Robert C Willging - On the Hunt: The History of Deer Hunting in Wisconsin

On the Hunt

Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Publishers since 1855

Text 2008, 2012 by State Historical Society of Wisconsin

E-book edition 2012

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Willging, Robert C.

On the hunt : the history of deer hunting in Wisconsin / Robert C. Willging.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-87020-405-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Deer huntingWisconsinHistory. I. Title.

SK301.W493 2008

799.276509775dc22

2008033216

Cover:
A satisfying day in Wisconsins North Woods, ca. 1900
Courtesy of the Marathon County Historical Society

For Deirdre, Ryan, and Molly

A man may not care for golf and still be human, but the man who does not like to see, hunt, photograph or otherwise outwit birds and animals is hardly normal. He is supercivilized, and I for one do not know how to deal with him. Babes do not tremble when they are shown a golf ball, but I should not like to own the boy whose hair does not lift his hat when he sees his first deer.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

I remember the first white-tailed buck I ever sawthe first deer I ever saw up close. All I have to do is close my eyes to relive the moment. The image of that first deer comes back with special intensity in autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are turning. I was twelve years old at the time.

I was in the car with my parents, my older sister to my right in the backseat. It was autumn in northern Illinois, and we were driving along a gravel road in what was to be a recreational development where people from Chicago would build vacation homes for their weekend escapes from the big city. My family lived in a Chicago suburb, and my parents had purchased one of these lots. We were looking for it for the first time, studying the little survey posts that had been driven into the ground all along the road, looking for the post that had our lot number on it.

The buck exploded out of the woods to my left, just yards in front of the car. I could see every detail of its body. He seemed huge, with a thick neck and a twelve-point rack of polished antlers. He moved from the woods onto the road in a gigantic leap, smack in front of the car. Dad hit the brakes; Mom shrieked. The buck paid no mind to us but with another leap he was past, then on the right of the car, then into the woods, white tail swaying back and forth. He disappeared almost as quickly as he had appeared.

Today, early into a new century, we have white-tailed deer populations at record high levels across most of the species range. The sight of a white-tailed deer is commonplace for many kids, whether they live in town or country. But this was 1973, and I was a kid born in Chicago and raised in one of the citys northwestern suburbs, the last child of seven in a family that did not hunt, did not camp, did not raft rivers or climb mountains. What my family did do for outdoor recreation was have backyard barbecues in the summer, and toboggan down the village sledding hill in the winter along with thousands of other suburbanites. My friends, as far as I knew, also did not have parents or siblings who hunted or shot guns or paddled canoes, or did anything in the real outdoors. My friends and I played sports, rode bikes around the neighborhood, hiked down the railroad tracks looking for anything that might have fallen off a passing freight train. We never talked about hunting or about deer.

It was a weird set of circumstances that allowed that massive northern Illinois, corn-fed white-tailed buck to cross my path. It all began with that lot.

It had been my dads idea to buy the lot. A developer with plans to dam Hells Branch Creek (a tributary to the Apple River, in Jo Daviess County, Illinois) to create a lake and instant lakefront property, had bought up farm fields and woodland. Nearly 3,000 acres of northern Illinois oak woodland and fallow farm fields had been carved up, marked with stakes, and sold. Somehow Dad had seen an advertisement for the development and sent in a request for more information. One night a salesman spread a large and tempting blue-and-green map across our dining room table. The blue was the future manmade lake, the green the lots for sale. There would be a marina, and a clubhouse, and an endless list of activities for kids. The offer was irresistible to my dad. He picked a lot in a projected bay of the projected lake and wrote out a check for the deposit.

Dreams of a summer home raced through our heads. Dome houses were a big thing then, and Dad soon had plans and brochures arriving in the mail with glossy photos of dome homes, the perfect vacation structure.

My parents were transplanted Iowans from the Mississippi River town of Dubuque. After serving as a personnel manager in the U.S. Army during World War II in not-so-exotic home-front locations such as Coffeeville, Kansas, Dad found work in Chicago. My parents, along with my oldest sister, a true baby boomer born the year the war ended, moved from Dubuque to a Chicago suburb to join thousands of other vets who were creating rings of suburbs around the Windy City. Their debt to country paid in full, they pursued the American dream of home ownership. My dads starry-eyed purchase of the Apple River lot was an extension of his pursuit of that dreama vacation home, the epitome of success.

Perhaps for financial reasons or simply waning enthusiasm, my fathers vacation home was never built. Years later, while I was in college, he sold the lot for a loss in a poor economy.

The lot may not have helped fulfill my dads dream, but it helped start my own. During the brief encounter with the buck I had witnessed a sort of raw wildness that I never knew existed. It did something to me. After that day I had a need to develop my own connection to the wildness I had seen in the deer. But what could a suburban Chicago kid do?

What I did was ask my parents to subscribe to outdoor magazines for me, hunting and fishing magazines: Outdoor Life, Sports Afield, Field & Stream . I wonder now if my parents thought that a strange request, since no one we knew hunted or even did much fishing, but they never said a negative word. I had never known anyone who had even fired a gun, until my brother married a farm girl from Princeton, Illinois, and his new father-in-law initiated him into rural Illinois culture by taking him on pheasant hunts with a group of cousins and uncles.