"We Always Looked Forward to the Hunters Coming": The Culture of Pheasant Hunting in South Dakota
James Marten
South Dakota History, volume 29 number 2 (1999)
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal.
The date is October 1962. Events in South Vietnam enter a crucial phase for the handful of American military advisors already in the country, while the Cuban Missile Crisis threatens nuclear holocaust. An alarmed United States government recalls some of its most experienced military intelligence officers from a hard-earned vacation of sipping imported wine and Johnny Walker whiskey, eating enormous pancake breakfasts and steak dinners, and enjoying the casual elegance of their isolated hideout. When the call comes, they dash to an airport and are whisked away in a private plane. As the men fly off to face unknown dangers, their airplane windows do not reveal a tropical paradise or snow-capped mountain range hut rather the brown, chilly, flat landscape of southeastern South Dakota. The airport is the municipal airfield in Sioux Falls, and the comfortable lodging the men leave behind is a corporate-owned hunting lodge near Wessington Springs. Their reason for taking precious time off from defending their country: hunting the ring-necked pheasant.
This fictional scenario takes place in Brotherhood of War: The Generals, one of a long and popular series of adventure potboilers by W. E. B. Griffin. If his characters had been real, they would have been among the nearly sixty thousand nonresident pheasant hunters who journeyed to South Dakota in the fall of 1962. Together with nearly one hundred forty thousand state residents, they killed almost 2.8 million pheasants in one of the biggest years for pheasant hunting in state history. The living arrangements Griffin's heroes enjoyed hardly represented the experience of the average pheasant hunter, however. Between the mid-1940s and early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of out-of-state hunters flocked to South Dakota from all over the United States. The few small-town motels and hotels in the heart of eastern South Dakota s pheasant country could hardly hold all of them, and as a result, many hunters stayed in private homes and enjoyed the hospitality of citizens who cooked and cleaned for them and served as guides to the best shelter belts, sloughs, and corn fields.
By devoting several pages to pheasant hunting in a novel otherwise filled with violent action and political intrigue in exotic lands. Griffin, probably unwittingly, hinted at the importance of out-of-state hunters to South Dakota, where their presence heightened and enriched the cultural importance of the pheasant season. To welcome the strangers in their midst. South Dakota communities sponsored a wide range of events, providing a break from the routines that generally marked the lives of farmers and denizens of prairie hamlets. In the process, they showed off the tightly-knit communities of the Great Plains to the rest of the country. Residents and nonresidents alike enjoyed the casual fun and relaxing exertions of the hunt, the dances, the dinners, and the lunches in crowded small-town diners that marked the first two weeks of pheasant season. By the 1950s and 1960s, the annual flood of visitors had also become an important source of income for business owners and farmers.
Pheasants have lived in the state that made them its official bird almost since the beginning of statehood. Borrowing a scheme that George Washington purportedly pursued over a hundred years earlier and Owen N. Denny, former United States consul general at Shanghai, China, instigated in 1880, individual South Dakotans began importing Chinese ring-necked pheasants in the early 1890s. The small-scale stocking efforts of hunters, farmers, and the Redfield Chamber of Commerce were replaced by an initiative of the State Game Department, which released seven thousand birds between 1914 and 1918. The attempts proved so successful-and the pheasant proved so durable that during the first four decades of the twentieth century South Dakota became, according to one group of biologists, "the greatest center of pheasant populations.' Their study, published in the mid-1950s, marveled at the rapid growth of the pheasant population on the northern prairies from the less than five hundred birds introduced before 1905 to a population that could survive and, indeed, thrive even after a "harvest" of over 82 million birds between 1940 and 1950. Due mainly to weather and farming patterns, the largest pheasant populations eventually settled into the area between the Missouri and James Rivers in east-central South Dakota.
The first hunting season in 1919 lasted one day and allowed Spink County hunters to shoot no more than two cock pheasants each; bad weather limited the total number of unlucky birds to less than two hundred. As the pheasant population grew, season lengths and game limits steadily expanded. The longest season, in 1944, stretched for 163 days, from late September to the end of February; the daily limit was ten birds, five of which could be hens (hens were declared off-limits two years later). Most years, however, the season lasted for several weeks, starting in mid to late October, and the limit ranged from two to five birds.
The growing number of in- and out-of-state pheasant hunters in the 1930s and 1940s attested to the popularity of the pheasant as a game bird. A 1941 South Dakota Writers' Project guide book described "this tough, wily lord of the fields" as hard to flush, easy to hit since they make big, slow targets, but extremely difficult to kill. Fifty years later, a long-time hunter and information officer for the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks said much the same thing. "They run. They sit. They flush in your face and cackle at you," declared Ken Moum in a Sioux Falls Argus Leader interview. "They stand and fight for themselves and scratch the dog when it tries to retrieve them." The birds might not be too intelligent, he concluded, "but they're really, really good at what they do, and that's getting away. They're really good at getting away." Hunting expert Steve Grooms, who has written several books on the subject, waxes eloquent about the joys of pheasant hunting in South Dakota. "Nowhere else have I found what I find here," he writes in Pheasant Hunter's Harvest, "birds in abundance in gorgeous country with superb reaches of cover. . . . The land is big and a man with legs can usually find his way to a place of poignant beauty where the dramatic encounter of bird and dog can take place just as he has seen it so often in his dreams." And, as Grooms enthusiastically testifies, pheasants taste great!
Once word of the exciting opportunities for a new kind of hunting reached the rest of the country, hunters began making their way to South Dakota in growing numbers. By 1929, for instance, 2,760 out-of-staters purchased hunting licenses during pheasant season. Although there were several good years for hunting before 1945, the late 1940s through the early 1960s may have been a kind of "golden age" of pheasant hunting in the state. Despite fairly predictable cycles of two years of plentiful birds followed by one year of relatively low numbers, the population remained in the six-to-ten-million range most years, with annual harvests of between one and two million every year except 1951, when hunters managed to bring down only half a million birds. Outdoors writer Frank Dufresne marveled in a 1945 Collier's article that of the 16 million pheasants killed throughout the United States during the 1944 season, 6.5 million had been hunted in South Dakota, far more than in any other state. Nearly twenty years later, Field and Stream reported that although the number of birds bagged in South Dakota had declined, both in gross numbers and in relation to other states, the number of birds "harvested per hunter" was a whopping twenty pheasants, as opposed to the nine per hunter in second-place Nebraska.
Hunting enthusiasts from all over the United States licked their lips and oiled their guns and set off for the outdoorsman's promised land. Pheasants and pheasant hunting gave the state positive publicity-especially important following the disastrous drought and agricultural depression of the 1920s and 1930s. Article headlines in national magazines enticed visitors with the premise that South Dakota had "More Pheasants than People." One glowing account promised hunters that they would "all but run over" pheasants "as they scoot across the right of way." The birds could be seen "roosting boldly on the rancher's haycocks, and flocking around the corncribs within a stone's toss of his kitchen door. Like animated blossoms they dot the vast grain stubbies as far as the eye can see." Indeed, the writer proclaimed, "They're everywhere."
A number of agencies and organizations in South Dakota also promoted the state as a haven for hunters. The Department of Game, Fish and Parks commissioned the South Dakota Writers' Project to write a history of the state's game birds. which was published as Fifty Million Pheasants (the title borrowed the popular contemporary phrase, "Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong"). The Huron Chamber of Commerce aggressively marketed its city as the "'Pheasant Paradise of America," mailing out three-page data sheets to prospective hunters along with game regulations and information about air and rail connections. Local guides-who charged a minimum of fifteen dollars per day-offered to provide their own cars and to help hunting parties make their limits by shooting "for the benefit of the party,"' The Dakota Farmer published Pheasantland, U. S. A., a guide offering suggestions about where to hunt, how to hunt, and how to prepare meals from the tasty birds. A fold-out map spotlighted towns and cities that offered lodging, camping sites, restaurants, and locker plants, as well as airports and car-rental services. The guide also stressed that "farm families make fine hosts" and advised out-of-state hunters to contact local chambers of commerce or check local newspapers for the names of families willing to take in hunters.
It is entirely possible that many of the out-of-staters who filled the cornfields and sloughs of South Dakota in the years following World War II had passed through on the long wartime trains that transported troops across the United States. The fixings in the pheasant sandwiches regularly served at the United Services Organization (USO) canteen in Aberdeen may have piqued their interest. A full-page advertisement for the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad during the war featured a grinning Gl munching a sandwich over the headline "Pheasant Sandwiches! Holy smokes! Who'd ever believe it?" The copy went on to applaud the Milwaukee Road Women's Club and the women of Aberdeen-the city "famous as the heart of South Dakota's pheasant country"-who served the state's most famous lunch to twenty thousand transient servicemen a month." In his hyperbolic 1945 Colliers article, Dufresne alluded to the pheasant lunches, suggesting that postwar demobilization would release back into civilian life millions of young men newly proficient with firearms. The increase in registered hunters, he predicted, might range as high as 50 percent.
Native South Dakotans who had moved to other states were another source of publicity. Gilbert C. Fite sent his hunter friends from Kansas City and Norman, Oklahoma, to stay with his parents in Wessington Springs during the 1940s. Twenty years later, George C. Parker took 'plane loads of customers" from California to Chamberlain; the group would celebrate a successful hunt with a pheasant dinner at the Presho home of Parker's cousin. Steelworkers from northern Indiana stayed with Joyce M. Eske's father, whose nephews by marriage worked with the hunters.
Attention also came from out-of-state newspapers, which reported on the pheasant phenomenon with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy. Max Cooper, an Aberdeen columnist, reported with glee the tall tales that an Ohio columnist had passed along in describing her neighbors' hunting trip to De
Smet. Misled, misunderstanding, or merely ignorant, she reported that the "Little Town on the Prairie" was located in the Black Hills, that there were no trees because of the black sand that dominated the landscape, that dairy cows had to be "rounded up" to be milked, that residents attending the pheasant dinner at a local church wore "rugged costumes," and that gypsies had started the Black Hills gold rush! Chagrined but amused, Cooper acknowledged that such rubbish "will sadden those among us who want South Dakota to be thought of as a somewhat civilized place populated by normal people."
Even when writers managed to get most of the facts straight, a little of the exotic leaked into their accounts. An article in a Nitro, West Virginia, newspaper described the "Safari to South Dakota" that five local men undertook in the 1960s. They planned the trip for a year, undertook a grueling two-day drive, and fired nearly a thousand rounds into "the land of the ancient Sioux-Yankton Indian tribes." The hunters appreciated the hospitality and guidance of Eldon Swanhorst and his wife Marcelle, who took a week's vacation from her job as a nurse to cook for the hunters. In the end, the article reported, the men "couldn't have picked a better spot to hunt or stay anywhere in the whole U. S.
The enthusiasm of hunters like these must have been contagious, even among South Dakotans. Newspapers ushered in the season with breathless articles predicting the prospects for good hunting, reporting on the battalions of hunters invading the state, and describing the flurry of activities that seemed to catch everyone up in the spirit of the season, "As the opener approaches." the Reäfielä Press intoned in October 1963, "people from all walks of life start preparing for hunting excursions. Excitement prevails in small towns and cities as resident and non-resident, young and old, prepare to hunt John Q. Ringneck-the state's most sought-after citizen." The 1963 season lived up to those high expectations. Sixty-eight thousand nonresidents poured into the state to help residents kill over three million birds, but the big year turned out to be something of a valedictory to the golden age. The number of out-of-state hunters would never again top forty thousand, and annual harvests would never rise above a million and a half birds.
In any particularly good year during the late 1940s through the early 1960s, however, hunters lined up two abreast and fifty deep to buy hunting licenses at places like Max Miller's hardware store in Canova. and newspapers reflected their communities' excitement over the strangers in their midst.-^ "The greatest army of out of state hunters since the pheasant became legitimate game in South Dakota" swarmed into the state in 1958, according to the Miller Press. So many "clamored" to buy licenses at various area establishments that an emergency supply had to be rushed from Pierre. Two dozen private planes from as far away as Washington State, Texas, California, and Arkansas crowded the runways of Miller's little airport on opening day. The annual count of the states represented in the hunt came to twenty-seven, while the local locker plant processed eighteen hundred birds a day in nearly round-the-clock shifts.
Every year, in every hunting town, similar reports filled the newspapers. The editor of the Carthage News traditionally walked his tiny town counting license plates; vehicles from thirty-one different states lined Main Street in 1958. When eight Texans in a two-engine Lockheed swooped into Redfield in 1952-a year when only 7 percent of nonresident hunters flew to South Dakota-they posed with the plane for a front-page picture in the Redfield Press. A decade later, about one hundred fifty planes landed at the Redfield airport on opening weekend. When a South Dakotan remarked to a pilot/hunter that it must be quite expensive to keep a plane, the Texan bluntly replied, "I can't remember the day that I didn't make three thousand dollars!"
For residents, part of the charm of hunting season came from such encounters with the unusual personalities of "foreign" hunters. Every year saw a number of celebrities stalking ringnecks in South Dakota. Sightings of well-known out-of-staters were a traditional part of pheasant-season news stories. Boxers Max Baer and Jack Dempsey, President Theodore Roosevelt, and writer Ernest Hemingway all hunted in the state at one time or another, as did actor Clark Gable, pitching legend Bob Feller, and slugger Hank Aaron, who, while hunting near Redfield in 1962 and 1963, gave batting tips to young patients at the Redfield State Hospital and School. Baseball great Ty Cobb brought a party from Georgia to hunt in the Salem area in 1945, while celebrity hunters in 1963 included General James H. ("Jimmy") Doolittle and Robert Stack, star of TV's The Untouchables, who filmed an episode of Wide World of Sports near Howard.
A Clark County resident recalled that the arrival of out-of state hunters ''was a very exciting time for a fifteen-year-old boy who loved to hunt pheasants," and many of his elders no doubt agreed, Celebrities, however, were not the main reason South Dakotans grew so excited as opening day approached. The strangers' arrival coincided with a flurry of social occasions that furnished welcome relief from long days of harvesting, tedious farm chores, or schoolwork. Pheasant-season parties rivaled national holiday celebrations and even 'V-Days," proclaimed the Sioux Falls Argus Leader at the beginning of the first postwar hunting season. The article recalled Watertown's famous "pre-wvar stag sessions," Winner's "guest honoring blowouts," and Huron's annual "Pheastival" at which big-league baseball players participated in a benefit game and huge pheasant dinner at the American Legion post. Aberdeen's "Golden Pheasant Festival" offered "imported talent acts," big bands, and a carnival.
Inspired partly by hospitality but also by the idea that pampering out-of-state hunters might be good for business, commercial clubs and other community groups organized events where businessmen and hunters could mingle. The Tyndall Commercial Club took the lead in the first post-World War II season, finding accommodations and guides for nonresidents and hosting an evening dinner at which everyone introduced themselves and talked about their hometowns and occupations. Residents of Gary traditionally held a buffalo feed during opening weekend, while the American Legion post in Canova hosted a pheasant feed complete with dancing and gambling. The Miller Civic and Commerce Association and American Legion post hosted a gathering for visiting hunters in 1954 that featured hunting movies and refreshments on the evening before opening day. Nonresident hunters so enjoyed the hospitality that the party became an annual occasion, with talks by conservation officers, games, and door prizes such as hunting jackets or boxes of shotgun shells. In Carthage, churches held "come-as-you-are" hunters' services and entertainment on the second day of the season. "The Singing Hunters," a group of choir members from Chicago, appeared at the Nazarene church in 1958, while the next year Trinity Lutheran sponsored "an evening of fellowship" with a speech by the game warden and wildlife films. Family-oriented activities were also held in Huron, where the Izaak Walton League's "Hunters' Festival" featured prizes and low-priced children's dinners, A number of Redfield churches held '"hunters' breakfasts" and turkey dinners. Finally, local groups raised money by selling box lunches and coffee to hunters, and American Legion posts solicited contributions of birds for pheasant dinners at Veterans Administration hospitals in 1963.
The friendship and fun promoted at these events complemented the hospitality of the rural and small-town South Dakotans who welcomed hunters into their homes. Many hunters not only returned to the state year after year but also became close friends of their families with whom they stayed-sometimes over generations. Verdon L. Lamb recalled that a core group of five or six hunters from Marshfield, Wisconsin, began hunting near Willow Lake in the 1930s. At first they stayed with his aunt and uncle. Later they moved to his parent's farm, and still later, they stayed with Lamb's sister. Finally, in the 1970s and 1980s, the group lodged with Lamb and his wife. In return, the Lambs journeyed to Wisconsin several times, and hunters and hosts alike reunited outside of hunting season for vacations, weddings, and funerals. Marion F.. Nordquist upheld a family tradition begun in the 1940s when she took over for her mother in putting up hunters for a few days each fall. Just as her family had done when she was growing up, Nordquist and her children visited and played cards with the hunters, went out with them for a special dinner once during their week-long visit, and, at the end of the week, received a generous "tip" from their guests. "They were all great fellows," Nordquist remembered. "They were respectful of us, our family, our homes." She concluded, "We hated to see them leave."
The meeting of nonresident hunter and guide-perhaps a local farmer who had 'put his name in" with the local chamber of commerce-sometimes led to friendship, as well. Gifford Cunningham of Mitchell became close to many of the hunters he guided from the 1940s through the early 1980s. His daughter, Barbara Cunningham Opp, remembers the children of one hunter calling him two hours after their father died, saying
"Dad thought so highly of you, we knew you'd want to know right away.'" She also recalls the "Tennessee Bunch," who began coming to Mitchell in 1947 and returned annually into the late 1990s, although the group changed as some members grew old and others came of age. Over the years, they "shared weddings, births, graduations, and deaths." When she and her husband visited the hunters' hometown in Tennessee, her "accent" alerted residents to the fact that she was "Giff and Helen's girl." Her "Tennessee uncles" had obviously told their friends about the South Dakotans they thought so much of.
The Hansens of Hitchcock always looked forward to "their" hunters' arrival-a group from Anderson. Indiana, that came every year from the mid-1950s into the 1990s. The barber in the group would give the Hansens and their neighbors haircuts. Those who flew in from far away gave the Hansen kids their first rides in airplanes. Some of the hunters also brought instruments and held impromptu jam sessions.
Obviously, the hosts were not the only ones who built fond memories during hunting season. "I have a grand time every time I come to your house and go pheasant hunting," wrote an Indianapolis hunter to his Wessington Springs hostess, Mary Fite, in 1945. A year earlier he had complained of the "pheasant fever" from which he suffered, reckoning he would "not be able to get over it until about next October or November when the season opens again." A temporary cure was the feed he put on for his Indianapolis friends, where the pheasants "tasted almost as good as those I ate in South Dakota." Ruth M. Fjelstad remembered many years after she accompanied her husband to Fulton, South Dakota, that she especially enjoyed visiting the Mitchell Corn Palace, where she took movies of the "outside decorations," and dining on the "excellent" food at a local steak house. A Missourian who had hunted near Viborg for over fifty years actually became a part of the countryside he loved so much. When Joe Doggett died at the age of eighty-one, his children had his ashes packed into specially-made shotgun shells and fired them across one of his favorite hunting spots.
An unusual group of regulars was the dozen or so members of the First Church of the Nazarene in Chicago, who would pile into a pair of Cadillacs every fall in the 1950s and speed west to Spencer, South Dakota. Along with their guns and hunting gear, they pulled two trailers filled with musical instruments. Led by their choir director, Adolf Gross, and his brothers, the men were known in southeastern South Dakota as the "Singing Hunters." In addition to enthusiastically firing away at birds for the first week of the season (except on Sunday), they sang and played at local churches, gave impromptu noontime performances in small-town cafes of the famous pre-meal hymn "Be Present at Our Table Lord." and. on at least one occasion, charmed a skeptical farmer into letting them hunt on his property with their a cappella rendition of some favorite hymns. At their church appearances, which the Carthage News reported increased in popularity "with every concert," they would play a version of "stump the band," in which anyone who managed to come up with a hymn unfamiliar to the Chicagoans won a pheasant. They gave away few birds. Between concerts, the men bounced through fields in a beat-up car, some of them sitting on the hood and jumping off to shoot at pheasants. The city boys could also create magical moments. As one October sunset marked a spectacular end to a satisfying day, the men launched into "Peace, Peace, Wonderful Peace." No one in the choir or in the family whose farm they had hunted that day could help shedding a tear of joy and nostalgia. Even their colleagues back in Chicago enjoyed the hunt vicariously. Once home, the "Singing Hunters" hosted a pheasant supper for the entire church choir.
Another group of Chicago hunters were equally lively but decidedly more exotic than the Nazarene singers, The Ettswold family, who farmed near Letcher, for a number of years hosted a group of Italian-Americans who could not have been more different from the farmers with whom they stayed. "It was exciting when they came," remembered Helen Ettswold DeMott, who as a teenager acted as their guide. The men, several of whom were successful restaurateurs, stood out partly because of their wealth. One kept his plane in a nearby pasture, while the others "drove expensive cars and had expensive guns," which they tended to fire with little warning. De Mott's father counseled her to hit the ground whenever a bird broke cover to avoid being pelted with birdshot from the guns of the wild-shooting hunters. This advice turned out to be valuable. Scrambling out after spotting a pheasant, one visitor blasted a hole in the ceiling of his expensive car. A more delightful experience was the Italian dinner one of the men cooked "from scratch" for the entire family, The Italians rewarded the whole community when they hosted a "Pheasant Ball" at the Corn Palace, where they embarrassed their tomboy guide by crowning her "Pheasant Queen."
Although the fun and sense of community dominated the memories of former hosts, the extra money they earned during hunting season no doubt played a role in their hospitality. Some families, like the Fites of Wessington Springs, went so far as to advertise in far-off newspapers like the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Chicago Tribune, and Minneapolis Star Journal. The few dollars hunters paid for lodging and food gave farm families extra spending money or paid for that year's Christmas gifts. Some farmers benefited more substantially. Edwin Cunningham hosted a number of hunters In 1945, each of whom paid him twenty-five dollars a day to guide them and gave his wife one dollar per meal, Altogether they killed twelve hundred birds within a five-mile radius of Cunningham's farm. Hunting was so lucrative that year that he paid off the farm mortgage with the proceeds. Some farmers refused fees over and above room and board, but their guests found ways to repay them.
Indeed, gifts comprised nearly 17 percent of the expenses out-of-state hunters reported in 1952. Some sent cards, candy, or fruitcakes to their South Dakota friends at Christmas. In a generous role reversal, a group of Wisconsin hunters treated a family of South Dakotans to a fishing trip on Lake Michigan. Hulda Marten remembered gifts like an electric iron, a ceramic plate depicting a pheasant, and a nice robe, while a GreekAmerican chef from Detroit favored Max and Mary Lou Miller with Greek pastries. Other regulars gave Joyce Eske a Hamilton-Beach hand mixer for her wedding, which took place on the first weekend of hunting season in 1959, and Eske still used the mixer nearly forty years later. Marion Nordquist recalled that the hunters who started coming to her father's farm in the late 1930s frequently sent Christmas gifts and also brought her son, whose birthday fell during the first week of hunting season, a birthday present. After Otto Arend had guided so many hunters from Minneapolis around his northeastern South Dakota territory, his regular customers honored him with a banquet in Minneapolis, where they presented him with a Remington shotgun. Finally, a benevolent Idahoan donated uniforms to the Canova amateur baseball team in appreciation for years of pheasant-season hospitality.
It is easy to romanticize the relationship between South Dakotans and out-of-state hunters, but not all encounters were pleasant or innocent. Some hunters remembered a Miner County woman who "were arrogant and liked to flaunt their wealth and importance.' Joyce Eske recalled that a woman with whom she worked in Aberdeen "couldn't wait for the guys to come to town." After a "night out with the boys," she apparently "drank perfume" to mask the liquor on her breath, Eske, who, at twenty-one, was admittedly "pretty naive," speculated that there were probably other "girlfriend-type people who entertained the hunters," although, she reported, "ours always stayed home in the evening."
The commercial side of hunting season unavoidably touched the vagaries of human nature, sometimes detracting from the sport's wholesome sheen. The only scientific study of the economic benefits of pheasant hunting to South Dakota conducted during the 1940-1960 period found that in 1952 hunters spent a total of $1,749,505 during the season, with more than $1,442,000 going toward goods and services. It is not surprising, then, that contemporary newspapers continually referred to the numbers of hunters, the wide variety of states they represented, and the amount of money they were going to spend. Clearly, South Dakotans were not merely enjoying a brief respite from normal routines. They hoped to benefit from the presence of out-of-staters, but some no doubt exploited the opportunity in small ways. When Otto Arend bought a small country store, the former owner advised him to raise the prices for hunters. He refused but did pick up extra cash every fall as a guide. As the Sioux Falls Daily Argus-Leader reminded readers in the fall of 1945, "the pheasant has given South Dakota much valuable publicity." Residents, particularly those such as motel and cafe owners directly associated with hunters, were admonished to treat these customers with consideration. South Dakota stood "on the threshold of extensive agricultural and industrial expansion," declared an editorial during the first week of the season. "When we are nearing the goal line of state achievement, surely it is no time to fumble the ball."
Local merchants certainly agreed. 'You Need No License to Hunt Bargains in Miller!" trumpeted the headline for the Miller Press's classified ads a fortnight before hunting season opened in 1955. Christianson's Grocery in Redfield offered to dress and "sharp freeze" out-of-staters' birds or pack them in dry ice, while the town's hardware stores and gun shops hoped to cash in on hunters' firearms emergencies. Two Redfield used-car dealers advertised "Hunting cars" like the 1953 Chevrolets that could be had for ninety-five dollars.
And abruptly, in the mid-1960s, it was over. "Where Have All the Pheasants Gone?" moaned a 1969 Field and Stream article that offered several tentative explanations for the sudden end of the "golden age" of pheasant hunting. Its author cited a disgruntled former South Dakotan, who complained, "Twenty years ago I could drive the few miles between my hometown and my wife's hometown and kill my limit of seven pheasants from the road. Today you're damned lucky if you even see a pheasant." In fact, the pheasant population had dropped precipitously in the mid-Í960s, from an estimated 10 million in 1963 to only 2,2 million in 1966. After slowly climbing back to about 4.2 million in 1973, it plummeted again to 1.4 million in 1976.
Proposed explanations ranged from immediate causes such as the severe drought of 1964 and several hard winters to more long-term causes such as changing land-use patterns. Improved farm machinery, drainage of wetlands, and increased herbicide use meant less prime nesting sanctuaries along weed-choked fencerows and in sloughs. More efficient farming practices led to earlier haying seasons, depriving hens of the time needed to raise their broods. Members of Pheasants Unlimited, an organization founded in South Dakota by Al Schock in 1965, and others blamed predators, particularly foxes, while still others suggested convincingly that the increased use of pesticides in the 1960s had taken a toll on pheasant breeding.
Beyond the dwindling number of birds, there also seemed to be a noticeable decline in the good relations between hunters and South Dakotans, at least to one South Dakota editor. Even as the state enjoyed its last big year in 1963, editorials in the Redfield Press expressed worry about the "Future of Hunting." The season seemed to have produced "more complaints on the part of farmers about out-of-state hunters and more gripes from the hunters about . . . the scarcity of land on which non-residents can hunt." The editor fretted that "the old friendly, congenial atmosphere of the hunting season has about disappeared."
At least partly because the federal Conservation Reserve Program that takes "fragile land ' out of production and converts it to grass, pheasant numbers began to average between three and four million in the 1980s. As a result, pheasant hunting has made something of a resurgence. Hunting now brings an estimated $50 to $60 million to the state's economy, while over one hundred thousand hunters (perhaps one-half are from out-of-state) take to the fields on opening weekend. But times have changed. More commercial hunting farms and lodges have sprung up, and free hunting is becoming increasingly rare. Far fewer families take in out-of-state hunters for a few dollars a night; landowners can earn one hundred to one hundred fifty dollars a day from nonresidents eager to range over prime hunting grounds. In fact, some farmers report that, as grain and livestock prices fell in the 1980s, they turned to commercial pheasant hunting to save their farms.
Some things remain the same, however. One out-of-stater still visits his old friends in Clear Lake, "more for visiting and playing cards . . . than hunting pheasants," according to Alana Hansen, whose parents first took in hunters in the 1950s. Argus Leader outdoors reporter Kevin Woster found other hunters who harken back to old values and ways. "The pheasant hunt is a homecoming" for many native South Dakotans who have gone elsewhere to make their livings. "They come to flush pheasants and hunt their pasts," wrote Woster a few days before shotguns began roaring in 1993, the year that marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the state's pheasant-hunting season. Carrying "'decades of pheasant-hunting memories" along with their paraphernalia, hunters continue to celebrate opening day, an occasion that "is as much a holiday in some parts of pheasant country as Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July." Communities, as well, continue to celebrate the hunters' presence with church and school fund-raisers, community dinners, and other annual events during the first week of the season.
Even so, the pheasant appears today to have less of a presence in the culture of South Dakota. Back in 1947, Huron had its Pheasant Lounge, Aberdeen and Lake Preston their Golden Pheasant Taverns, Watertown and Ashton their Pheasant Inns, Orient its Pheasant Paradise Hotel, Kennebec its Pheasant Lunch Room, Spencer and Doland their Golden Pheasant Cafes, Lemmon and Gettysburg their Ringneck Cafes, and Red field its Ringneck Lodge. Fifty years later, only the Pheasant Restaurant and Lounge in Brookings, the Pheasant Inn Cafe and Lounge in Watertown, and the Pheasant Bar in Winner serve up drinks and meals, But a minor-league baseball team called the Pheasants once again plays in Aberdeen, and Redfield High School students still cheer for their hometown Pheasants sports teams. Recently. Huron business and civic leaders agreed to "save" the town s thirty-seven-year-old, twenty-eight-foot fiberglass pheasant-one of at least three giant-sized birds perched at various eastern South Dakota roosts-when a convenience store was planned for its home.
Like all golden ages, the twenty years of prime pheasant hunting that ended in the mid-1960s are now swathed in nostalgia. Most farm families can scrounge through old shoeboxes or battered albums to find black-and-white snapshots of heavily armed, grinning young men in checkered coats and jaunty caps kneeling over long ranks of dead pheasants. The pictures inspire instant memories of crisp fall afternoons, dusty marches through long rows of rattling cornstalks, and the luxurious weariness at the end of a good day's hunting. In 1957, the Redfield Press called pheasants "South Dakota's gift to the nation." Through the income that hunting brought to them, through their exposure to people and customs from outside their own rural milieu, through the break from routine that the arrival of out-of-state hunters heralded, that gift enriched South Dakotans even more than it did the guests with whom they shared it.
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal.
