R. K. Sawyer is a petroleum geologist based in Houston and a manager at the Thunderbird Hunting Club in Matagorda County, Texas. He is also the author of A Hundred Years of Texas Waterfowl Hunting: The Decoys, Guides, Clubs, and Places, 1870s to 1970s.

Texas Market Hunting

Stories of Waterfowl, Game Laws, and Outlaws

By R. K. Sawyer

Texas A&M University Press

Copyright © 2013 R. K. Sawyer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62349-011-9

Contents

Foreword,
Preface,
1. Introduction,
2. Sowing the Seeds of Texas Market Hunting,
3. A National Appetite,
4. Fowl as Fad and Fashion,
5. The Window Closes,
6. The Law and the Outlaw,
7. Epilogue: The Last Big Sting,
Notes,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

On each side of the flat-bottomed skiff lay the guns, a Winchester Model 1893 pump and an old side-by-side ten-gauge, their barrels rusted from saltwater that leaked through planked floorboards. The night was cold, the north wind blowing hard after a front. But the moon shone through herringbone clouds that made it easier to row from the anchored sloop to the flats where, the day before, the market gunner watched a big flock of redheads mixed with pintails and wigeons. The hunter positioned his skiff upwind to drift into their masses, darkness masking his approach. If he timed it right, daybreak’s splintered sunlight would help him retrieve the results of his seven shots.

He waited, prone in the little skiff, listening to the catlike sounds of contented redheads that always gave their location away. Water seeped through his canvas jacket, and he turned his collar up against the wind, remembering a time when the morning chill didn’t feel as cold. Gnarled fingers clenched the wooden paddle as he guided the skiff into position, and his back ached as he turned to reach for the first weapon. “Thirty-nine,” he said to himself, “is just too old for this.”

Aboriginal Indians followed by the Spanish, French, and Mexicans trapped or hunted waterfowl on the Gulf Coast for sustenance or barter long before arrival of Anglo-Americans. The Anglos were, however, the first to look upon nature as a commodity, finding a place for it initially in local then later national economies. Those who made their living by killing and selling waterfowl for profit were at first called huntsmen. The name market hunter did not often appear until the late 1800s, when efforts to control declining natural resources brought a largely ignored segment of society to the forefront of a great conservation and legislative tug-of-war.

The best known of the market hunting operations gained their foothold in the 1700s along the East Coast of the United States. The Texas market hunting period started much later, its foundation laid by privateer Jean Lafitte in the late 1810s, followed by Stephen F. Austin’s colonists in the early 1820s. Oysters, fish, native game, and migratory flocks of wading birds and shorebirds, puddle ducks, diving ducks, geese, swans, and cranes were integral to survival of Texas’ early settlers. A single discharge of black powder and chilled shot fired through the middle of a flock of wildfowl assured food for a family, and extras could be bartered or sold in the nearest village. Galveston visitor Matilda Houstoun in the 1840s wrote: “No one must be surprised at our attempts to eat nearly everything we shot.” Galveston meals, she noted, were either wild game or wild cattle, with no domestic meat other than pigs that “fed so uncleanly, upon snakes and dead dogs that recourse to them was not to be thought of.”

Along the Brazos and Colorado Rivers, waterfowl fed the planter culture of a cotton and sugarcane economy built by the sweat of slave labor. James F. Perry’s Peach Point Plantation, between the Brazos and San Bernard Rivers, was like many, where “the Perry boys and some of the slave men … hunted on a regular basis, and venison or wildfowl often found their way to the Peach Point kitchen.” Others of Brazoria County’s blacks, usually unable to possess guns and certainly unable to afford them, trapped large numbers of teal using primitive deadfall traps “in the common contrivance called a ‘figure of four.'”

Ducks and geese also fed armies, from the Texas Revolution to the Civil War. When Gen. Sam Houston sent a detachment of men to the village of Copano to meet Col. James Fannin, they lived off fish and game before setting out to Goliad and into immortality. One of Fannin’s soldiers described fowl on the prairie so thick “we might have loaded our horses down with wild geese.” Zachary Taylor, landing his troops in 1845 during the Mexican War on the peninsula between Nueces and Corpus Christi Bays, found the “tall grass was buzzing with rattlesnakes” and supplied his army with rations made up in large part of wild ducks and geese.

As port settlements and crossroads became towns, huntsmen peddled game door-to-door or from wagons on the side of the road, or sold their wares in town marketplaces, market stalls, and meat markets. Every form of wild game was found in Texas during the 1800s. Large game included deer, pronghorns, and bears; smaller animals were rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, opossums, and muskrats. There was every bird imaginable: whooping cranes, sandhill cranes, swans, geese, ducks, nearly every type of shorebird—of which snipes, plovers, and curlews were most common—upland birds such as woodcocks, passenger pigeons, prairie chickens, wild turkeys, quail, doves, and a variety of songbirds.

Before the Civil War, transportation and preservation limitations restricted sale of most game in Texas to local markets. It often took days to reach the nearest town on foot or by pony, ox- or horse-drawn wagon, rowboat, or sail. The risk of spoilage between field and market was always high. The most efficient method to preserve the kill was by brining it, but salt was often hard to obtain and always expensive. Instead, birds were often gutted and sacked or packed in ventilated, slatted barrels with preservation left to a prayer for cool weather.

Despite abundant natural resources, Texas in the first half of the nineteenth century lagged far behind much of the United States in the economy of waterfowl. The Lone Star State was still part of Spain when wildfowl and other game were sold in established marketplaces along the northeastern Atlantic seaboard. In the early 1800s settlers were taming the frontier of Mexican Texas as wintertime shoppers packed sophisticated big-city markets in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Chicago, Saint Louis, and New Orleans.

Texas entered the national, and even global, trade in wild game during the late 1870s to early 1880s, as post–Civil War economic expansion afforded a growing segment of Texas and the United States with disposable cash to spend on luxury items. One of those items was wildfowl, popularized as a vital seasonal ingredient in the nation’s pursuit of trendy and refined dining.

Demand was the catalyst for Texas’ burgeoning late-1800s trade in wild game, but it was postwar advancement in technologies that delivered it. Inefficient black powder and muzzle-loading shotguns were swapped for repeating firearms and factory-loaded shotgun shells. Hooves on the prairie, and sail and steam on the waterways, gave way to a network of railroads that shipped products quickly to market. Salt was replaced by ice-making machinery used to refrigerate rail cars and cold storage houses. The combination of ice and rail did away with the uncertainty of getting birds to market without spoiling, or even getting them there at all.

As quickly as rail tracks were laid, nearly every sizable Texas coastal and inland town joined in the harvest, packing, and transportation of wildfowl to cities across America. The birds in highest demand were canvasbacks, redheads, plovers, and curlews. Of these, it was America’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the canvasback that allowed Texas a prominent place in the wild game industry. By the late 1800s express railroad cars moved barrels of Texas canvasbacks to all points on the national compass. The big red, black, and white diving duck also found its way to Europe; when Texas shipped its first cargo of refrigerated meat across the Atlantic by steamship in 1887, on the ship’s manifest were seventy canvasbacks that sold “like wildfire” in London’s Leadenhall Market.

The Texas trade in wildfowl also included plume-bearing and ornately feathered birds for the fashion industry and secondary markets in bird skins, eggs, and wing feathers for quill pens. By the late 1880s demand for plume feathers by the millinery trade—mostly for ladies’ hats—developed into a fad not unlike what the canvasback was to America’s dining table. At the top of the feather list were long, delicate plumes of the snowy egret. Plumes sold for hundreds of dollars per pound and were in such high demand that the egret was sometimes dubbed the “bonnet martyr.” Snowy egrets were hunted so intensely that, by the early 1900s, the white bird was uncommon in Texas.

Whether they were hunting for the meat market or the plumage market, or for the local or export trade, market gunners harvested wildfowl by whatever means they could, and it was not sophisticated and not sport. The big birds—whooping cranes, sandhill cranes, swans, and geese—were rifled or shot with scatterguns from horseback. Ducks were usually killed by shotguns fired from the shoulder and most often shot while they were on the water. Large bags were made by gunners who raked shot across feeding and resting flocks from behind slow-moving oxen. Birds were hunted at night, sometimes by sneaking into flocks of rafted birds in sculling skiffs, with weapons that included shotguns, eight- to four-gauge swivel guns, and punt guns. Ducks were netted, trapped, and baited to the gun. Texas market hunters, like those across the United States, did whatever it took to earn a living from the harvest of nature’s bounty.

With the late nineteenth century came recognition that numbers of many of America’s game animals and birds were declining, and some were already eradicated. The market hunter’s occupation came to be viewed as one of the major causes, and increasingly maligned. More insidious than his guns, however, was the destruction of habitat by a progressive nation. But the market man, certainly not wealthy, and poorly represented in the halls of business and politics, was an easier target.

Sportsmen, whose tenure afield paralleled that of market hunters throughout the late 1800s, were among the most vocal opponents to the market hunter’s trade. Theirs was not an issue of conservation, but more a matter that market men were a competitor for the same declining game and bird resources. When the sport hunter’s crusade was joined by naturalists, farmers, and a growing segment of the population with the means to enjoy wildlife not as food, not for profit, but on its own merits, they formed a forceful but unlikely coalition that brought game protection to the forefront of American consciousness.

Texas’ efforts to curtail sale of wild game began as early as 1874, but protection of migratory waterfowl managed to pass through slippery lawmaking fingers for another thirty years. The legal reign of the market hunter in the Lone Star State ended when Texans passed a Model Game Law in 1903 and a Permanent Game Law in 1907. The noose around the neck of the national migratory bird trade was tightened with the federal government’s passage of the Lacey Act in 1900, the Weeks-McLean Law or Federal Migratory Bird Act in 1913, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918.

The Texas market hunter had a choice to comply with each new state and federal law, and many quit; those who continued were outlaws. Outlaw hunters enjoyed several years of near impunity; sale of wild game in the first decades of the twentieth century was still legal in much of the United States, and if Texas gunners could export their wildfowl across state lines, they found ready buyers. Too, there was little law enforcement. In 1903 the Texas State Fish and Oyster Commission, predecessor to today’s Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, had only five game wardens to cover the entirety of the Texas coast. As their numbers increased after 1907, the stage was set for a decades-long showdown between game wardens and those who still made a living from nature’s migratory bounty.

The fire lit under the Texas market hunting business burned brightest between 1880 and 1903, but the flame was largely extinguished after 1918 with the advent of federal regulation. In many ways the era of the market hunter was similar to that of the great cattle drives in Texas. Both occupied only a brief period of Lone Star State history but were steeped in legend and lore. The travails of the cowboy spawned spellbinding legends of men on mustangs who pushed the edge of a frontier. Equally engaging stories emerged from market gunners who supplied the frontier, and later a nation. This book attempts to tell their story, spanning the time from when waterfowl were sustenance, then income, to a new era in which they were, at last, protected.

CHAPTER 2

SOWING the SEEDS of TEXAS MARKET HUNTING

On his ill-fated expedition along the Texas coast in 1685, French explorer René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, witnessed limitless herds of buffalo and deer and swarms of turkeys, quail, waterfowl, and prairie chickens, which the French called grouse. Little had changed nearly 150 years later, when Stephen F. Austin’s colonists settled between the Brazos and Colorado Rivers. In addition to native wild game, each fall they saw a sky filled with huge numbers of migratory wading birds and shorebirds, puddle ducks, diving ducks, geese, swans, and cranes.

Early Texans knew only that migratory birds, in flocks that at times blackened the sky, arrived from the north. It would not be until later that the birds’ route south from northern breeding grounds would be mapped by biologists who in the late 1920s gave it a name: the Central Flyway. Waterfowl nearing the end of their Central Flyway journey passed over northwestern Texas’ rolling plains, where wet years brought playa potholes to life. At times they paused along wide spots of the red, silty Panhandle river waters or flooded hardwoods along the upper Red, Trinity, Brazos, and Colorado Rivers until the first hard frost drove them farther south.

South of the Central Texas Balcones Escarpment, wildfowl gorged on acorns beneath oak trees that lined floodplains wide with meanders, oxbows, and overbank ponds along the Guadalupe, Colorado, San Bernard, and Brazos Rivers. To the east, they flocked to growths of duck potato in flooded hardwood and cypress trees along the Trinity and Sabine Rivers. A swirling skyline of ducks often animated horizons over natural lakes such as Mitchell Lake near San Antonio and Caddo Lake in East Texas.

Finally the journey brought them to the coast. There an unbroken marsh extended from the Sabine to Lavaca River of the upper and middle coasts, where shallow, fringing shorelines of spartina grasses, bulrushes, spikerushes, millet, phragmites, and three-square grasses concealed bayous and coastal ponds adjacent to the estuaries of Sabine Lake and Galveston, Matagorda, and Lavaca Bays. Stretching from the edge of Galveston Bay to near Lavaca Bay, the inland prairie freshwater habitat of Houston Prairie and Big Prairie was a sea of bluestem, switch, yellow Indian, and eastern grama grasses covering a topography of low-relief knolls and shallow ponds. Abundant aquatic vegetation in the prairie’s large natural lakes, notably Orchard Lake and Eagle Lake west of Galveston Bay and Green Lake on the Lavaca River, held uncountable numbers of birds.

The coastline morphology of the Coastal Bend and the northern part of the lower coast was made up of San Antonio, Copano, Aransas, and Corpus Christi Bays, protected from the ravages of the sea by Matagorda, St. Joseph, and Mustang Islands. With fewer rivers than along the upper coast, bay waters here were more brackish than those to the north and east. More saline still were Baffin Bay and Laguna Madre of the lower coast. Shallow waters of Laguna Madre, paralleling Padre Island for more than a hundred miles, supported rich growths of widgeon, shoal, turtle, and manatee grasses. Past shoreline clay and silt dunes, and tidal and algal mud flats, were extensive quartz sand deposits of the coastal plain, its terrain of cactus and mesquite dotted with freshwater ponds filled intermittently by rainfall and natural springs. The mainland sand sheet was interrupted in two places, cut by rich delta deposits of the Arroyo Colorado and Rio Grande, their floodplains covered in dense vegetation along banks of meandering streams, ponds, and oxbow lakes.

From the upper coast to the lower coast, the geomorphology of prairie, floodplain, river, delta, coastal plain, and estuary complexes created unrivaled habitat for great skeins of wintering Central Flyway waterfowl. Fresh water delivered by rainfall and rivers was the ecosystem’s lifeblood. Rainwater saturated the organicrich soils of the upper prairie, its runoff so slow that early ranching families joked that the land could bog down a snipe. Rivers overstepped their banks at times, with sheets of floodwater that covered miles of prairie. Small rises that poked through the ephemeral inland sea were the only high ground for quail and prairie chickens, which became easy prey to circling eagles, hawks, and falcons. As fresh water continued to make its way to the coast, it was prevented from quickly reaching the Gulf by the same shallow, silled inlets that caused deep-draft sailing ships to bounce hard on the bottom during their crossings.

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