The first newspaper notice of the City of Saginaw, the railway hunting coach of outdoorsman and author William B. Mershon, is in the Fargo Argus of 6 September 1883. Described as “plainly but elegantly fitted up,” the Saginaw carried nineteen hunters, their dogs, and equipment. “Dogs and guns were to be seen everywhere,” writes the reporter. “The coach seemed a hunter’s perfect paradise.”
Mershon, in his memoir, Reflections of My Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing, recounts that in 1883 he and some friends bought a circus car at a sheriff’s sale in Saginaw, Michigan, and converted it for their hunting headquarters on the rails. It had twelve berths, a kitchen, an observation and dining room, storage, and an icebox. Mershon calls the City of Saginaw “a thing of joy.” A chapter in his memoir is entitled, “The Old Hunting Car.”
And the following chapter is called “Hunting at Dawson,” for Dawson, Dakota Territory, was his favored destination from 1883 to 1899. As it is today, the territory around Dawson was renowned for its waterfowl, especially geese, which lingered to feed in wheat stubble and loitered on nearby glacial lakes. Mershon describes the opportunities for hunters.
The geese fed twice a day. They came into the stubble at daylight and fed until ten or eleven o’clock and then returned to the lake. They came in again between three and four o’clock and fed until dark.
On gray days, the geese might fly all day. “We used to get tremendous bags of geese,” writes Mershon—Canadian honkers, greater and lesser, but also snows and whitefronts, a party commonly shooting fifty or sixty in a day. One day, 165. The sportsman recalls, “We frequently brought home [to Saginaw],” as shown in the 1883 photo I have written about previously, “three hundred or more geese . . . and our friends flocked to the car to share in our bag. . . . these wheat fed young geese were very highly considered for the table.”
The method of the hunters, transported locally by men with wagons and mules, was to scout feeding geese in the stubblefields early in the morning, and then, on their departure, look over the ground, examining feathers and droppings, to determine whether the field was being habitually used. If so, they sunk pits, a hard bit of work, one for each shooter. The fresh earth was spread and then covered with straw. In a group of pits, the man in the center called the shots. Near the pits they set metal profile, or silhouette, decoys, and the geese decoyed readily.
Most of the hunters packed double-barrelled ten gauges hurling 1½ ounces of No. 2 shot. Mershon, I think, was a bit of a show-off who hunted with a 16 guage and ⅞ ounce loads.
The hunters, coming back to Dawson from the stubble, delighted in the long light of the Dakota dusk. Mershon describes one frosty evening when in the back of the wagon, they thrust their feet and legs into the pile of geese for warmth, singing and telling stories. Once back to town, they drew the birds, then played cards into the night.
“Those were the great old days,” writes Mershon, “the days of the hunting car. . . . We had not at the time begun to appreciate that the game was disappearing.” A recollection of 1883 is, however, perhaps weighty. During that expedition he was served a supper of buffalo hump, the old hunter writes, “the last piece of wild buffalo I ever ate.”
