Having grown up doing a lot of bird, deer, rabbit and squirrel hunting, that is often where my thoughts and memories wander in November.

I still recall a lesson I learned when I was about 12. I was quail hunting with my father on the family farm near Artesia. A meadowlark flew up in front of me and I shot it. My father said that’s not a quail and informed me that no game was ever to be shot unless it was for food, and I was to take the bird, clean it, cook it and eat it. I never again killed any game that I was not planning to have for dinner.

Two early residents who told of their hunting exploits were Peter Pitchlynn, who was born on the banks of the Noxubee River in 1806, and Gideon Lincecum, who moved from Tuscaloosa to Columbus in 1818. He first settled near what is now the public boat ramp on Wilkins Wise Road and in 1819 moved to what is now the Trotter Convention Center parking lot. (At least five early historic sites in downtown Columbus are now parking lots.) Some of the more interesting accounts of hunting are early 1800s descriptions of bear hunting.

During the 1820s, Pitchlynn lived on the south end of a prairie that ran from the present-day Golden Triangle Regional Airport to a couple of miles southwest of Artesia. That prairie by the early 1830s was named Peter Pitchlynn’s Prairie. In an 1870 interview in the Atlantic Monthly he recounted how he “amused himself by an occasional hunt for the black bear.” Those hunts would have been in Catalpa Creek bottom, which bordered the prairie on the west.

The best account of hunting, including bear hunting, in what is now the Tuscaloosa, Columbus, Amory area, came from Gideon Lincecum in a series of articles he published in the American Sportsman 1874-75. Those articles were later included in “The Adventures of a Frontier Naturalist,” Lincecum and Phillips, Texas A&M Press, 1994.

While Lincecum was in Tuscaloosa, he joined a group of bear hunters who would make excursions into the canebrakes west of the Warrior River in search of black bear. Lincecum told how they would hunt bear with only knives and a pack of dogs. He maintained that there was “not much danger in what the bear can do to you.” The hunters had learned that when threatened or attacked by a pack of dogs, a black bear would ignore humans and go after the dogs. After the dogs would corner the bear the hunters would then run in behind the bear and stab it with knives. The bear would associate the stab wounds with dog bites and even more fiercely go after the dogs. That would be repeated until the bear was killed.

However, there was one great danger that the hunters feared more than any bear. Lincecum described how more hunters were accidentally shot by other hunters than injured by bears.

Lincecum said he hunted with packs of American dogs which he described as being “many-colored, crop-eared, bob-tailed … hounds, and big curs and some half hounds.” He also described an interesting “… little red-mouthed native dog, with yellow eyes and bushy tail — a distinct race of indigenous dogs.”

I cannot help but wonder who in the world was crazy enough to first decide to attack a bear with only a knife because they thought the bear would attack their dog and not them.

Lincecum also described a circa 1825 bear hunt in the “canebreak bottom” along the Tombigbee near present day Amory.

“There were ten or twelve men and a big train of dogs of all sizes and shapes and breeds, from the great sheep-killing cur through all races of dogs – except the good one — down to the ill treated suck-egg hound.” The men took stands in the bottom and the dogs were turned loose. “Soon rifles began to crack and the whole bottom was filled with an awful uproar. The bottom was filled with foxes, rabbits and deer, and every dog seemed to be in full chase after his own game and they were roaring through the densely-set canebrake in all directions.”

Lincecum added that “in a bear hunt the rule is to shoot nothing but bear.” However, the men on the hunt “were blazing away at the deer or even a fox if it ran by them.” There was “an old man in the crowd who had two trained bear dogs and they paid no attention to foxes nor deer.” They were hot on the scent of “a big old hog-killing bear.”

Lincecum didn’t give the ending of the hunt, but I can only imagine the old man dispatching the bear while the younger hunters were sitting around bragging about the fox or deer they had killed.

Rufus Ward is a local historian.

Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].

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