INTRODUCTION. 27 



felt upon the vast multitudes of water-fowl that bred in the 

 Canadian northwest. Farmers used every possible method 

 to destroy the Ducks and Geese which consumed their crops. 

 Market hunters systematically hunted the country. Flocks 

 of Quail were enticed to certain points, where they were 

 netted or trapped. Grouse were hunted by men in wagons, 

 with trained dogs ranging near to put up the birds. Plover 

 and Curlews were pursued by a small army of men, who fol- 

 lowed them during their migration, and shipped the game to 

 both western and eastern markets. The fact that these birds 

 were among the most beneficial species on the prairie farms 

 was not considered; they were exterminated without mercy. 

 It was customary in the early days for a party of wild-fowl 

 gunners to take along a horse and wagon to haul home their 

 loads of birds. Mr. E. Hough, in writing of Duck shooting 

 in North Dakota (1897), says that up to within two years of 

 that time it was a daily sight at Dawson station to see the 

 entire platform lined with Ducks. In warm weather it was 

 not unusual to see two or three wagonloads of spoiled birds 

 hauled away and dumped into a coulee.^ 



Huntington tells of a time when the Ducks were so 

 abundant in the markets of Detroit that they could not 

 be used, and, warm weather coming on, they were thrown 

 away.^ He says that it was common in the old days for pot- 

 hunters to fill their gunning boats to the gunwales, making 

 such a glut in the market that large quantities of the birds 

 spoiled.^ 



" Invisible," writing in Forest and Stream, in 1899 states 

 that there was not then one Goose left on the River Platte 

 to fifty in days gone by. Ten or fifteen years earlier he had 

 known a man to kill fifty-two between 2 o'clock and sundown. 

 Similar statements came from sportsmen and ornithologists in 

 many parts of the middle west. The shooting scores of gun- 

 ning clubs show the decrease of the birds during the latter part 

 of the nineteenth century. 



' Grinnell, George Bird: American Duck Shooting, 1901, pp. 320, 321. 



2 Huntington, Dwight W.: Our Feathered Game, 1903, pp. 182, 183. 



3 Ibid., p. 206. 



