BY LANCE NIXON Lance.Nixon@capjournal.com

D a k o t a L i f evisit us at www.capjournal.com • e-mail us at news@capjournal.com FRIDAY • 1.9.2015

WATERFOWL HUNTING I n A G o l d e n A g e

Who knows by what name he goes in

the business world of Milwaukee where he earns his living? He hunts the marshes of eastern South Dakota for ducks and geese with doctors and law-yers and jewelers for his companions, but he only tells what they do, not what he does – he is only “the scribe.” And when he writes about his waterfowl hunting, he uses a pen name:

Greenhead.Greenhead favors

a 16-gauge Parker shotgun and “salmon-colored” shotgun shells; a pair of Buck’s water-proof lace-up hunting boots; Elliston carved decoys from Bureau, Illinois; and a Mullins

“Get There” duckboat, made of sheet metal by the Mullins Boat Co. of Salem, Ohio – “the only coat that will stand the rough treatment given on a trip of this char-acter.”

And for a few years

as the 19th century goes out and the 20th rolls in, Greenhead is letting readers of a sporting magazine called American Field in on some of the best waterfowl hunting in America. The catch is, they’ve got to travel to South Dakota to get to it, at the end of a day and a night’s train ride; they’ve got to bring their own boats and decoys; they’ve got to lug their water in five-gallon tin cans or bar-rels; they’ve got to sleep

in the hay mow of some Norwegian farmer; and they’ve got to share meals with the farmer’s nine children.

Put up with all of that and you’re sure to get a crack at some of the best hunting in the continent.

Those are some of the lessons Greenhead drives home as he writes about hunting at Lake Thompson, and later, the area around Waubay Lake and Blue Dog Lake and Enemy Swim in 1902, in the

Sisseton area in 1904.

Not the only destination

True, Greenhead is not the only hunter from the east winging his way west to the prairies, and South Dakota is not the only Dakota attracting their attention. That’s apparent from a 2003 anthology that com-piles magazine pieces of the late 19th century about waterfowl hunt-

ing. Harold Duebbert’s “Wildfowling in Dakota 1873-1903: Old-Time Duck and Goose Shooting on the Dakota Prairies” gives more space to North Dakota, already one of the great destinations for water-fowl hunting at the end of the 19th century. But at least four of the articles look at South Dakota through the eyes of this self-styled

“Greenhead.”

A gentleman hunter visits South Dakota, 1897-1902

For more on this topic:Wildfowling in Dakota 1873-1903: Old-

Time Duck and Goose Shooting on the Dakota

Prairies. Hardcover, 352 pages. Edited by

Harold F. Duebbert. Windfeather Press,

Bismarck, N.D., 2003.

See WATERFOWL C6

A 19th century illustration of gentlemen hunting ducks. (Public domain image)

Dakota Life Friday, January 9, 2015capjournal.comC6

Lake Thompson“Our party num-

bered five persons; our destination was Lake Preston Station on the line of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway, which town we reached after a ride of nineteen hours from the Cream City,” Greenhead writes.

“The date of our arrival was October 6, 1897, and here we had secured conveyances for transporting our-selves and outfits to Lake Thompson, five miles distant. Out of the town wound our little caravan, Big Pete, the red-whiskered Norske, bringing up the rear with a lumber wagon rigged with hay rack for carrying our boats, which, fortu-nately for us, we had brought from home, for neither love nor money will avail in securing suitable boats in that country.”

Greenhead notes that at the time of his visit, Lake Thompson has dwindled in size from the much larger lake it had been in the past; in 1897, there’s a mile of crisp grass between the former shoreline and the shore where he goes to hunt.

There are also insights in Greenhead’s account about what has brought the people of South Dakota out there upon the Plains, including the farmer with whom the party ends up boarding, “an apple-faced descen-dent of some hardy Norseman.” Greenhead writes: “A farmer for more than thirty years within the confines of the state of Iowa, in his fiftieth year, the beautiful tract of land had been disposed of and with wife and nine children a new home was sought upon the Dakota prairies where the proceeds of his sale enabled him to purchase three times as much land as he had owned heretofore.”

It’s here they get per-mission to sleep in the hay mow after a supper of beef stew, cabbage, potatoes and coffee.

“Upon the hay our blankets were soon spread for the night, and with a tight roof overhead what more could a reasonable mortal demand on a hunting trip, while the recollection of that first meal in a Dakota farmhouse still remains with me.”

Next day they are up at dawn, and Greenhead, hunting from shore while the party’s three boats push down Lake Thompson, notes “the mighty roar of great

bodies of birds” as the boats displace the ducks.

The best hunting on one outing belongs to a jeweler who is in one of the boats. He finds a large bay filled with scattered clumps of bulrushes and the greatest flights of waterfowl he’s ever seen and shoots until his shells are gone.

Greenhead and his companions only hear about it the first time. But a day or two later they experience it for themselves when they see a vast flight of birds winging their direction across the lake.

“Little rows of shells were laid out on the boat’s bottom in readi-ness for the arrival of the winged hosts. Presently the first of the mass passed over and we allowed them to go by unharmed. Behind them, as far as the eye could see, nothing but ducks, ducks, ducks appeared in the distance. From the space of fully ten minutes the scene beggared description. Never in the course of my life have I seen such countless hordes of ducks of every description and variety. We were fairly in the center of the flight, and for several minutes, strange as it may seem, remained perfectly quiet in the boat, trans-fixed with interest at a sight so unusual. Then the guns cracked as rapidly as shells could be thrust into the smoking cham-bers. The barrels grew warmer and warmer, till presently by mutual consent we suddenly ceased our execution, for eighty rods distant a gang of geese were bearing down upon us. Cartridges loaded with two’s replaced the finer shot and we crouched lower in the bottom of the boat … Pintails, teals, widgeons, mal-lards and gadwalls were still darting over our heads, the rush of their wings constantly ringing in our ears. The great birds were nearly directly over us and entirely oblivious of our proximity, when we rose to fire.”

Day CountyThat would be

enough to convince anyone to return to South Dakota, and probably Greenhead needs less convincing than most. He returns, but this time his desti-nation is Day County.

His party of three knocks down 40 ducks in a few hours outing in the Waubay Lake area.

And why not, given the numbers of waterfowl? One of Greenhead’s descrip-tions of an arm of Waubay Lake reads like this:

A few yards further and the secluded bay was disclosed to our view, and it was liter-ally blackened with feeding and preen-ing ducks which had sought shelter from the rolling seas in this narrow arm where the high banks afforded excellent shelter from the strong wind … Great rafts of teal extended down the muddy shores much further than the naked eye could discern their brown little bodies. Spoonies were busily and greedily feeding in the shallows; widgeon and pintail stretched their long slender necks to the fullest extent to determine whether or not our operations were likely to cause them any inconvenience; great fat redheads, and even one band of canvas-backs, were sleeping contentedly in the sun.

And the ducks are not all.

In the midst of the excitement a vast army of chickens in full flight from corn to stubblefield passed overhead and before the last had sped beyond the reach of the chilled sixes, three gray bodies were lying upon the shal-low waters. Another roaring of wings and another great body of ducks took wing from somewhere in my vicinity, filling the air with their calls. Five, seven, ten of the sixteen’s salmon cases were lying at my feet before the flight had passed on and about my little boat were numerous lifeless birds, well marked, to be retrieved when the flight abated. For fully an hour and a half this sport continued, then, the weather being calm and mild and few birds dropping into the lake, we counted our bag and found it to be comprised of thirty-four ducks, five chickens, and a brant, surely a gratifying morning’s work.

No wonder Greenhead and his party are “unani-mously of the opinion that October is a good month in which to be alive and upon the incomparable South Dakota prairies.”

About those prairie chickens …

Though it wasn’t the

main game he was after, Greenhead’s passing mention of shooting prairie chickens in the northeast part of the state offers supporting evidence for what biolo-gists think was happen-ing in the 19th century.

Travis Runia, senior upland game biologist for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks, said biologists think south-eastern South Dakota may have been the farthest extent of the prairie chicken’s native range at one point – Lewis and Clark apparently found them near the mouth of the James River in the area of what is now Yankton. Historical records sug-gest the birds preferred the tallgrass prairie and mixed timber areas that they found in warmer states farther south and east.

Runia said biologists think farming may have made it possible for prairie chickens to live farther north and west because they were able to forage for grain. That made it possible for them to endure the colder winters, and prompted prairie chick-ens to expand their range.

“When the settlers moved into the Dakotas, they had that addition-al food source. They fol-lowed the plow,” Runia said.

Even today, Runia said, pockets of prairie chicken are found in northeast South Dakota counties such as Deuel, Grant and Clark coun-ties, not so far from where Greenhead shot a few at the start of the 20th century.

But South Dakota’s main prairie chicken range is now in central South Dakota, Runia said.

SissetonBy 1904, Greenhead

is well-established as one of South Dakota’s best boosters. He starts off a story that year:

“To secure most excellent sport shoot-ing wildfowl … it is simply necessary to secure transporta-tion to Sisseton, S.D., over the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, and leave on the Pioneer Limited, pulling out of the Cream City about 9 o’clock in the evening … For years I have under-gone privation and dis-comfort indescribable that some distant and unfrequented shooting ground might be dis-covered, but now I am well content to confine my yearly excursions to points which are reached in pleasant journeying. I have

visited a number of points in South Dakota in the past ten years, but none of them has appealed to me more strongly than the coun-try adjacent to Sisseton, which is reached after a short ride westward from St. Paul …”

The trick, he tells his readers, is to be sure to send boats and decoys ahead by some two weeks – and still be prepared for some hardships in the field.

“Fit drinking water is rarely close at hand and should be secured at some ranch where there is a good well and kept in five-gallon tin cans, or, better still, a good clean barrel. While I have taken chances and occasionally used the water of these prairie lakes and sloughs without unpleasant consequences, the practice is unsafe and should not be followed,” Greenhead recom-mends.

Family affair with South Dakota …

Greenhead also recommends letting the women join in the romance of hunting.

On one of his trips to Dakota, Greenhead hunts the area near Fort Sisseton, hunt-ing with area rancher Nels Nelson, appar-ently a precursor of the commercial hunt-ing operator of today. Later Greenhead writes: “Within the past few months Mr. Nelson has secured a lease of the territory adjacent to the fort and will very likely be in a position to care royally for shooters who visit him. Circumstances rendered a trip to the Dakotas out of the question last season but if nothing occurs to prevent, I expect to spend this year’s vaca-tion with Nels at the fort. Accommodations for ladies can easily be arranged for, and there certainly never can be found a more admirably located headquarters for a con-genial party than at the fort, for innumerable sloughs extend in all directions, several of which can be reached in a few minutes’ walk. The water from the big spring is excellent, the dry prairie air is invig-orating, and enough shooting to satisfy any humane sportsman will be found close at hand. Take your wives with you for a change, fellow shooters … Mrs. Greenhead says she is going this Fall, and periodically trots out her togs for my inspec-

tion. I have had the six-teen’s stock shortened a bit so as to fit her shoulder …”

What about bag limits?

Of all the inconve-niences about hunt-ing in South Dakota between 1897 and 1904, there’s one that Greenhead never men-tions: bag limits.

Wildlife managers say that’s no surprise

– though some local jurisdictions did set game limits at that time, such rules didn’t carry much weight and were poorly enforced.

That culture of unre-stricted hunting came with a price. Though the written accounts may seem to describe a hunter’s paradise with ample game, some spe-cies of waterfowl were being driven nearly to extinction at the time. That’s not necessarily due to sport hunters so much as it is other fac-tors such as commer-cial hunting in parts of the country and also hunting of waterfowl year-round and gath-ering of eggs by farm families, for example.

One of the reasons Greenhead’s accounts of hunting South Dakota are valuable, biologists say, is that they give a glimpse of a time before the U.S. signed a migra-tory bird treaty in 1916 and Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The act – which was sub-sequently challenged but upheld by the courts in 1920 – now protects more than 800 species of migratory birds. But all that hap-pened after Greenhead wrote about hunting on South Dakota’s marshes.

“It’s a good window into how things were done before the treaty and before there were wildlife laws,” said Rocco Murano, senior waterfowl biologist for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks.

“That’s the time the giant Canada goose was being extirpated out of South Dakota. Wood ducks almost became extinct at that same time.”

Though it’s difficult for biologists to guess what waterfowl popula-tions were during the first decades of South Dakota statehood, when Greenhead is vis-iting the state, Murano said the good news is that many species of waterfowl are at higher levels now than since the state began track-ing those populations in the 1950s.

Four hunters behind fowl suspended from lines secured to a building with wood siding. Four firearms form a pyramid with their muzzles leaning against one another in the foreground. (5.5x3 glass plate courtesy of the South Dakota Historical Society)

WATERFOWL from pg. C1

OLD-TIME TRADITIONS IN SOUTH DAKOTA’S GOLDEN HUNTING AGE

“Upon the hay our blankets were soon spread for the night, and with a tight roof overhead what more could a reasonable

mortal demand on a hunting trip, while the recollection of that first meal in a Dakota farmhouse still remains with me.”