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When the first Dutch settlers arrived about 1626 in the New World and established a town called New Amsterdam, later transformed into the English city of New York, they were astonished at the prodigious quantity of game birds—passenger pigeons, quail, geese, swans, cranes, turkeys, heath hens, snipes and ducks. Swans were so plentiful that the bays and shores where they resorted appeared as if they were dressed in white drapery. And in the spring and fall, “ducks and geese blackened the sky over the marshlands on the east side of the [Manhattan] island,” and “woodcocks were in plenty in the thick coverts.”

The colonists began at once to trade with the Indians for their commodities, which were comprised principally of grains, vegetables, fish, game, and furs. Nicasius de Sille, who arrived in 1653, remarked: “The Indians bring us wild geese, turkeys, partridges, wild pigeons, ducks and various other birds and animals.” Three years later, 1,000 Europeans lived in New Amsterdam and the new inhabitants complained they couldn’t sleep at night because of the constant noise of the thousands of ducks and geese. A writer remarked: “The men scarcely ever labor, except to provide some game, either fowl or other description, for cooking, and then they have provided everything.” By the early 1660s, New Amsterdam had transitioned from a wilderness trading post to an entrepot of colonial commerce in the New World in which New York City would become the world’s greatest game market. It would remain the most redoubtable fortress for game dealers and markets hunters for the next 230 years.

I remember my first shotgun and the beginning of my tutoring in the art of wing shooting. What a Red Letter Day it was for me, for when I reached my tenth birthday Dad placed in my hands a double barrel shotgun, a family heirloom, and a good, reliable shooter over the years—used by my elders of the bygone days over whose everlasting bones the grass has grown and wilted. What halcyon scenes my aging eyes did see, what would I not give to recall them all? It does my old heart good to go back to them. I well remember the first duck I killed on the wing. A flock slackened speed as they saw the decoys, lowering as they came, while several of the keenest eyes searched the area around the decoys for danger. They flew around for reconnaissance in a wide circle, before setting their wings and gliding deadly close. Dad said, “Take ’em.” Then out of a shadowy tree line, a jet of fire and a sharp report came from my long gun barrel. Red hot needles of lead pierced a big greenhead just at the right moment. Frantic wings clamored away for safety as the dead greenhead never felt the water below as it splashed down. I gave a triumphant yell, and Dad responded in some surprise, “You got him?” “Of course, I did,” said I proudly, puffing out my chest, what chest I had. I was the happiest boy in the state of Tennessee. From the look on Dad’s face, as plainly as if this significant moment was chiseled into a monument of granite, and the silence that followed, I knew what this day meant to him and he knew what this day would mean to me. Oh, glorious days of boyhood, when the rich red blood of youth ran rampant through my veins, those times of dreams, how much I appreciate them in old age. They will linger for a long, long time. However, it is only now when the days spent afield are few and far between that I grasp their full importance, and I am overcome with merciless disappointment that I cannot relive the yesteryears once more.

The metal “instrument” Bigelow made “to imitate the quacking of ducks” was probably the prototype of the Elam Fisher tongue pincher duck call, who lived in Detroit. As he was hunting at St. Clair during the Civil War and after, home to the canvasback, redhead, mallard and black duck, he would have been close to Detroit and Elam Fisher who was the only one who patented a call that early. His patent read: “Be it known that I, ELAM FISHER, of Detroit, in the county of Wayne and State of Michigan, have invented a new and useful Improvement in Duck-Call.” According to the patent, the two curved radius tone-boards were made of wood while the “bell-mouth” was made of horn or bone. It had no barrel. Then we come to a duck call with a barrel and a single tone board. The earliest known written reference to a duck call is from Joseph W. Long’s American Wildfowl Shooting, 1874. Long gives instructions on how to make a “squawker,” a call with a barrel. Duck calls did not occur in a vacuum. The next two duck-call styles to evolve after the tongue pincher—Allen’s and Horner’s/Grubbs’—were fashioned after an “organ’s reed pipe,” and, like so, those that followed, which had a barrel, a single tone-board and metal reed. It was only a matter of experimenting and experiencing for duck calls to evolve. Another call style came with a wooden barrel and became known as the “Illinois River duck call.” Like the Allen call with its straight tone board and curved metal reed, this style became highly commercialized and promoted by Charles Grubbs. It made its appearance sometime during or right after the Civil War by Sam Horner and soon thereafter by Frank Wood, both who sought anonymity, then Charles Grubbs, who sought fame and fortune, and then others. This style would become the forerunner of our modern wooden barrel calls to the present-day. It is my belief that Fisher got his idea for making a call from Dr. Bigelow and that Sam Horner was the first to make an Illinois River duck call, which was the forerunner of all our modern-day duck call, which Olt and the Glodos and others took to perfection. And from Sam, the Wood’s brothers began making calls, but much too late in the game. That is if their birth dates are correct.

Side hunts had their origin in a beneficial custom obtained in pioneer days, when the power of a town or county sallied forth to kill bears, wolves, wild cats, etc., which were a menace to the whole community. The choosing of sides and the competition thereby engen­dered, stimulated each man to kill as much as he could, so they began competing against one another for the price of a supper, or some other modest wager. These side hunts were often advertised in newspapers. The hunts promoted social intercourse, more than sport, among members, and competitive elements were prominent. In these side hunts, long popular in most areas of the U.S., the members of the hunt assigned points in relation to their desirability and scarcity, and competing teams went into the countryside and along the shores after the highest point total—so many for a grouse, quail, duck, crane, deer, etc. Once gun clubs made their appearance, side hunts were conducted, where each member strove to kill as many birds as possible, that his side might win, and that the other side had to pay for and prepare a gala dinner which followed. Barrels of game birds and big and small game were killed, no longer just the “vermins” in these hunts. Nothing tended more to exterminate game birds and large and small game than these contests, as the contestants were out to kill all they could. On the Gulf Coast at Mobile, the valuation of game adopted by the Gulf City Gun Club, for their annual two-day hunt in November 1882, was: “bear 300, wildcat 150; deer—buck 125, doe 100; fox 100, rabbit 12, squirrel 7, goose 75, turkey—gobbler 60, hen 50; chicken hawk 25, owl 20, sparrow hawk 10, woodcock 20, quail 7, wild pigeon 10, Wilson’s snipe 5, plover 5, papabot 10, dove 4, robin 1, lark 1, rail 1, poule d’eau 1, king rail 2, gallinule 2; ducks—canvasback 25, black mallard 20, mallard 10, pintail 8, widgeon 8, redhead 8, teal 5, other ducks 5.” During a Christmas side hunt in 1902, the citizens of Wisner, Nebraska held a one-day side hunt as reported in the January 3, 1903 Recreation magazine. They “killed 150 quail, 225 rab­bits and more than 200 ducks.” At Albany, Oregon in 1885, two sides of 30 hunters each killed 21 geese, 31 mallards, 39 teal, 13 pheasants, 162 snipe, 10 killdeers, 55 yellow hammers, 4 coons. Following the hunt, a game dinner was given at the Revere House by the losing team.

As the twenty-third president (1889-1893) and the grandson of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president, he loved cigars and waterfowling as he was an excellent shot at snipe and ducks and a mean performer with the heavy eight- and ten-bore side by side, but mostly with a 12-gauge. He was one of only two presidents that were avid waterfowlers, as it was said that “he had a penchant for duck hunting that had no bounds.”

He hunted the entire eastern seaboard, both north and south. When he needed to get away for relaxation from the presidency, it was as a hunter of waterfowl. He was happiest when he was down on the Potomac or the Chesapeake blasting away late in the fall or in the cypress swamps of the James River wetlands. Like President Cleveland, he left Washington D.C. surreptitiously in the hope of keeping where he was going from the press. As he said, “if it is announced where I am going on a shooting trip, the consequence is that about ten thousand other sportsmen would select the same time and place for their own sport.”

Migrating southward along the Atlantic coast from Labrador, Newfoundland, and portions of southeastern Quebec and western Greenland, along the shores of Cape Cod bays and ponds arose the famous Massachusetts goose and duck stands. These varied in complexity from the “shooting blind” or “brush house,” which was made of reeds and branches and looked like a low cluster of trees and bushes with a few wooden decoys and perhaps a couple of live ones placed within about 20 yards of the pond, to the more elaborate permanent stands. It was a sport peculiar to Eastern Massachusetts, particularly at the ponds of Norfolk, Plymouth, and Barnstable Counties. Overall, there were some “Great Ponds” (over ten acres), as they were called, in the state, most all lying near the coast, having been at one time or another occupied with shooting stands.

The best opportunities usually came when the birds had been driven off their course by the heavy northeasterly storms of the fall and early winter, which sent them inland over the ponds. Block and slab decoys along with live decoys were the chief accomplices of market gunners, who also served as gamekeepers and guides for wealthy sports from the cities.

Shooting on these ponds consisted of hunting from a wooden blind or “stand,” where the “stand gunner” prayed for a big storm, which would drive the waterfowl from the sea inland. The typical Massachusetts stand consisted of a “hut” (also called a “camp” or “shanty”), large enough to sleep and feed six or eight hunters, usually built on the shore of a beautiful pond or freshwater lake about 15 feet directly back of the stand or “breastwork,” the latter located some 20 feet from the water’s edge. The breastwork, or “stockade,” extended often along the pond shore for some distance on both sides, and it was customary to keep the goose beach more or less separated from the duck beach.

The hut usually contained three rooms. A living room, a sleeping room fitted with spring bunks, “similar to those in the staterooms of a Sound steamer,” and a kitchen with the end partitioned off for an ice chest and provision room. The roof and sides were brushed up.