Waterfowl_MarketHuntingOrigins_Sawyer_Rob_SugarlandTX_4April2023_Reel4148.mp3

Rob Sawyer [00:00:00] You look at Texas, its Anglo period started in the 1820s. In any of these new settlement, pioneering days, wildlife fed the population.

Rob Sawyer [00:00:13] So, it was interesting. One of the first settlements in coastal Texas was at Galveston. Of course, it was called something else then. It was called Campeche. And, it was settled by, some people call them a pirate, some people call them a privateer, but John Lafitte.

Rob Sawyer [00:00:32] And, he settled there and for two or three years, and had close to about a thousand convicts, outlaws and fortune seekers.

Rob Sawyer [00:00:40] And, he sailed to Louisiana and hired a rather well-known marksman by the name of Burrell Franks, hired him to shoot ducks, shoot deer, shoot quail, prairie chickens, and feed his community.

Rob Sawyer [00:00:56] Now, as Mexico began to allow Anglo settlement, particularly the Austin Colony, we started introducing a number of people to the coastal areas and up rivers in Texas, and market hunting started nucleating from that and got bigger.

Rob Sawyer [00:01:17] So, market hunters were just as important occupation as a farmer or a seaman or a merchant, and they were called, "huntsmen" - 1820s to kind of 1840s period of time. And what they did was, was hunt waterfowl and, and other birds, and they would sell it by the side of the road. They were called game hawkers.

Rob Sawyer [00:01:40] Or they'd go into town squares as towns started becoming founded along that growing Texas inland areas and market square is where everybody went to buy their fruit, vegetables, exchange gossip, tell stories, and that's where most of the ducks were sold...

Rob Sawyer [00:02:00] So, small scale, relatively harmless. Remember, people were shooting with black-powder shotguns. And so they couldn't really do a lot of damage to the resource.

Rob Sawyer [00:02:12] But, but wild game became food and fashion, if you will, after the Civil War, particularly the period between 1880s to 1900. And it was technology-driven as well as demand-driven.

Rob Sawyer [00:02:27] So, the business of hunting wild game for the market was made a lot easier with refrigeration, the first gasoline engines, improvements in firearms, and perhaps most importantly, railroads. Texas was, and much of the South, was behind the East Coast and the North with the railroads. But once you combined refrigeration and railroads, you could take wild game anywhere in the United States, and, in fact, with steamers, around the world.

Rob Sawyer [00:03:00] And those were the big, big boom years.