Forest and 
Vol. LXXXIII. October 31, 1914 
No. 18 
The Old Timer Talks of Accidents and Opportunities 
Tragedies of Days When Game Was Plenty and Shooters Careless 
By Edward T. Martin. 
In plowing and cultivating land which was 
once under water but by ditching and draining 
has been reclaimed, many relics of the primitive 
days are often uncovered. Relics of the time 
when waterfowl were the chief inhabitants and 
muskrats the only house owners. Relics every 
one of which was a souvenir of tragedy or 
trouble. 
In places near the large cities, where the black- 
coated Sunday shooters held sway for many 
years, the finds were more numerous than fur¬ 
ther away where less powder was burned and 
fewer hunters congregated. 
Take, for example, Wolf River where the 
railroad bridges cross, half a mile south of 
the Chicago city limits. There at times ducks 
were aplenty; usually when coming from Lake 
Michigan ahead of a storm, and there also the 
dark uniformed battalions of the Don’t-Know- 
Hows gathered in force, sometimes more than 
a hundred gunners being on or near the bridges, 
using an assortment of shooting irons from old 
army Enfields to six bore swivels, and banging 
at everything able to run, jump, swim or fly, 
from hop toads and dragon flies to ducks. 
Some years ago the river channel was widened 
and deepened up stream two hundred yards from 
the second bridge and with the mud thrown out 
by the dredge were many mementoes of the 
past. One was the skeleton of a man, the skull 
shattered as by shot fired at close range, then 
there was a variety of bottles, mostly broken 
and empty of everything but water, an ax, a 
powder flask and seven shotguns, one of which 
was a flintlock musket made more than a hun¬ 
dred years before, a possible relic of the Fort 
Dearborn massacre. Four others were common 
muzzle loaders and the remaining two, old style 
cheaply made breech loaders. 
One of these last was given to a boy residing 
near the bridge and when scraped, cleaned and 
oiled was in good enough condition for its new 
owner to use in shooting mud hens, divers and 
blackbirds, these being as high as his ambition 
reached. There were rumors of coin, a watch 
and jewelry also having been found, but of this 
there is doubt. 
Three miles North of Wolf River, on the 
Calumet, a dredge in its dipper of dripping mud 
lifted out a few bones, some bits of leather with 
an old buckle still attached and a crusted, rusted 
silver piece, which when cleaned proved an 
English shilling of 1733. This the writer now 
has stored with his other souvenirs of the long 
ago. A tragedy here; perhaps some early ex¬ 
plorer or a Colonial or English scout lost trying 
to cross a swollen stream in the days of 1776. 
So all through the Calumet, the Kankakee, 
the Illinois River countries, through the Ameri¬ 
can Bottoms, through the thousands of square 
miles of marsh and swamp of lake and pond 
drained since reclamation first began back in the 
’6o’s, if the many grewsome finds could talk what 
tales of open war and private feud they would 
unfold; what stories of accident and misfor¬ 
tune, of revenge and robbery might they not 
tell; but as once a threatening native, claiming 
to be a market hunter but who could neither 
shoot nor yet find game, said to the writer: 
• 
“The lake gives up no story of how it hap¬ 
pened and dead men tell no tales.” 
The yearly casualties among shooters from 
accidents, some unavoidable, many careless, equal 
those of a small battle. There are few men who 
have shot much, who have continually hunted 
the wild that have escaped accident or near 
accident which might have resulted seriously. 
Perhaps one of the least expected, the most 
unavoidable happened to a friend of the writer, 
back in the long ago. He and his shooting mate 
were on opposite sides of a round pool, gunning 
for bluebill, passing over on flight. My friend 
was kneeling in his boat, back to the pond, try¬ 
ing to nurse into flame a faint burning match 
so as to light his pipe when a flock of ducks 
swift and high passed over his companion who 
killed one. The birds were easily doing two 
miles a minute which speed carried the dead 
one across the pond with almost cannon-like 
velocity. It struck my friend on the shoulder, 
knocked him out of the boat which capsized 
and into the mud and water where he lay un¬ 
conscious, his head pillowed on some cane roots, 
his body half submerged until his companion 
could come to his rescue- Had he fallen face 
down, or had his head not struck the bunch of 
roots, it must have been a fatal accident; even 
as it was, several weeks passed before he fully 
recovered from the blow. 
The writer once had a somewhat similar ex¬ 
perience from a bird of his own killing, but as 
a miss is as good as a mile, it amounted to so 
little as to be hardly worth telling. 
The bird was a twelve pound goose, killed 
with the first barrel and while watching his 
second bird which came down fluttering and 
showing signs of life, he paid no attention to 
the first. It barely missed his head in falling, 
knocked his hat overboard with the tip of its 
wing, struck the boat a glancing blow which 
cracked one of the boards in the side, then when 
it splashed in the lake, threw mud and water 
ten feet high. 
Another near accident happened in the South 
while shooting from a platform blind built two 
hundred yards from shore. The writer, tended 
by a boy in a light skiff and with 175 decoys 
set around the blind, was having good shooting, 
and “good” in those parts meant something very 
extra up North. 
Soon after sunrise the wind suddenly shifted 
to southeast and rapidly increased in force. 
The ducks became very uneasy, flying scattered 
in broken flocks and eventually working to the 
sheltered end of the lake. Heavy cloud banks 
which got darker and darker were piled in the 
southeastern heavens. Then the water com¬ 
menced rising and the platform, before six inches 
above the waves now was level with the lake’s 
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