Description
The old timers’ creed was the wetlands are God’s best sanctuaries —a brotherhood that was patronized and loved and in harmony with flooded timber, swamps, rivers, and lakes of Mother Nature rather than board rooms, offices, and workplaces.
For some three hundred years after the colonists arrived, astonishingly waterfowl were so abundant that it is beyond our comprehension. Nevertheless, these images tell us of the ponderous strings of waterfowl and shorebirds they once hunted on the sloughs, swamps, marshes, etc.
While many pictured in my three volumes engaged in market hunting of waterfowl, this being their principal means of support, others employed their leisure time in the sport of waterfowl shooting, their passionate love. The two groups, which were so inspired, took time out to leave these treasured images behind for us to marble at and ponder over.
These pictorial gems have an intensity which we cannot achieve, for they depict a time that is long gone and will never be seen again, and their images portray a narrative purpose which are quite remarkable. Through these images, the old timers tell their stories and their personal histories are worth recording. Without them, I am not sure we would have a resemblance of what the olden and golden days beheld for the waterfowlers as the written word can only depict so much.
Most surely, they blazed the trail in creating a modern national culture of outdoor sport and recreation enjoyed by all of us as we pursue our love for waterfowling and recreation, a hunting culture which led to the growth of environmental awareness of and debate over conservation and an appreciation for the natural world.
That they were enthusiastic lovers and devotees of our waterfowling sport is evidenced by the vividness in which their scenes depict an embodiment of waterfowlers’ well bought knowledge of their sport.
Hopefully, they will remind us of more recent days spent in Mother Nature’s solitude with friends, family, guns, and dogs, and make us long to again enjoy ourselves in that way.
However, the keener delight in viewing these images just might be in dreaming of what it must have been like and to have participated in such a sport during those times. And many will confess to dreams of a sportsman’ paradise in which we will picture ourselves. For me, they provide everything I need to imagine myself hunting during those times in the wilderness, imagining myself in the wetlands as a waterfowler while taking me away on imagined flights from humdrum life. The nostalgia, so depicted, implicitly invites us to view America as one might imagine an old-timer would have seen it, a nostalgia which shaped a perspective on a changing nation.
I often sit in solitary wonderment as I look at the images of the old timers. I can hear the swamps, marshes, and forest coming alive at dawn—mallards, teal, and pintails calling their awakening. I hear their unspoken words and the stories they tell and see things that will never happen again. They draw me to different events from the past, which are imprinted in my mind that will never be forgotten.
It is easy to judge and condemn the excesses of kill recorded in some of these images, but I will not do so, for they lived during a different time and place and under different circumstances and conditions. We tend to vent our displeasure with such and pay little attention to the circumstances and conditions in which they lived and the purposes to which they were put. In many ways, these visual images motivated sporting journals to write editorials embracing conservation of the last remaining wildlife and encouraging restoration of wetlands which were lost to drainage, etc., along with promoting the passage of legislation to protect wildlife, particularly waterfowl, while forging North America’s conservation principles and acting upon it for over 130 years.
As I view these images through the haze of vanished years, I only contemplate the grandeur of the olden and golden days now stored in my memory vault for me to enjoy forever and, hopefully, others can enjoy for years to come long after I have crossed over the Great Divide. Memories stored of the old timers hunting dabbling ducks in the prairie potholes, or the rough seacoast where from their boats they shot at the passing squadrons of old squaws and sheldrake, or the ample bays where they had such fabulous sport with canvasbacks, redheads, widgeons, and black ducks, or flooded green timber where the mallard ruled supreme, or the tidal mudflats where they waited in ambush for the whistling pinions of the curlews, willets, yellowlegs, and dowitchers.
The images were reproduced to remain as true to the original works as possible. Obviously, some were blurred or defective in some way, but I felt it esthetically important to include them so that the knowledge base of our sport is known for the sake of the rising and the unborn future generations, and that the images might be instrumental in convincing others regarding the importance of using our natural resources wisely.
Many of the old timers’ images were taken with cameras with all the art and precision to be found anywhere at that time, images touched with all the wonders of nature herself, while others were cruder and made in haste here and there that only needed a little improvement and retouching, but I will even recant that—they needed nothing. They are natural and that is—perfect, for they chronicle Mother Nature’s doings in her far-away nooks and crannies, noting now and then where the waterfowler and his skills and talent and passion encountered the infinite and invisible nature around him.
But, more than that, they urge us to get out of musty offices and edifices of brick and mortar and concrete and asphalt jungles, and back to nature and natural conditions. Nature is the source and end of all. We only betray ourselves otherwise. Too large a portion of our populace is centered in cities and towns. Too many of us are chained to business, and too many to something worse.
So, as you view these images, you will, I know, ponder the changes that have taken place in wildlife conditions across this country. The growth of population, the spread of cities and towns everywhere across the landscape, and the penetration of once remote wilderness by steamboats, railroads, automobiles, and highways over the years have resulted in a shocking diminution in game and waterfowl. If the old timers were here today, they would tell us that as long ago as the 1870s that they were lamenting the decline in the abundance of waterfowl, that what we have today is only a shadow of its former self.
It is different now! Just as we replenished the passing of the old timers, hopefully, we will pass the baton of waterfowling and its preservation to the younger generation and thus prolong the sport we love so that there will be something worth living for.
The reasons they have given us these extraordinary images of their time and their livelihood are because they wanted the future generations to know what they saw, what they experienced, and what changes occurred during their lifetime!
Their written words are so powerful but in no way measure up to the vivid imagery so expressed in the pages of my three Volumes. They give us hope and the belief that we can change the direction we are going by bringing the world back into harmony with Mother Nature; that it is not too late. Hopefully, the younger generations that follow will preserve and replenish the wetlands thus conserving something worth living for—waterfowling!
I have authored many good books and stories which have been published in various publications and have gone aboard in the world, but I know of nothing I have published that has given me more pleasure than the Historic Waterfowling Images books.
This volume and the other two, hopefully, will turn out to be worthy enough to be preserved and made available and shared for years to come. Vol. III includes NY, MD, NJ, ME, MA, PA, IN, OH, IL, IO, MI, WI, MN, NE, OK, KS, GA, ND and SD.
