A Hundred Years of Texas Waterfowl Hunting: The Decoys, Guides, Clubs, and Places, 1870s to 1970s

4. Sabine Estuary

 59  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. Adjacent marshes and sloughs were rimmed by ancient beach terraces, called cheniers, their sands originating in the Appalachian and Ouachita Mountains, carried to the coast by rivers, and shaped by alongshore currents. Coastal wetlands paralleled the Gulf of Mexico west for nearly thirty miles into what later became Chambers County, its landscape a maze of river channels, oxbow river meanders, distributary channels, and coastal potholes. The freshwater upper marsh was marked by cordgrass, saltgrass, bulrush, spikerush, millet, and Phragmites (reed), and the more saline lower marsh by three-square grasses, saltgrass, saltmeadow cordgrass, and marsh cordgrass.1 From the river bottoms to the coast, flocks of waterfowl at times covered the horizon. The great flocks were sustenance to the early settlements of Jefferson and Orange Counties, and by the late 1800s, were a source of income to market hunters and to those who guided wealthy sportsmen. Sabine Lake in the 1870s and ’80s was a hard destination for visiting sportsmen to reach. They first traveled by train to Houston, switched carriers to the Southern Pacific as far as Beaumont, then journeyed by sailboat to the edge of the lake, where they waded ashore in a cloud of mosquitoes. The trip was easier after Arthur Stilwell’s Kansas City Southern Railway connected the fledgling town of Port Arthur with the US interior in 1897. The new railroad brought large numbers of sportsmen to Sabine Lake and the southeast Texas coast.2  sabine estuary chapter 4  60  COASTAL TEXAS HUNTING CLUBS, GUIDES, AND PLACES Sport hunters embarked from sloops, steamers, and naphtha launches that lined the wharves in Orange, Port Arthur, and Sabine. They hired captains and guides such as George Pastre, who took hunters to Taylor Bayou and Clam Lake on his launch Jennie, and Beaumont’s G. M. Oliver, “one of the oldest citizens of the county, [who] is known at every farm house for his expert shooting and jovial disposition.” Popular sporting vessels in Orange were the steamer Nellie and the elegant Robert E. Lee. One Kansas City party returned from an 1893 hunt on the Robert E. Lee, declaring, “brant [snow geese] and ducks had never been seen in the area in such numbers, and were thick on ponds, on the burns, and wherever acorns are to be found.”3 One of the greatest challenges posed to sportsmen was returning home safely after the chase. The winter storm of 1892, for example, left a litter of sailing vessels and hunters strewn across Sabine Lake. One was an Orange hunting party that spent several days beached aboard the pilot boat Star of the East, passing their time shooting ducks and snipes. H. J. Lutcher was left stranded in the marsh when high seas forced his hired sloop to return to port. He was eventually retrieved by the steamer Fannie, found in good health with 250 ducks and an uncountable number of snipes.4 Sabine estuary and surrounding lands as they looked before the Intracoastal Canal and ship channels to Beaumont and Port Arthur.  61 SABINE ESTUARY In 1896, Orange duck hunters crossing Sabine Lake at night on the sloop Wild Duck faced gale force winds, and with waves sweeping over the boat, they bailed all night to keep the vessel afloat. The next morning a mistake in navigation put them into the mouth of Bessie Marsh, where, with no food or water, they remained for several days. After limping back to harbor, the party confessed they never shot a duck. Land could sometimes be as challenging as water. Beaumont hunters in 1884 lost their bearings in high sea cane along the edge of Sabine Lake and wandered all day and into the black of night. With no moon to guide them, they drove their wagon into a slough. Wet and covered in mud, they abandoned their mule and the day’s ducks and walked all night back to Beaumont.5 More Than Just Sport Despite the potential for calamities, recreational waterfowl hunting grew in popularity and became a critical part of advertising schemes used to attract investors to the upper coast. In an effort to advance his new town of Port Arthur...