. Briggs, who likes to shoot alone, going by himself. " 'We no sooner got over the fence than old Bob made a rush across the fields, head up. He quartered it in good style and came up like a rock; but the new dog the Doctor had brought with him had never seen a quail before, and he lit in the middle of the covey in 54 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing about ten jumps, so we did not get a chance at them. Then we got into bad territory; we got up lots of birds, but they got into pieces of woods like that one you and I struck that night where we stood on some high logs, and after knocking down two or three birds we gave it up as a bad job. " 'In the afternoon we got into better territory and got a covey scattered in short brush, and my black dog worked to perfection (I had left old Jack at home) and bird after bird was picked up; I think only one got away. Pretty soon Bob began roading, and picked up a second covey right in the same patch; they scattered close by, and we began trimming them out, when up got the third covey. We were shooting fast and furi- ous ; I never had anything like it. I have forgotten just how many the three of us trimmed out, but I think it was seventy-one birds we had in our pockets that night. At any rate, all told, the party had ninety-six, and I am quite certain that I had my share of them. (I did Archie up brown that day.) " 'After that Archie went with Mr. Davis, and we hunted by ourselves. Mr. McCarthy was laid up with a stiff back one day, and another day there was such a wind blowing that it made it almost impossible to do anything, your fingers would get so numb, but we put in our time just the same, making four days, and we divided our birds fair and square last night and had sixty-two quail and four partridge each, that is, for each of the four. The rats or cats had gotten at one of the strings in the barn and must have used up a Grouse and Quail 55 dozen of them. Pretty nearly slaughter, wasn't it? But the birds were there just as thick when we quit as in the beginning, and we can do it all over again another year, and hope you will be able to enjoy some of it. " 'I have not forgotten how we knocked down those four birds that left the ground at the same time. Mc- Carthy and I came pretty near it; three got up and we got all three of them, then struck a bunch of five par- tridge. We killed the first three that jumped, the other two got away while our guns were empty. We fol- lowed them up and got one of them. " 'Dec. 2 — I dictated this letter yesterday, but there was so much to write that it did not get away. I learned of something that really makes me sad, unless McCarthy is stuffing me. He sent word last night that I missed one day of the hunting season; that the law reads: 'the first of December, inclusive;' at least, he says so; whereas I supposed we could only shoot up to the first of December. Now, isn't that too bad for a fellow that is so sadly in need of exercise and hunting as I am? It is meaner still for McCarthy to twit me about it. " 'By the way, the last day, in the afternoon, I ran across a bit of cover that seemed to have a good many ruffed grouse in it. The first one I flushed among some burnt logs, while I was hunting out a bevy of scattered quail. I went in the woods a little further and old Bob made a fine point; the bird was killed, and he went after it. When he came in about half way he stopped, threw his head to one side, and then made as 56 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing stiff and pretty a point as you ever saw, with this great, big grouse still in his mouth. This produced another bird. A little later on he made another point, which was also added to the bag. I think if I had had time to hunt that patch of wood I could have found twelve or fifteen grouse easily enough/ "The foregoing record is a large one, though more surprising in the grand totals than for the daily scores. An average of over fifteen birds to the gun for four days is an unusual one nowadays. Many may ask how it comes that such a shooting country still exists in the north, but I may reply that this is a result of close protection. These few guns did well this year. Throw this little country open to all the guns, and half a dozen birds to the gun would be above the average. The shooting there is still good because the market hunting has stopped there, but I do not think the local- ity can stand even so heavy a drain as is above men- tioned for very many seasons, nor do I believe that such shooting is to be predicted for any unpreserved country in the north for any very great length of time. I enjoyed most of all the sport with the grouse, of which I had never before seen so many on a hunt. E. Hough. 1206 Boyce Building, Chicago." Forest and Stream, December 11, 1897. Duck Shooting THE Saginaw River is only about twenty-two miles in length. Down its placid course has floated more white pine saw-logs than any other stream in the world. It was the main artery of river transport- ation for saw-logs, so to speak, for into it came other rivers, lesser arteries, that reached out through and into a large part of the pine growing area on the east- ern side of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. From the northwest comes the Tittabawassee and into it is poured the waters of many rivers. From the southeast comes the Cass that reached the old Cass River pine territory — big, soft, glorious pine, such as the world never saw elsewhere — the cork pine of old. I have seen Cass River logs that would produce per- fectly clear white pine plank four inches in thickness and four feet in width. The third or middle stream that merges into and meets the Saginaw is the Shia- wassee, which also has numerous branches of consider- able magnitude, such as the Flint River coming in from the southeast, the Bad from the opposite shore and farther up, and so on. All these streams flow through what was originally a pine forest, and in the old days, for I am going back to half a century, before such a thing as a logging 57 58 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing railroad was known, the logs were banked on the streams in the winter time and with the spring freshet the rollways were broken in and the drive began. Near the mouths of the Tittabawassee, Shiawassee and Cass were booming grounds. Great rows of spiles and boom sticks chained together made pockets and separate pens for the various brands of logs, which were stamped on the end with iron hammers bearing the insignia of the various owners. At these booms these brands were separated and sorted and done up into rafts that were held together by a rope and pin — an oak pin driven into the log amidships around which was wrapped the rope. Then the logs were floated with the gentle current down to the booms of the owners, or the sawmills where they were to be sawn. Later on small steam tugs were employed to handle larger rafts and tow them to destination more promptly. For nearly twenty miles on either side of the Saginaw River above Saginaw City, past East Saginaw, Carrollton, Crow Island, Zilwaukee, Melbourne, to Bay City with its suburbs Portsmouth, Bangor and Banks, was almost a continuous string of sawmills, so that when the saw- ing season in the summer time was about over and the docks were piled full of lumber, it was almost a solid lumber pile on both sides of the river from Saginaw to Bay City, and the logs covered the surface of the water so thickly that at times it was difficult for the steam- boats to find a channel, for in those days we had water connection with Cleveland and Detroit. Passenger Duck Shooting 59 boats ran regularly and there was an hourly service by passenger boat between Saginaw and Bay City. How times have changed. There is not a single sawmill on the Saginaw River today cutting pine. One or two mills are sawing the remnants of the hardwood timber that half a century ago was considered worth- less, and that today brings a higher price per thousand than the very best of the white pine did. Back from the river edge, both below and above Saginaw, stretched great areas of marsh land. I don't know why I call it "marsh land," other than that it is the common expression, for this was marsh pure and simple with no land to be seen in it, tremendous beds of wild rice miles in extent, pond holes with cattails, musk- rat houses, pond weed, water lilies — both yellow and white, and all the surroundings and inhabitants that an ideal old fashioned duck marsh ever contained, even to the sonorous old bullfrog that on moonlight summer nights concerted and bellowed, making a music that many a night has lulled me to sleep even in the heart of my home town, East Saginaw. Of course these tremendous stretches of marsh land meant quantities of wild fowl. The marshes were inaccessible except by boat or canoe. Then a railroad was built from Saginaw to Bay City. Dredges went through the marsh and put up an embankment. Then more railroads followed. An interurban line rattled slappety bang through the very heart of the duck country. Dykes and ditches re- claimed hundreds and hundreds of acres to make 60 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing so-called prairie farms that were hard to subdue, but when the wild grasses were finally exterminated, some of these reclaimed areas were developed into rich farms. But with all of these changes came the lessening of the wild fowl, so that where half a century or more ago the ducks congregated in hundreds of thousands, today even though there are in places large rice beds left, the ducks are few and far between and only steal in in the night-time to feed, and spend the day out on the safe broad bosom of Saginaw Bay. Around the mouth of the Flint River was the Mish- tegay. I have spelled it phonetically; I don't know what the meaning of the word is, probably derived from the Chippewa language. Then Ferguson Bayou put off from the Shiawassee and extended up towards the Flint, its earlier reaches being tremendous rice marshes. Then the shores of this bayou became fringed with trees of black walnut, elm, basswood, oak and hickory to which clung enormous wild grape vines. This was a great home of the woodduck, and black and gray squirrels innumerable. These up river marshes were miles in extent. The combined length of the two marshes I have mentioned was upwards of twenty miles, and in breadth from a mile to three or four miles. All along the margin of the river were rice fields from a few hundred feet to hundreds of yards in width. Below Saginaw the rice beds of Crow Island, Cheboyganning and Squaconning were of great area. The duck boats then in use were canoes made from a single white pine log and were very ticklish affairs to Duck Shooting 61 ride in. They used to say that one had to have his hair parted in the middle to keep them balanced. The first time I was taken duck shooting was when I was a boy seven or eight years of age. My father sent to school after me early in the afternoon, I re- member, and I was told that I was to go duck shooting with my father. He was all ready and we went to the river bank where his small dugout or canoe was fas- tened, and his old black and tan pointer, Sport, curled up in the bow. This old pointer was a wonderful fel- low — a pure black and tan and had come from Ire- land, or his parents had, I have forgotten which, but he was one of the few pointers that I have ever known that liked to retrieve ducks. My father paddled down stream a mile or so to the marshes near the mouth of what we called the Salt Works Bayou — an extensive marsh that was above Crow Island. Here he shoved the boat through a narrow lane in the wild rice to the edge of a pond hole, where he had built a blind which I recall was sort of a platform of slabs, boards and stakes well screened with rushes and rice. I don't think he had any decoys, but was in the habit of coming down here for what was known as the evening shooting. Just before sundown the ducks came in in swarms. I know he shot several and the old black and tan pointer fetched them. Then we paddled home in the evening. My father was in the habit of taking these little afternoon hunts in the fall. He was a busy man and couldn't get away from his work for long at a time, but two or three hours in the 62 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing afteroon gave him such shooting as we would go long distances to get now. The first duck that I killed was a green-winged teal, and he looked to me to be bigger than any mallard has ever looked since. I was about ten years old and was taken with my uncle to a marshy meadow where they had cut the prairie grass from a portion of it. My first gun was a double barrel 16-gauge muzzle loader, of course, made by Playfair of Aberdeen, Scotland, a beautiful weapon, and it must have been a good shoot- ing gun, for I used it for years. The ducks were pass- ing over this piece of marshy meadow and we were blinded, and I was instructed how to hold the gun for a passing shot, and I recall distinctly this teal passing over my head and just before he got right over me I fired and had the good fortune to kill it. I dropped the gun and ran and picked it up and gloated over it. Rarely have I made a shot that gave me more satis- faction. My father was an excellent shot. He used a muzzle loading io-gauge gun that I believe was made by W. & C. Scott & Sons of Birmingham. He probably had other guns before this, but my early recollection goes back to this particular weapon of which he was very fond and proud. A 12-gauge gun in those days was looked upon with little favor and a 16-gauge was only suitable for a boy. I might say in passing that I have continued to use a 16-gauge gun all my life. I never owned a larger gun. I have used that gauge for all the wonderful shooting we had around Saginaw for Duck Shooting 63 many years — plover, snipe, quail, grouse, ducks, etc., and in the many trips that I made to the northwest after ducks and geese it was my weapon and proved fully as effective as the larger guns that some of the members of the party used. We used to go to Carr's Landing, a place five or six miles above Saginaw — Jimmy Carr's landing to be exact. It was a place where the land and forest came right to the river bank and one could land without hav- ing to go through an interminable distance of marsh. It was a favorite camping spot for duck hunters. Wal- nuts, butternuts and hickory nuts were plentiful. That meant lots of squirrels in that vicinity, so that the camp menu was varied from ducks and snipe to young squir- rels fried with salt pork — a dish that even to this day the thought of makes me smack my lips. My father had a shooting companion — Charlie Richman. They used to hunt together in one of these little canoes and take turns in paddling, one shooting from the bow while the other paddled, and early in the season this was their favorite mode of duck shooting — jumping the ducks out of the rice. One night we were camping at Carr's Landing, for as a boy I was frequently taken along even before I did much shoot- ing. It was an exceedingly bright moonlight night and after the campfire had died down and we were trying to sleep, the quacking of the ducks made such a racket that my father proposed to his companion that they play one game of seven-up to see who should paddle for the other one to shoot and see what luck they could 64 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing have by jumping the ducks against the moonlight. They went out and did some shooting, but what their success was I don't recall. One day's shooting my father spoke of a great many times and that was when he and Charlie Richman, tak- ing turns in this same way on the marshes below Sag- inaw, had killed 103 ducks in one day, which was looked upon as a big bag, as it was with muzzle loaders and but one man shooting at a time. As to ducks. First we had the bluewinged teal and wood ducks. Then came the mallards, and last, or latest in the season, the so-called fall ducks, an expres- sion that is used for these late comers in some sections even today. These fall ducks meant the scaup or blue bill, of which we had both the greater and the lesser, the redhead and an occasional canvasback, but the latter was a rare bird on the Saginaw River. Neither do I recall in those early days that we had many widgeon or pintail, and the black duck was hardly known. Once in two or three years my father might get one of these and then it was passed around as a curiosity. Later on black ducks began to increase. Where formerly there was probably a thousand mallards killed to one black duck, now on the Saginaw marshes and those near by on Saginaw Bay there are three black ducks shot to one mallard. These black ducks have been steadily pro- gressing westward until they have become compara- tively abundant, not only in western Michigan but across the lake in Wisconsin, Minnesota and northern and central Illinois. Duck Shooting 65 For wood ducks the favorite place was Ferguson's Bayou or some of the little woodland lagoons that jutted off from the Tittabawasee or Cass, and Swan Creek, a tributary from the west putting into the Shia- wassee a mile or so above Jim Carr's Landing. That was a wonderful place for woodducks. After I had become a boy of twelve or fourteen, my father and I went up Ferguson Bayou early in the season. Our season opened in those days the first of September. We were putting up woodducks, one paddling the other and we changed places upon missing a shot. I found that my portion at the paddle was far longer than my father's. I recall once we were woodcock shooting. This must have been early in September. Our shooting ground was along the banks of the Tittabawassee near where the Michigan Central, then the J. L. & S. Railway, bridge crosses it. An old salt works stood there. I don't know who built it in the first place, but it was afterwards run by Ed Andrews who had a shingle mill in connection. Just beyond the salt works was a wood bayou or lagoon; tag alders, red willows and saggi- tarius fringed the shore; a dark, shadowy place, and along its margin we were looking for woodcock. As we approached the water hole wood ducks began to get up and leave it. There were dozens and dozens of them. We did not shoot at any of them, according to my father's direction. He said, "Wait awhile, they will be coming back and we will get some shooting." We were using No. 10 shot and muzzle loaders, 66 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing remember. Pretty soon a pair of ducks came back and then a few more. They kept stringing in and we, standing on the margin where we could pick up the ducks we killed, shot until we had twenty-two wood ducks, killed with No. 10 shot — the end of a perfect day's woodcock shooting. The next ducks to call our attention were blue- winged teal. I never did much of this shooting. The best of it had passed and gone before I was old enough, but I know it was my father's habit to go down to Crow Island, and there standing on the river bank, which would be the east bank of the Saginaw River, where now the old Loveland farm is, get the evening flight of teal, for in the fore part of September these birds flew from the east to the west side of the river, crossing at that point as regularly as a morning pigeon flight, and they were there literally in thousands. My father used No. 8 shot and would frequently get thirty or forty teal in an evening's shoot, and it was all dry land shooting at that, although without a dog the birds were difficult to find in the marsh grass that was nearly knee high, but the old black and tan pointer was on the job and rarely was a bird missed. I, with a boy friend, when I was fifteen or sixteen years old, frequently after school on Friday would paddle down the river to below the New York Works or Crow Island, or to the mouth of the Salt Works Bayou, build a fire, tip the duck boat on edge as a wind break and stay there overnight just to get the early morning shooting on Saturday, for there was no school Duck Shooting 67 on that day and it was my only full day in the week that I could shoot, for none of us believed in Sunday shoot- ing in those good old times. I most always had a mixed bag, for where the drainage of the solar salt fields was, the wading birds of all kinds frequented. Then there was a choice bit of snipe marsh at the New York Works, where every year I had splendid jacksnipe shooting. In the field near by the mushrooms grew. The trolling hook taken along frequently furnished a pike or bass. We lived off the land and cooked our game or fish in the open. Those were indeed wonder- ful days. In duck shooting on the Saginaw River, we of course had the market hunter, and the most noted were the DuPraw's — Louis and Jacques. Mrs. DuPraw used to take the ducks to market. They counted the mallard as a duck at full price, but it took two teal to make one duck. I think they were sold at 25 cents apiece, that is, you got one mallard or two teal for 25 cents. When I was fifteen or sixteen years old and we were living at the Pere Marquette crossing where now the Mershon, Eddy, Parker Lumber Yard is, my father was very busy. He was working on a salary for the old Rochester Salt and Lumber Company as Superin- tendent and General Manager of its business, the own- ers being H. A. Tilden and Marvin Sackett, of New Lebanon, N. Y., and Samuel J. Tilden, I believe was a stockholder. Therefore, when the hunting season was on, my father for several years rarely had a chance 68 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing to enjoy his much beloved sport, but our taste for ducks had not vanished so we used to buy them of Mrs. DuPraw, and I can recall to this day how beautifully they were dressed. She would have them done up in white cloth and to look at, even in the raw state, made one's mouth water. Her road to market passed di- rectly before our house, so that once or twice a week we had the opportunity to take the pick of her well- filled market basket. As a boy I thought that my mother could roast a duck better than anyone living, and somehow or other even today, no duck tastes as good as those rice fed mallards or the little blue winged teal that were split open on the back and broiled on the coals at home when I was a schoolboy. In order to have something authentic relative to the DuPraw's hunting and shooting, Hon. Riley L. Crane has kindly written the following brief history : "The DuPraw Marsh in Kochville Township" "It may be of interest to people who remember the hunting conditions along the Saginaw River near the Bay County line, and instructive to the younger people, to give the following facts: "One of the first permanent duck and fur hunters was Louis DuPraw, who came from Detroit nearly a century ago. Mr. DuPraw was born in France but came to Detroit and settled there. After his wife died, he moved to Bay City and more than ninety years ago settled on the east side of what is now the Michigan Central Railroad and one mile south of the Bay County Duck Shooting 69 line, in Kochville Township. The Squaconning Creek was then an open stream entering Saginaw River about a mile west of the present interurban bridge and ex- tended southerly one mile, then in a westerly course through the easterly half of Kochville Township, and is known as Davis' Creek. The hunting at this point was so attractive to Mr. DuPraw that he sold his prop- erty in Detroit, that later was worth a very large sum. The first year upon this new and before uninhabited land, he grew a good crop of corn, potatoes and other spring crops and was well pleased with his location, for ducks and fur bearing animals were at hand in abundance. "The next summer he was completely drowned out and was forced to move back to Bay City, and the flags grew that season higher than a man's head where his crops were the summer before. Not discouraged he soon returned, moving up the river to Davis' Creek, about two miles southwest of his first location, where he cleared a farm and resided until his death in the 8o's. He was a man of great endurance, pronounced character and bravery. He killed a bear with a hand axe in this marsh, the only event of the kind. Mr. DuPraw ceased to hunt after reaching middle age and devoted his time to his farm and died at the age of eighty-four years. "His two sons, Louis and Jacques, took up hunting in an early day upon this marsh and followed it until they died a few years ago. Each had a farm adjoining the old homestead but they pressed the market hunt- 70 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing ing more than any other two men in the community. The ducks were plentiful in this marsh during the spring and fall and perhaps no better shooting ground could be found in the country. Being south of the lake and Saginaw Bay, it was a natural feeding place for ducks, and the northerly winds making the lake and bay water rough, the birds would come to this marsh in great numbers with northerly winds, especially in the fall season. The wild rice was abundant and furn- ished excellent feed for the wild ducks, an indispens- able factor in any good shooting ground. Ducks will not harbor when disturbed, unless it is their feeding place. "The gray mallard and blue winged teal predomi- nated in the early days and furnished the bulk of market supply from this marsh. There were varieties of other ducks — the black duck, green winged teal, wood duck and various varieties of fall ducks, but the gray mallard, the drake having a beautiful green head and green and brown stripes, was a handsome bird and furnished splendid food. For the last twenty-five years, the black duck has, to a large measure, super- seded the gray mallard in this marsh, and the blue winged teal has diminished in numbers rapidly. "The boat used here by the early hunters was the dugout canoe — a pine tree dug out somewhat like a trough — and not too steady, but often easily upset. "The largest number of ducks shot upon this marsh by a single charge were nineteen blue winged teal shot on the fly by Jacques DuPraw with a single barrel, Duck Shooting 71 muzzle-loading shot gun. The greatest number of ducks killed there in a single day by two men was two hundred and seventy-two birds, about 1876, Mr. Louis DuPraw getting one hundred and sixty-two with a 10-gauge breech-loading shot gun and Mr. Jacques Dupraw one hundred and ten with 12-gauge, double barrel, muzzle-loading gun. "These hunters found no hardship too great to over- come in making a successful hunt. It was not an un- usual thing for them to take off their pants, wade through the marsh to a duck pond, carrying their gun and clothing above the water, and then go upon a bog or muskrat house and dress themselves and remain there shooting for hours, even when the weather was cold so as to produce ice and snow. It was the claim of the DuPraws that in good hunting they could aver- age a duck a minute during the time they were shooting. It was not an uncommon thing for the hunters to bring their boats filled with ducks, but now many a hunter is happy if he returns with a single duck, and should he get a pair or two he is very proud. "Up to twenty-five years ago, the blue winged teal and gray mallard hatched in this marsh, but of late very little brooding is done in that vicinity. Wild geese were upon this territory, spring and fall, and even now visit, in a small way. In early days the beautiful white swan was often seen there and sometimes in consider- able numbers, especially when the water was high. "In the early days many creeks and water courses cut through this marsh, which made it easy for the 72 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing hunter to pass and also furnished abundance of wild rice and splendid feeding and resting places for the birds. It was a natural and accessible hunting ground for birds, muskrat and mink, probably not excelled in productiveness for the same extent of land anywhere in the country. It was a natural resting and feeding place for birds going to and fro in their traveling sea- son and a natural home for muskrat, mink and coon. This ground was principally a marsh with clay bottom and black mucky top soil, but in places was sufficiently high for large trees to grow, or a prairie that could be cropped. However, usually the entire body was cov- ered with water in the spring and early summer, so no one resided upon this territory until recently. It was the resort of deer, bear and foxes in large numbers and especially in dry seasons until thirty years ago. "One can judge of the abundance of fur bearing ani- mals when we learn that Jacques and Louis DuPraw each trapped and speared from 1,000 to 2,000 musk- rats each year while they hunted this property. Con- ditions have changed, and especially since the inter- urban railway was built across this hunting ground near its center. uIn the 70's the wild pigeon was in abundance in the hardwood near this marsh, but they have entirely dis- appeared. Birds and fur animals must be protected and it is evident, if not cared for, will in the future become extinct. This place was an ideal hunting ground, but alas, no more as it was in the days of old. "Riley L. Crane." Duck Shooting 73 The duck marshes on the Saginaw River no longer teem with water fowl. In early September and before the first frost the cackle of the Carolina rail is on every hand. These little birds — the Sora, seem as plenti- ful as ever, so I have not given up the marshes of the Saginaw entirely, but once or twice in the early part of September I get out the old canoe and with Alphonse to paddle or push, I take the trip through several miles of the Cheboyganning rice beds and usually get what the law allows of rail shooting, but in making all of this distance through acres and acres of rice, one or two ducks maybe is all I see in place of the thousands of old. The Witchery of the Saginaw Marshes 0 ME the marsh has been a place of content- ment and joy. Whether in the early September opening days of the duck season when the native birds only are to be expected, or the crisp Indian sum- mer haze of October overspreads the droning silence and the first "fall ducks" are in from the north, or later when the blustering gales and snow squalls of Novem- ber make one put on the warmest of clothing and crouch beside the shelter of a blind or tangle of marsh growth to keep off the biting cold winds, always there is a joy and contentment creeps over me in the great solitude and long vision expanse of the marsh. There is so much to see, so much to listen to, or for, so much to speculate about and hope for, that there is no place that my days afield or tramps afar take me in quest of other game that quite brings the contentment, peace and satisfaction that the day on the marsh can bring to him who will give himself to its full enjoyment if he is observing and loves nature, as all true sportsmen must, and has the happy trait of counting the size of the bag as least. Years back the duck season began September ist, and many blue winged teal and mallards, that we called gray ducks, raised their broods on our home marshes. The rice was high, still in the milk; water lilies, both 74 The Witchery of the Saginaw Marshes 75 white and yellow, filled the open places; the pickerel weed with its blue spikes had not yet lost its beauty. The redwinged blackbirds had flocked in clouds, and taking wing were uncountable and for brief moments darkened the skyline. Then as quickly as they had appeared from nowhere, they were out of sight again, but listen! What a concert you can hear from the dense rice cover, for when the rice is in the milk these cheery birds love it best. Hunting ducks now is mostly by jumping them by punting or paddling the little, totterish canoe or duck boat along the edge of the rice. No frost has come to cause it to fall and it is almost impossible to punt the boat through its denseness. One in the bow to shoot, one in the stern to push or paddle, we as quietly as possible creep along. It is hard to shove into the rice for the dead birds and hard to mark the spot where they fall, and if only wing broken the quest is almost hopeless. When I was fortunate and had Frank Allore with me or one of his sons, Ed or young Frank, my troubles were few, for they were to the marsh born — French muskrat trappers and hunters all their lives. To one side the teal are alighting. "There must be a pond hole in there; let's see if we can get in." A way is found, one lead after another. Bitterns or shitepokes, as they are called, with squawk and intes- tinal evacuation spring into the air, startling one so that the gun flies to the shoulder involuntarily. A great pike or carp sunning himself at the surface whirls and with its unexpected noisy splurge gives your tensioned 76 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing nerves another jump. With good luck you reach a spot where the pond hole is only hidden by a few more yards of rice and you know the teal are close by and probably hundreds of them. A momentary question goes through your mind. "Shall I give them the first barrel on the water?" It is dismissed almost as soon, for early I have been taught it is not the way of the sports- man. Give the birds a chance is the rule. Yet I can not help hoping they will be well bunched and I can get more than one with the first barrel and hope for another with my second. Well, sometimes it works one way and sometimes another. Either way it's the life worth living. We push into the rice and have our lunch. A marsh wren dodges in and out and cocks its tail much like its cousin of our back door nesting box. A least bittern is standing on a lily pad not far away looking at the sky. Coots are paddling about in the open pond hole we have just left and the teal are coming back. It surely is a favorite feeding ground, or more likely a good sleeping place this hot day, for the little, round- bodied blue wings. Mosquitoes bother so we do not tarry long but get outside where there is more air and hope for a breeze. When the boat is thumped with the paddle or a mill whistle calls the men back from the noon hour, Soras answer in derision all around and from afar. It is early for them yet. Wait until there are frosty nights up north, about the middle of September, then these gay and airy little marsh dwellers will be daintily tread- The Witchery of the Saginaw Marshes 77 ing the lily pads picking up the rice that has ripened and fallen upon the great outstretched leaf carpet of the ponds, not in single thousands but in hundreds of thousands. Now a bullfrog and its companion, the cowfrog, call a deep bass booming that one can not tell whether it is far or near. We are homeward bound before sundown, not stay- ing to see the increased movement of the water birds at nightfall, but we know there will be singles and flocks coming in to the night feeding spots. Great blue herons on lazy wings are overhead moving to some distant marsh — a regular habit of these ungainly birds in September. Afternoon or early evening will mark the flight over the same pathway for weeks, the heron go- ing from the marshes of the lower river to the great expanse of rice and cattail above the city, a ten or twelve mile flight, to return early the next morning. The sky is red in the west. The end has come to a perfect day on the marsh. October has come. We are out earlier now, for the redheads are here, pintail and widgeon too and may- hap a green winged teal and blue bill or scaup. So we must try for the morning flight over decoys. It is chilly as we are early away. We go to a blind prepared some days before that the ducks have had time to become used to. If the wind is brisk and the place well chosen we may have good sport. The coots are thicker now than in early September and are destroying acres of wild celery before the canvasbacks will be down to get it. How they skitter along the water ahead of the 78 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing boat. Gallinules too are plentiful and fly from every little island of rush and reed to the shelter of the shore growths. Alighting, they seem to drop stern end first as if out of breath and could not go a rod farther. The Sora or Carolina rail have been hurried south be- cause of a frost a few nights ago. Most of the blue winged teal also have gone, but not all, for now and then a few get up out of the ripened lily pads. A jack- snipe scaips away from a bog as we pass. The blue heron and bittern are with us still. Sandpipers and plovers of various sorts have stopped to feed and then move on to warmer climes. By mid-forenoon the duck movement lags. The day is warm; a smoky haze hangs over the marsh and to where the forest edge shows maples with leaves redden- ing. Your face tickles from cobwebs that the air is carrying in wondrous threads; they hang on cattail and rush. The rice has ripened and fallen. Now it is easy to push a boat through it, so let us leave the blind and try to jump mallards and black ducks from its beds or the bog holes along the margin. The musk- rats are just starting to build their houses. They yet have plenty of time before they will need them for it will be the middle of November probably before the marsh is frozen. We punt in the direction so the ducks will get up on the right hand side. This makes the shooting swing easier. No noise now. Don't shoot if the kill is to fall in some place where it can not be retrieved. We may have good luck and we may not. I may shoot well or The Witchery of the Saginaw Marshes 79 I may have a bad streak when I can not hit a barn. I never know when these bad streaks are to come or what makes them, but all who shoot have these bad days. We hear the noon train pass in the distance. It is lunch time and we may as well rest for two or three hours, so back to the blind, get out the lunch bucket, a smoke, and then a snooze for the afternoon flight doesn't amount to much these still, warm days in Octo- ber. By and by Herman touches me and whispers, "There are some redheads in the decoys." I take a peek. Sure enough there are half a dozen that have come in unnoticed by either of us. I stand up to give them a chance. Bewildered they do not fly. I shake my gun at them and yell and Hermant throws an empty shell. This starts them and I get the shot of both bar- rels on the wing. I hear a companion shooting now and then at the far end of the marsh and then a flock of bluebills come from his direction. Maybe I have a shot, maybe I do not, but it is a great day to be alive and out of doors. It is near the close of day. Open water duck won't pay attention to decoys late in the day. Besides, while the law would let us shoot an hour or two longer and the bag is quite below the legal limit, I have enough. I may take a whack at the coots on my way home. The French fishermen like them better than ducks and in exchange gladly give me perch, herring or walleyes, still kicking fresh from Saginaw Bay. My companion comes in soon after I reach the boat- house. Our ducks are hung in a cool place. We are 8o Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing at the Tobico Marsh today, not far from the Saginaw River's mouth. Dinner, cigars. The evening is chilly so a fire of white birch in the fireplace is cheering. A game of old sledge or seven up and by nine-thirty in bed. November is here. Cold and raw, a veritable duck day. A little ice formed around the shore rushes dur- ing the night. The wind is from the northwest and blowing great guns. Again the Tobico Marsh. We do not get away until seven o'clock. No hurry, the day will be long enough anyhow. Canvasbacks were here yesterday. Geese have been passing south for a week. The herring gulls are flapping over the open water of the marsh. Scaup and ringbills are more plentiful than they were in October. All the bluewinged teal have gone, but greenwings are a plenty and great green- head mallards from the far north are here. Wisps of snipe are in the air. "Sawbills" and golden eyes and butterballs too are plentiful. All of this means the end is near. How differently the marsh affects you today than when the opening day was here. The rat houses are completed and stick up from every cove and pond hole. The cattails have largely shed their seed down but now and then a bunch is sent flying by the day's cold wind gust. All is yellow and brown. The forest margin is bare of leaves except the red oaks. The pines and white birches are more prominent. All of the marsh bird life is gone except the waterfowl and now and then a marsh hawk with white rump sailing on unsteady wing close to the grasses looking for a The Witchery of the Saginaw Marshes 81 wounded duck, for he has collected many of them this autumn. A crow now and then crosses the marsh to the woodland. It has been feeding on the sands of the bay shore where a clam or dead fish or crab is still to be had. Picking up decoys now is no fun and what a tempta- tion it is to leave them out until the next day in hopes it will not be so cold on the fingers. We are in luck if the blind proves a good wind break, and we hope we don't have to chase cripples. How the dead grasses bend and billow in the wind. One thinks the marsh on such a day a lonesome place ; sort of a haunted house. A grand expanse, no longer a place of dreamy quiet, yet we are full of happiness and satisfaction, for the cause of this absence of quiet is the north wind that makes a real duck day. Rail Shooting THE Sora, or Ortolan, that little laughing witch of the marshes, has furnished me with many a day's sport. First of all he is here earlier than the other marsh and bog sorts. While we have a few Wilson's snipe that breed here, there is not much use hunting them until the northern flight comes in, well after the middle of September, but early in September the rail are plentiful. The wild rice is beginning to harden and drop and these little fellows can absorb quantities of this rich and attractive food. It is amazing how much of it they can stuff into their gizzards. Their gizzards are much larger in propor- tion than any other bird that I know of, and they are crammed jam full of rice; seems as if sometimes I had taken a tablespoonful out of one of these gizzards, for I always clean them and consider them tidbits to go with the birds themselves. The liver too is large and worth saving, and while I am speaking of the cooking end of it, I might just as well finish that part now be- fore I tell of the shooting. We at home were all very fond of rail. Sometimes they would be spitted on a long skewer, three or four of them, and broiled over the fire, but more often put between a wire broiling iron, a dozen or twenty of them, and quickly toasted over the coals, so that they 82 Rail Shooting 83 still were red and juicy when the breasts were cut; amply buttered, with a little bit of currant jelly and piping hot right from the fire, and the old fashioned broiling fire was almost always hickory or its bark. There are only two birds that equal or are better — the jacksnipe and the golden plover. I think the golden plover the best of all the birds that fly, and to my no- tion the woodcock ranks below any of the three that I have mentioned. Our favorite way of cooking rail was to make a deep pie with a biscuit dough crust, good and thick, and lots of juice or gravy. We picked the birds when we could so as to have the benefit of the flavor of the fat, for they are fat as butter after they have been feeding on the rice a few days, but sometimes this would prove impossible on account of the tender skin. Then the birds were skinned, but ordinarily there were some of them that we could pick so we had a fair amount of the fat for flavoring and juice. Sim- mered over a slow fire until they were tender, then put in a deep baking pan lined with crust and covered with a crust, a liberal lump of butter, some peppercorns coarsely ground, and then put in the oven and baked to a rich brown, there was nothing ever came on the table more toothsome. uThe four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie" in good King Arthur's time I think must have been rail to have lived so long in history as a toothsome dish. As to the shooting; I have talked enough about the table. The vast rice fields of the Saginaw River marshes afforded a wonderful feeding ground for 84 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing thousands, yes and hundreds of thousands, of rail. By the third or fourth of September usually they were plentiful. A slap on the side of the canoe with your paddle would bring forth a derisive laugh or rail from all over the marsh, and the sudden whistle of a mill would start them cackling and tittering and railing for miles around. The shooting was the same as rail bird shooting everywhere, only we do not have to wait for the tide as they do on the seashore, but the higher the water the easier the pushing through the rice and the more shooting, because the birds flushed easier and did not skulk and run away as readily as when the water was low and the footing and hide better. A North wind raised the water in the Saginaw marshes, so when we had a chance to choose the day, we waited for the north wind, but it made little difference, for the rail were so plentiful we could usually get enough anyhow. Seated in the bow of the canoe or duck boat with a man in the stern to push at as good a rate of speed as he could through the rice, the birds would flush ahead of the boat and one had a variety of shots, but very few straight ahead, most always to the right or left, the birds making for the fringe and cover of the rice bed margin. It seems to be a favorite trick of the rail to get up just opposite you and fly around you, occasion- ing a hard twisting shot, and if you were not careful you would be apt to overturn the boat. On the salt water marshes I believe they have boats that are wide enough and steady enough so a man can stand up to do his Rail Shooting 85 shooting. That would be a great advantage, but in our marshes the cover was so dense that we had to have very small boats and the shooting had to be done from a sitting position. The punter of course stood up, but he could balance himself with his pole. Other- wise the craft was very tottery, and many a bird I have missed because of the boat giving a sudden twist or turn just as I touched the trigger. I recall some years ago, before there was a bag limit, I went down to Cheboyganing marshes and in some- thing like four hours' shooting killed sixty-nine rail. A few days later, taking more ammunition, I came home with no. It is quite a chore marking them down. I have tried throwing painted blocks as markers for the fallen birds, but this doesn't work very well, and my punter was a good marker with my help. Then again I am careful not to shoot birds that I know we are not going to be able to find. Of late years rail shooting has been more difficult owing to so much of the marsh being drained, but it is only recently that I recall getting my limit of fifty of the Carolina rail, that being the legal bag, in just two hours' shooting . This was after the days of the auto- mobile, quite different from when we used to have to paddle clear down there from Saginaw. My canoe was put bottom upwards, resting on the windshield and the hood, and we sped down the Bay City road to the cross- ing of Cheboyganing Creek where the canoe was launched with good old Alphonse in the stern. We 86 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing paddled down past the pump house; then the rice beds began. Nearing the upper railroad bridge we find birds in plenty and before we have gotten to the Inter- urban Bridge I have my fifty. I began shooting at eleven o'clock and at one had my limit. We paddled down Cheboyganing to Zilwaukee, telephoned for the automobile and were back home at three o'clock. My gun is an open 16-gauge, 26-inch barrels, which I have spoken of before I think, and for rail shooting I load with two drams of smokeless powder, E. C. or Schultz, and either % or y$ of an ounce of No. 10 shot. One should not shoot more than % of an ounce of shot in a 16-gauge gun, no matter what the game is. How glorious are the marshes at rail time. It is your first outing. A mud hen or gallinule skitters away ahead of you; there may still be the chug of an enor- mous bullfrog; great white lilies in full bloom every- where. As you paddle along quietly you are startled and give an involuntary jump because of the splurge of an immense carp that has been basking or feeding near the surface, and through the shallow pond holes this commotion of the carp is most active — splurge after splurge until you think the place is full of fish, yet look sharply as you can and rarely can you see one, although you almost run the bow of the canoe onto the fish at times before it makes its splurge. Bitterns and great blue herons get up. Sometimes you will run so close onto a bittern that when it springs into the air with its startled cry, you get another tremor, for your nerves are all on edge expecting something, you don't know Rail Shooting 87 what. Now and then a teal or black duck or mallard gets out of the rice and flocks of wood ducks pass by. All the time the rice is dropping into the canoe. The barb on it causes it to crawl, and if you have a crawly shirt on, the first thing you know you have one of these down the back of your neck and you can not shoot or do anything until it is extricated. Don't get one in your throat. If you do, you are liable to go to a doctor to have it out. You hear a train pass over the trestle of the long marsh. Great hawks soar and skirt and plane the marshes; the white spot on the rump tells you it is the marsh hawk. Marsh wrens, blackbirds and various sandpipers are in evidence. Webs of invisible spiders are spun all about the upstanding rushes; a lazy drone of bees and now and then a stinging mos- quito, but a great silent place after all; a peaceful, rest- ful place with an odor all its own — an odor that tells you of many happy days with ducks, snipe and now with rail. We did not do much rail shooting with the old muzzle loading guns. Once in a while a day would be taken for it, but it was not often; it required so much loading and there was usually so much other shooting that was more attractive, for in the early days the duck season opened September first, so by the time the rail were here there was good duck shooting. Then too we had summer woodcock shooting and lots of plover, but of late years there is no other shooting before the sixteenth of September, when the duck season opens, so that rail shooting today fills quite a niche, and takes 88 Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing the place of the snipe, plover, woodcock and early duck shooting of old. Once in a while we used to get king rail in the Sag- inaw marshes, but they never were very plentiful. The Virginia rail we find breeding here in Michigan but in the out of way, isolated spots — the small bog holes or little marshes of the woodlands. I never have seen them on the big river marshes. u If £ 5 < S 2