Hundred Years of Texas Waterfowl Hunting
The Decoys, Guides, Clubs, and Places, 1870s to 1970s
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: Texas A&M University Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Contents
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pp. v-vi
Foreword
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pp. vii-viii
The sport of waterfowl hunting began, for many of us, at an early age. As summer green turned to fall orange, we put on our boots and went afield with fathers, uncles, brothers, friends, and sometimes we went alone. I was introduced to waterfowl...
Acknowledgments
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pp. ix-xi
The one author’s name on the book cover is misleading, as the effort results from contributions by a great many people. First and foremost are those who provided written material, both published and unpublished, oral histories, and family...
Introduction
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pp. 1-3
Waterfowl hunting has been an integral part of nearly two hundred years of Anglo Texas settlement, first as sustenance, then market hunting, followed by recreation or sport hunting. A Hundred Years of Texas Waterfowl Hunting attempts...
Part One: Texas Waterfowl Hunting
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pp. 5-56
1. Sport Hunting in Texas
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pp. 7-22
Early Texans found a vast, unbroken coastal marsh that extended from the Sabine River on the Louisiana border to the Lavaca River, punctuated by the rich estuaries of Sabine Lake and Galveston, Matagorda, and Lavaca Bays. To the south, where fewer...
2. Decoys and Duck Calls
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pp. 23-50
While wagons, sailboats, shotguns, and other parapher-nalia were critical to early hunters, only wood decoys and game calls were entirely unique to the sport, their sole purpose to bring waterfowl within range of a hunter’s gun. Carved duck decoys and duck...
3. Hunting Laws: Rules of the Game
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pp. 51-56
Declines in all game species, not just waterfowl, brought conservation to the national conscience in the late 1800s. The market hunter was widely blamed for the declines, although that is an oversimplification. The first laws, penned by an unlikely...
Part Two: Coastal Texas Hunting Clubs, Guides, and Places
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pp. 57-295
4. Sabine Estuary
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pp. 59-86
In the early 1800s settlers found the Sabine and Neches Rivers a “dense solitude of unbroken timber” and Sabine Lake an untouched estuary. To the south, fresh and saline waters collided at Sabine Pass, blocked to deep-draft ships by a huge oyster reef...
5. East Bay
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pp. 87-125
West of Sabine Lake, horse and oxcart trails led across fifty miles of unbroken prairie along the Atascosita Road to Liberty and Anahuac. With its northern edge an irregular boundary of longleaf pine forests, the prairie route was dissected by small streams...
6. Trinity River Delta
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pp. 127-144
North of East Bay, past the narrow, tree-lined harbors of Lone Oak Bayou and Double Bayou and the wharves at Anahuac, hunters in the 1800s found the mouth of the Trinity River a pristine delta wilderness. From the river’s headlands...
7. San Jacinto River
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pp. 145-160
West of the Trinity River delta, the San Jacinto River met Galveston Bay by way of Clopper’s Point, later Morgan’s Point. Wintering flocks of shorebirds, ducks, geese, and swans were an important resource for watermen, market hunters, and guides in the river and upper...
8. West Galveston Bay
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pp. 161-171
Sportsmen who frequented the extensive wetlands and prairies between San Jacinto River and Galveston Bay in the early 1800s were mostly from Houston and Galveston. By the mid-1800s they were joined by hunters from a growing number of small coastal communities and...
9. Brazos and San Bernard Rivers to the Gulf
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pp. 173-184
Split roughly down the middle by the Brazos River, Brazoria County covers a wide range of habitats: tidal marshes on West Galveston Bay, inland prairie, Brazos River bottoms, and, to the west of the river, wetlands that fringe the Gulf of Mexico...
10. Matagorda Bay
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pp. 185-203
It was Spanish then French explorers who first flushed endless flocks of waterfowl from Matagorda Bay, once called San Bernardo Bay, between the mainland and Matagorda Peninsula. There was no East Matagorda Bay; the Colorado River drained directly into Matagorda...
11. Espiritu Santo and San Antonio Bays
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pp. 205-220
Extending from Matagorda Bay to San Antonio Bay, and tucked between the mainland and Matagorda Island, narrow Espiritu Santo Bay is six miles across at its widest point. The estuary makes a bend at Welder Flats into San Antonio Bay where....
12. Copano and Aransas Bays
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pp. 221-253
Inland prairie meets water at Copano Bay, its drainage system made up of Copano Creek, Mission River, and the Aransas River. Fresh water around Copano Bay was always magic to wintering waterfowl, and one of those special ecosystems was...
13. South Bay to Corpus Christi Bay
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pp. 255-278
Aransas Bay forms a narrow neck as it approaches Corpus Christi Bay, the constriction between the mainland and St. Joseph and Mustang Islands marked by South Bay and Redfish Bay. Gulf waters ebb and flow by wind-driven tides through Aransas Pass...
14. Laguna Madre
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pp. 279-295
Bordered by the mainland on one side and by over a hundred miles of Padre Island white sand on the other, the hypersaline lagoon of Laguna Madre was a continuous body of water until wind-blown Holocene sand deposits—the Coastal Sand Sheet—divided it into upper and lower water...
Part Three: North, West, and East Inland Sport Hunting
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pp. 297-360
15. Big Prairie and Eagle Lake
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pp. 299-323
It was a blurred boundary, mostly just a change in the course of the Brazos River, that separated Colorado County’s Big Prairie from Houston Prairie. Big Prairie geographic names such as Lissie, Eagle Lake, Garwood, and Canebrake Prairie came...
16. Katy Prairie
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pp. 325-341
When settlers first crossed “the Prairie,” they found high-standing grasses of bluestem, switchgrass, yellow Indian grass, and eastern grama in a gentle topography of knolls and natural ponds. Legend has it the ponds were wallowed by buffaloes...
17. Short Stories from Farther Afield
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pp. 343-360
From the Panhandle to Caddo Lake in East Texas and from the upper coastal prairies north to the Red River, inland Texas waterfowlers share a heritage as deep as that from the coast. Compared to the coast, their hunting was in some ways very...
Epilogue
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pp. 361-366
By the turn of the century the population of several species of waterfowl had dropped dramatically throughout the United States. The causes were many, but a major one was national demand for waterfowl in the marketplace that, by the early 1900s...
Notes
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pp. 367-390
Index
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pp. 391-402
Back Cover
E-ISBN-13: 9781603447737
E-ISBN-10: 1603447733
Print-ISBN-13: 9781603447638
Print-ISBN-10: 1603447636
Page Count: 288
Illustrations: 26 color, 175 b&w photos. 13 maps. 32 figures. Index.
Publication Year: 2012
Series Title: Gulf Coast Books, sponsored by Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
