It’s that time of year when we’re leaving deer season and drifting toward turkey season. It has been years since I would almost live in the woods or along prairie hedgerows hunting deer. However, I never got into turkey hunting, but I have thought a lot about both this week.

Penned up inside during the bitter cold, I dug through some drawers full of old papers and photos. Underneath some papers in one drawer, I found a photo of the first deer I had killed.

My father was an avid outdoorsman, and when I was 12 he gave me my first deer rifle, a Marlin 30-30 lever action. It was with that rifle I killed my first deer, a six-point. I also came across several photos of my father and one of his closest friends quail hunting around 1940. It was a friend who had died in a World War II plane crash. On the back of a shelf was my father’s turkey call with the date of 1965 on it.

Last week when I heard Fox Haas had passed away, thoughts of turkeys again came to my mind. He was a fine man and will be greatly missed by many many people, but sure not by any turkeys. He was the consummate turkey hunter, outdoorsman and conservationist. Even into his 90s he enjoyed turkey hunting. His was a life well lived.

Mr. Fox grew up hunting in the Mobile area, which was a region with a long tradition of hunting. In the Oct. 23, 1852, Alabama Planter (Mobile newspaper), there is an article about hunting in Baldwin County, Alabama, which is right across the bay from Mobile.

“… Our friends in Baldwin have fine sport in deer and turkey hunting, when they have an inclination that way. We saw a superb specimen on board the model steamer Junior, in the shape of a fine fat buck which we presume, Capt. Joe designs for his own table. … At this season of the year, any quantity of deer, turkey squirrel and possum may be captured in the ‘State of Baldwin’ by expert and skillful sportsmen.”

The West Point, Columbus and Starkville area also has an ancient hunting tradition. Many of those traditions revolve around the turkey. The tradition of turkey hunting in the Tombigbee Valley goes back to the early Native Americans who were here even before the Historic-Period Choctaws and Chickasaws. Artifacts frequently found at prehistoric Indian camp sites include turkey bones. The turkey was often associated with warriors and warfare. Gobbler spurs were used as arrow points and an imitation of a turkey gobble was even used as a war cry.

Gideon Lincecum, who moved to what is now Columbus in 1818, often hunted with nearby Choctaws in White Slough on what is now the Island. He described how in the slough’s cane breaks and cypress swamp could be found more game, including turkeys, “than at any place I ever lived.” He liked using the leaf of the wild peach for a turkey call, which he described as “a most excellent leaf to yelp with.” He also found that the leaf of the elder was good for making a soft yelp.

Probably the best account of the wildlife found in what is now Mississippi prior to Anglo-American settlement are the accounts in the 1786-1797 notebook of George Rapalji, which is at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Rapalji was a trapper and fur trader along the Big Black River (it flows from Webster County to the Mississippi River south of Vicksburg). He recorded the following skins being traded: deer, otter, bear, racoon, fox, beaver, cat, wildcat and tyger. Over the course of his nine years of trapping and trading on the Big Black, Rapalji only reported one tyger skin as having been taken.

That tyger skin was taken in 1794 and was probably a jaguar, as prior to 1800 there were a few sightings of them as far east as South Carolina. However, in the spring of 1836, what was apparently a jaguar was trapped at Cypress Bluff on the Tombigbee River in Alabama. It was reported “The animal resembles somewhat the peculiar kind of leopard, which is found in the Lebanon mountains, near Jerusalem.” That leopard would be the Arabian Leopard, and the jaguar is the only big cat in North America that would resemble an Arabian Leopard.

It seems that hunters were not the only ones seeking turkeys. In 1899 near Leakesville, W.M. Dorsett reported that while turkey hunting in “a river swamp” he had “killed a big wildcat.” Monroe Russell was turkey hunting in Tallahatchie County in 1882 and “killed a panther measuring eight feet long.”

The real danger to turkey hunters, and hunters in general, during the 1800s were not wildcats, panthers or jaguars. It was other hunters. Newspapers during that time were filled with accounts of hunters accidently shooting and usually killing other hunters. Often hunters not knowing of the proximity of other hunters thought the other’s turkey call was a real turkey. That was the cause of most of the accidental shootings and a reason hunter safety today is so important.

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