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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, Texas Market Hunting: Stories of Waterfowl, Game Laws, and Outlaws provides a comprehensive and colorful account of this bygone period.
From its earliest days of human habitation, the Texas coast was home to seemingly endless clouds of ducks, geese, swans, and shorebirds.
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.
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 60,000 ducks and geese were shipped from Corpus Christi alone.
About the author
R.K. Sawyer has been a waterfowl hunter since 1964, the seeds of his lifelong passion sown on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. He currently resides in Sugar Land, Texas, with his wife Wendy and Matagorda Mattie, a black Labrador Retriever. A retired petroleum geologist, Rob has since been working with waterfowl habitat projects and freelance writing. He is the author of four historical hunting books: A Hundred Years of Texas Waterfowl Hunting (2012), Texas Market Hunting (2013), Images of the Hunt (2020), and The Tarpon Club of Texas (2022) and numerous magazine articles.
