FOREST AND STREAM 
117 
Confessions of a Market Hunter 
A Story of Years of Game Slaughter and the Shipment of Tons of Birds 
By “Old Camper.” 
RESUMING somewhat on the 
privilege usually extended an 
old subscriber I would like to 
ask a little space in your 
columns to make a few quota¬ 
tions from a book I was reading 
the other evening, and which 
may be a revelation to the pres¬ 
ent generation of American sportsman. I will 
not weary your readers preaching a long sermon 
on the extracts I intend quoting, nor will I 
moralize over them, for the lesson is so clear that 
no sermon is necessary. 
In 1904 there was published in Chicago a book 
of some four or five hundred pages, under the 
title “The Shadow of a Gun.” The author, H. 
Clay Merritt, had for years pursued the occupa¬ 
tion of supplier of wild game to the city mar¬ 
kets. The stories of slaughter told in that book 
go far to explain why it is that so few birds are 
left to-day. In the quotations I give below, I 
will not endeavor to make a connected story. 
The period runs from wartime and before, down 
to 1895, when Merritt, and dozens of others in 
the same business found, like Othello, their 
occupation gone. Just read some of the follow¬ 
ing : 
“On this trip we killed over one thousand 
birds (woodcock) and delivered nearly all of 
them safely in New York, but the prices were 
only thirty cents per pair at the highest. More 
sold at twenty-five and some at twenty.” 
“From Erie we went to Savannah and spent a 
large part of the summer hunting on the Island 
across the river and oh the bottoms bdlow the 
town, and in August, when we left, we thought 
we had killed about all the birds that were 
there. Our total birds made us a profit of over 
a thousand dollars that year.” 
"The spring came again. We packed about 
twenty thousand birds. We shipped half of them 
or more and endeavored to carry the rest until 
the summer, or when they were called for. 
Prices were good in May and June at about $2.50 
to $2.75, but we were confined entirely to orders 
if we maintained our price, and the orders came 
now only from A. & E. Robbins that year.” 
‘‘In the fall the season was wet, so that we 
added a good many more (snipe) and when the 
spring opened we had nearly fifteen hundred 
dozen. This was about 1875 or ’76.” 
“Later in the latter part of the eighties, we 
received an order from A. & E. Robbins for a 
barrel at $1.50 per pair, and he liked them so 
well he continued ordering till he had received 
thirteen hundred pair, all of which arrived in 
good order and were promptly paid for. Very 
many barrels were forwarded and sold in those 
years between 1878 and 1885 for over three hun¬ 
dred dollars per barrel.” 
“One year prices did not go up above one 
dollar and I did not sell. I put them in barrels 
and carried them over till 1884 and then shipped 
a carload. of all kinds of game at once, in Sep¬ 
tember, including canvasbacks, red heads and 
snipe, and we packed the car in ice and it arrived 
well and sold well, except the woodcock, which 
sold only a barrel or two at half price, and we 
had them returned to us in cold weather, but 
we^ never were able to dispose of them.” 
‘ We had a good many barrels of the early 
snipe which we had carried over from the year 
preceding, and they were getting mouldy, and I 
could not place them on orders. We rubbed the 
mould off the fat birds and they sold well.” 
"I had at this time a large supply of fresh 
grass plover and I sold about a thousand dol¬ 
lars’ worth of birds within an hour after he 
(the buyer) had arrived. He took what fresh 
snipe I had at $3.00, a good many barrels of 
grass plover at $2.00, the small mouldy snipe at 
eighty-five cents, and the sand snipe at twenty- 
five cents.” 
“I had a few barrels of Dow birds. They 
seemed to keep better as they were very fat, 
vnen the last barrel had gone we found that we 
had a net profit between twenty-nine hundred 
and three thousand dollars on the thirty-six 
barrels.” 
“In this trip we killed and shipped fifteen 
hundred pairs of woodcocks.” 
“In 1873 our actual labors in the field, by wood 
and stream, ended. We had carried a gun for 
fifteen years and we now laid it down, never de¬ 
siring to take it up again. We had in that time 
seen the finest flocks that ever inspired a hunter, 
pass out of existence. Henry County was prac¬ 
tically denuded of game. The States west of the 
Mississippi River were no better off, but beyond 
Why Game is Scarce To-day. 
and what little mould there was, rubbed off 
easily enough. These brought me six dollars 
and a half a dozen when winter came, and I 
had now reduced my stock of old birds so low 
that I only had twenty-ifive or thirty barrels left 
of all kinds, and I considered it the best time I 
would have to rebuild my freezer.” 
“We took four or five hundred dozen quail 
that we had left in the spring and packed them 
in cans and sealed them the best we knew, and 
they cost us $1.50 per dozen.” 
“I sent a buyer to the Illinois River in Mardh, 
who gathered up. with a little outside help, thirty- 
six barrels, red head and canvas, six barrels be¬ 
ing canvas and the balance red head. The 
canvas cost about $6.50 a dozen and the red 
heads $2.50.” 
“The market was in such a delicate state we 
could only sell one or two barrels at a time, but 
the Missouri lay a great country full of every de¬ 
scription of birds we had here except woodcocks 
and partridges, and these were found only in the 
lands further north, beginning in ‘Wisconsin and 
running through Minnesota and Montana and the 
Dakotas, and here we turned our attention for 
twenty years more until 1893.” 
“I have, seen more birds fly up in one fidd at 
one time in October, than are now living within 
the limits of this State (Nebraska) and in one 
instance in Stark County on a cold day in early 
winter I have seen acres covered with the birds 
as thickly as they could sit. Along low valleys 
like the Edwards River, the birds would gather 
at the approach of snows in such Quantities, that 
they covered ground for a distance of a .mile in 
length, and in 1861, north of Mt. Pleasant, some 
fifteen or twenty miles, I have seen the fences 
at the first fall of snow covered with chickens 
