Texas Market Hunting

<p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>In this book R. K. Sawyer chronicles the days of market hunting along the Texas coast and the showdown between the early game wardens and those who persisted in commercial waterfowl hunting. Containing an abundance of rare historical photographs and oral history </span><em style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Texas Market Hunting: Stories of Waterfowl Game Laws and Outlaws</em><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> provides a comprehensive and colorful account of this bygone period.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>From its earliest days of human habitation the Texas coast was home to seemingly endless clouds of ducks geese swans and shorebirds.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>By the 1880s Texas huntsmen or market hunters as they came to be called began providing meat and plumage for the restaurant tables and millinery salons of a rapidly growing nation. A network of suppliers packers distribution centers and shipping hubs efficiently handled their immense harvest. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>At the peak of Texas market hunting in the late 1890s Rockport merchants shipped an average of 600 ducks a day in a five-month shooting season and in the last year of legal market hunting an estimated 60000 ducks and geese were shipped from Corpus Christi alone.</span></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>