A Diary of My Younger Years - The Autobiography of Ivan Hall

Hunting in the Swamps

HUNTING IN THE SWAMPS

December 19, 1892

Sam and I are getting ready to go on our bunting and trapping expedition to the Tennessee side of the Mississippi River bottoms about 25 miles northwest of where we live. We will start tomorrow morning. Our hunting party consists of myself, my older brother Sam, my younger brother Edd, one of our neighbors named David, and a long lanky fellow called Donald.. Clim and Bob are the two other boys who are fond of adventure. My father, who is also fond of adventure, has promised to join our party with one or two other elderly gentlemen in a few days. A guide, whom we call Coonie, claims to know every path in the bottoms and makes up another of our party, concluding with a Negro cook named Timothy, who is a very good cook and can cook anything from a fish to a baked coon. Several in the party who do not know anything about exciting sport are doing a great deal of bragging and boasting of their fearlessness. I have to wonder if their courage will be sorely tested.

Sam's outfit alone consists of 125 single and double spring steel traps and a tent. Beds, a complete set of cooking utensils, fish nets, trot lines, guns, and ammunition are furnished by the rest of the party. Supplies of all sorts are ready and prepared for the journey. I am very jolly now; I can hardly keep still, for I want to be off on our hunt.

December 20, 1892

We started this morning on our trip to the bottoms. There are eight of us, and a more jolly crowd you never saw. We did nothing but talk about what we were going to do in the bottoms for the next few days. We have reached a neat but small hut in the bottoms by 3 o'clock this evening -- it is two miles from the Mississippi River. Here is where we are going to stop, try our luck at fishing, look for beaver signs, and spend some time in the bottoms. We are all tired and we are not going to hunt any today, as it is almost dark. It seems very strange to be so far from home and away in these dark bottoms. We will buy a boat, so we can set our traps on the other side of the lake, which is half a mile away.

December 21, 1892

We fished all day today and hunted for signs of beaver, which are reported to live in great numbers upon the lake. We set to work making our new home as comfortable as possible. There is nothing of importance to write of yet. Tonight our Negro cook furnished us with a fairly relishable lunch, all the fish we could eat tonight and a great mess for breakfast. We went to sleep tonight to dream of catching tile big beavers which are building their dams upon the lake. We mended nets all morning. Pleasant dreams!

December 22, 1892

We found plenty of beaver sign today -- it appears to be about two days old. Clim, who returned by a long, circuitous route, declared he saw numerous coon tracks and one very large one too. At that we began to get ready to set the traps. That evening we went down close to the river and hired three very good skifts and a batteau to paddle on the lake. We have nearly all our traps set. I got our boat, rowed across the lake, and set our traps on the other side. As yet, we have caught nothing but fish. The lake is a very swampy one -- it lies back about two miles to the east of the river -- it is a wide slough which widens out to nearly half a mile.

Donald took a long ramble and declared he saw coon tracks as big as bear tracks. The next day Bob and my brother Edd and I went to the slough above the lake to try our luck at catching the big white perch, while my brother Sam, with ciim and Coonie went to set traps to catch the big coons on the hank of the slough. After a whole evening's sport, Bob caught an eel and Edd caught two good sized perch. I got several bites but concluded the day was not a favorable one to fish. The water in the lake is too cool and it's too deep to seine, so we find that our nets are useless just now. We caught an eel on our trot line last night. We catch more fish on our trot line than we do with our fly hook.