State Game Was S laughtere in '7 Os 
 
Hunters Made 
It a Business 
Supplied Lumber Camps 
and    City    Markets     by 
Wholesale Killings in 
Wisconsin 
BY SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THlE JOURNAL 
Rice Lake, Wis.-Modern deer 
poachers, fur bootleggers and "game 
hogs" in general can qualify as no 
better than novices when compared 
to the professional hunters of the 
seventies and eighties who like ex- 
ecutioners stripped the forests and 
streams of central and northern 
Wisconsin of game, fowl and fish. 
To those hunters who contracted 
to supply meat for lumber camps 
and city markets, it was nothing 
unusual to kill a hundred or more 
deer a season. With guns and traps 
they also tracked down bear, beav- 
er, otter and muskrat, and some, 
like David Cartwright of Chippewa 
county, shipped out 600 to 900 pounds 
of brook trout at a time during the 
cold season. 
Trapping Pigeons an Art 
Game birds were so numerous in 
the seventies that they were given 
scant attention, but in the eighties 
and nineties Haugen, New Auburn, 
Alma and a dozen other points on 
the Mississippi and in northern Wis- 
consin became centers for shipping 
quail, prairie chicken and grouse to 
market. The    trapping  of wild 
pigeons in the seventies and eighties 
became a specialized art that de- 
manded particular skill in locating 
the birds. 
The destruction of wild game by 
professional hunters and parties of 
sportsmen was even more rapid than 
the depletion of the pine forestry, 
and such vandalism often aroused 
the Indians, who rarely killed more 
than they needed for their own con- 
sumption. 
An example of what one hunting 
party did is revealed by Editor 
Stocking of Eau Claire who reported 
that his party of six in two days' 
hunting .in Barron county in Sep- 
tember, 1871, "bagged . . . 364 birds 
and we probably killed 100 more we 
did not find on account of the brush. 
We are sorry to say, however, that 
most of them were spoiled because 
of the hot weather on our return 
journey, and many of the 300 trout 
that had been taken and packed in 
ice." 
Charles Martin Foremost 
Augusta was the headquarters of 
the greatest array of hunters that 
the state has ever known, and was 
the center of operations for Charles 
Martin, whose wholesale slaughter 
of passenger pigeons gained him na- 
tional notoriety. 
Martin trapped pigeons in Michi- 
gan as well as Wisconsin and spent 
as much as $100 a year for tele- 
grams to keep informed on the 
flights of the birds. Express com- 
panies paid for the telegrams. He 
reported that he once captured 1,195 
pigeons at one drop of a double net. 
Martin used wheat for bait and 
tame pigeons as decoys to attract 
the passing flocks. When captured 
the pigeons were fed for several 
weeks until they were "as fat as 
butter balls" and then were shipped 
to Chicago or New York where they 
brought as high as $2.50 a dozen. 
 
the village of Cartwright (now New 
Auburn) was named. He arrived 
here on foot from Madison in 1856 
and shortly thereafter signed a con- 
tract with a Menomonie firm for all 
the venison he could furnish by, 
Jan. 1. 
Cartwright carefully recounted his 
hunting exploits in his memoirs, but 
he found his deer hunting feats so 
monotonous that he gave them scant 
mention, devoting greater space to 
his encounters with wolves and wild- 
cats and his trapping of muskrats. 
Killed Deer With Hatchets 
He did recall, however, that in his 
first season in the north the snow 
was so crusted that it was impos- 
sible for deer to travel and enabled 
him and his son, Jonathan, and Wil- 
liam Lee to approach the flounder- 
ing deer and slay them with hatch- 
ets. Indians and predatory animals 
also killed so many that the deer 
hunting was poor for several years 
thereafter. 
His memoirs note one shipment ef 
brook trout that brought 40 cents a 
pound and 67 deer on which he real- 
ized from 10 to 12 cents a pound. 
Thousands of muskrats fell prey to 
his traps. From one slough alone 
he took 400 and his high catch for a 
single night was 130. 
The best hunting territory, accord- 
ing to Cartwright, was Dallas (now 
Barron)  Pounty. On one of his trips 
his party bagged 50 otter, 40 beaver, 
300 muskrats, 100 coon, 100 mink, 18 
martens, 10 deer and a wolf._ 
Trout Netted $976 
By 1870 Cartwright and his com- 
panions had more than 100 miles of 
trap lines with nine camps along the 
route. In 1876 they sold 97 deer, 
eight bear and thousands of pelts. 
A 600-pound shipment of speckled 
trout also brought them $976 that 
year. 
Although Cartwright left north- 
ern Wisconsin several times for ex- 
peditions with parties along the 
Minnesota and Cottonwood rivers in 
Minnesota and the Turkey river in 
Iowa, he always returned to Wiscon- 
sin. 
Railroads, always quick to pro- 
mote the recreational possibilities of 
Wisconsin, made it a point 40 years 
ago to use the names of prominent 
Madison and Milwaukee sportsmen 
who had made successful hunting 
trips. Often pictures were printed 
showing them with a hundred trout 
caugt i a half day's fishing or 50 
mallards brought down in a forenoon 
of duck hunting. 
But the day of the professional 
hunter had passed by the turn of 
the century and stricter conserva- 
tion laws gradually curtailed their 
lucrative trade. Too late did Wis- 
consin discover how tragic and cm- 
plete was, her loss and only then did 
she start the long job of repbpulat- 
ing fields and forests and streams.