Bush pilot John Knox, an old friend of mine from Piseco, a small community located in the heart of the Adirondacks, allowed me to copy this photo from his family collection many years ago. This is a good depiction of early Adirondack sporting life in the 1890s, and the practice of jack-lighting for deer, which was still legal around that time.
While many Adirondack hunting camps were log cabins, the T Lake camp in the southwestern Adirondacks was more primitive, used during deer season and probably spring trout fishing. It would have taken the bark of a couple of large spruce trees, stripped during the spring growing season, to cover the outside. Posing in front of the camp are two Piseco guides, John Burton and Henry Courtney, and their “sports” – George and Hobe Casler – heading out for an evening of deer jacking at T Lake.
The light clothing the men are wearing in the photograph suggests this was an early season hunt, possibly in August or September, when deer would have still been attracted to vegetation in the water. Note the rope belt, the canoe paddle, and the jacklight. The jacklight would have been mounted on a staff on the front of the boat, and it looks like Hobe Casler is holding that in his left hand. The light would have temporarily blinded the deer and sometimes even attracted one so a hunter could paddle up close for a shot. More than one person with a light has had a deer jump right into the boat or canoe. This was probably a legal hunt, but jacking, or “floating,” was prohibited by law in 1897 and hounding banned a year earlier. Despite the laws, illegal hunting continued well into the 1900s. At the time, deer were an important source of food and income for many Adirondackers.
Two events made a big difference in the deer population in the mid-1890s: early logging and the extirpation of wolves and panthers. The logging took out the big white pine – up to 6 feet in diameter – and the big spruce, leaving behind the smaller conifers. This created plenty of browse and at the same time left critical winter yards intact. The deer responded with good numbers, keeping Adirondack guides busy for years to come.
While deer were doing well in the mountains, however, elsewhere in the state they were practically nonexistent. Only a dozen or so were known to exist in the southern Catskills along the Pennsylvania border, the result of extensive land clearing and unregulated hunting. If you wanted to hunt deer in New York State, you had to go to the Adirondacks and probably hire a guide such as those at Piseco. It was during this period that the Adirondack guide and guiding became famous.
Then big pulpwood operations started taking spruce and balsam down to just a few inches in diameter, in many cases wiping out critical deer yards. “Where the lumbermen formerly took nothing less than two-log trees, the wood pulp men cut all the trees large and small,” wrote New York State’s Superintendent of Forests William Fox in 1901. “This severe cutting of softwood species for pulp had a decidedly adverse effect on the winter range of deer.”
Another interesting aspect of this photo is the guns the hunters are holding. John Burton has a 12-gauge hammer gun, meaning that the hammers had to be cocked before the gun would fire. The two lever actions are likely Winchesters, the most popular rifle at the time. Hobe Casler’s gun is a Belgian Pieper 44-40-/12-gauge combination. The Pieper sold for twice the price of a typical Winchester at the time. This and his outfit could indicate that he was a well-to-do individual and likely a businessman from the city. This hunt at T Lake with a couple of veteran Adirondack guides would have given the two hunters plenty to talk about when they returned home!
Author’s note: Like many other bush pilots just before World War II, Johnny Knox was a ferry pilot, flying U.S. planes from Gander, Newfoundland, across the North Atlantic for use by British pilots. That was a dangerous job. A sportsman and conservationist, he had several airplanes including a twin-engine Grumman Widgeon that he used on backwoods trips.