Hunting (and fishing), Stateside, during World War Two.
A note. And one that I'll note here more than I might otherwise when I'd otherwise note it. This post engages in a lot of speculation.
That's because the details on this one are really hard to get.
A year ago I posted this item, which dealt with putting game meat on the table during World War One:
So you're living in Wyoming (or the West in general) during the Great War and there's talk of food conservation, and you are a hunter. . .
At the same time I posted that, I was going to follow up with one on the same topic, but for stateside during World War Two. I'm finally getting back around to it.
And in getting back to it, I'm finding that I know a whole lot less about it than I thought I would, and its hard to find information on it.
Before I go on, however, I should note that, in fact, I actually did touch on this topic just a bit, and in a way that's relevant to our topic here. So to show I'm not completely remiss, I'll incorporate that old text back in, right below. You'll note that we're not only repeating that post, but repeating the photo that we linked in above.
Today In Wyoming's History: October 14:
1943 Hunters were asked to donate animal skins to the war effort. Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.
And in getting back to it, I'm finding that I know a whole lot less about it than I thought I would, and its hard to find information on it.
Before I go on, however, I should note that, in fact, I actually did touch on this topic just a bit, and in a way that's relevant to our topic here. So to show I'm not completely remiss, I'll incorporate that old text back in, right below. You'll note that we're not only repeating that post, but repeating the photo that we linked in above.
Today In Wyoming's History: October 14, 1943. Material shortages in World War Two and the Hunting Camp.
Deer season opens in much of Wyoming today, and apparently has for awhile, which brings us to this interesting item from 1943.
Today In Wyoming's History: October 14:
October 14
1943 Hunters were asked to donate animal skins to the war effort. Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.
A Wisconsin deer camp in 1943. I couldn't find a Wyoming example and this one was available for use. The rifle on the wall appears to be a nice Mauser with a set trigger, perhaps a rebuild of a World War One prize rifle. Photograph courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Fish and Game, which retains all rights to the same.
If this seems like an unusual request, we have to keep in mind that the leather requirements for the service during World War Two were quite high, and moreover various uniform items used different types of leather. Cowhide was the most common leather in use, of course, but elk hide was specifically required for mounted service boots, which were used by cavalrymen, horse artillerymen and other mounted soldiers. While its common to believe that mounted soldiers did not exist in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, this is in fact incorrect and only horse artillery was actually phased out during the war. Mounted service boots continued to be made for service use as late as the late 1940s.
As noted in the entry above, leather was a serious war material during World War Two. Indeed, I could have gone into more detail than I did. As noted, cowhide was to be found in regular Army combat boots, service shoes (an ankle high boot) and shoes, but also in such things as tanker's helmets. Horsehide formed the original leather for the famous A2 flight jacket, but apparently due to shortages that was changed to goat hide fairly early on. Those who received the early A2 jackets were lucky as horse hide is incredibly tough, although the goat hide jackets were loved by those who were issued them. Most of those soldier were airmen, but not all of them were, as they were also a semi dress item for paratroopers, showing in part how many were made.
Sheepskin was the material for an early series of high altitude flight jackets mistakenly remembered today as "bomber jackets". Like A2s, they were general issue for pilots in Europe until mid war when a synthetic flight jacket began to replace it. They remain a popular item today, as does the A2, on the civilian market.
So I can see where deer and elk hides would have been in demand.
What's a little more puzzling, actually, in this photograph, is the presence of the young men in the photo. We tend to think of every available man of service age being in the service during World War Two, and as the war went on those eligible for conscription definitely increased as service standards decreased, strained by the war as they were. But here we see at least a couple of men of service age in the photo. Of course any number of explanations could explain what we're seeing. They could have been service men on leave, or who had been discharged for wounds. Or ineligible due to health. Or in war vital jobs where they were exempt from conscription, or otherwise so exempt.
Hunting in World War Two, I recall my father telling me (who was in his early to mid teens at the time) was made a bit difficult because of cartridge shortages. Of course, reloading already existed so some may have had prewar stocks of supplies. Otherwise, shells were hard to get. Gasoline to get to the game fields was as well, which might have increased the need to have a camp like these folks (who obviously had one before the war, however, as we can see the years that they've occupied it written on the wall).
Of course meat and other foods were also rationed during the war, which would have made a camp like this all the more attractive for other reasons as well.
Lots to ponder and consider in this one.
Which takes us back to our topic.
For those who may not have read it, the first post dealt with hunting in every sense during the World War One time frame, including conditions and technology. Like a lot of topics we can and have addressed that contrast World War One with World War Two, the topic is a lot different for the Second World War in every sense.
For those who may not have read it, the first post dealt with hunting in every sense during the World War One time frame, including conditions and technology. Like a lot of topics we can and have addressed that contrast World War One with World War Two, the topic is a lot different for the Second World War in every sense.
We'll touch upon the lot of the same topics, and when we do we'll related back so that we've tied in what we've already written on.
Easy to do, right?
Well, oddly not so much.
This is one of those topics I should know a lot more about than I do, as I already noted. After all, my father was in his early teens during this period and he was a hunter and fisherman, so I surely know a lot first hand about this, right?
Well, not as much as you might think, although I can recall broaching the topic with my father.
Part of the reason, in retrospect, that I don't know that much about this in that second hand fashion is that my father really never said that much about his early life. He did some, and in some areas, but on a lot of topics he was pretty quiet. My grandfather died just after my father graduated from high school and that was such a painful event that he was just silent on a lot of things that involved my grandfather. This is likely one of them.
I know that my grandfather was a hunter and fisherman from my father. In terms of being a hunter, he was a bird hunter. As far as I know he was not a big game hunter at any point in his life. At least in his married years he didn't own a rifle. He did own a shotgun, and according to my uncle, was so good with a shotgun that he'd hunt pheasants with a single shot .410 and only take the small number of shells needed to fill his limit, and come back with that. I.e., if the limit was three, he took three shells.
He hunted waterfowl as well, and indeed he used a double barrel, exposed hammer, Damascus twist 12 gauge shotgun for that. Indeed, I have a letter he wrote to my father, early in my father's college career, noting that he had been invited to Thermopolis to hunt ducks. I don't think of Thermopolis as a waterfowl destination today, but it does have year around open water and farm fields. It probably does have good waterfowl hunting.
More than anything else that letter, I'd note, counseled my father not to worry so much. I don't think of my father as somebody who worried a lot, but he may have. I do. But I digress.
Rationing
In my first post dealing with the Great War I noted the following as a good reason to get out in the game fields in 1917 and 1918.
World War One era poster, one of a series, on various "less" days. As I've posted here before, for the nation's Catholic and Orthodox minority, the social pressure that applied to such things must have been a particular nightmare during World War One as they already had days in which they abstained from various foods and the government's actions, perhaps intentionally, didn't jive with what they were already doing. So they were getting days added to their already "meatless" days.
Rationing
Grocery store customer presenting ration coupons.
During the Great War the government didn't ration food, or anything else, in the United States. It resorted instead to campaigns, including just outright shaming you if you didn't get with the program. During World War Two, it outright controlled access to many commodities, including lots of foods.
This was a huge change from the First World War and was no doubt for a variety of reason, including an appreciation that the war wasn't going to be over quickly. Indeed, World War Two ended more quickly than anticipated (so did World War One, after we reassessed what we'd gotten into).
The Office of Price Control, a wartime agency, was given authority to impose rationing on January 30, 1942, mere days after our entry into the war. By the spring of 1942 sugar was rationed. By November, coffee rationed. The following March of 1943 meat, cheese, fats, canned fish, canned milk and various other processed foods were rationed. Late war the limits started to come off, save for sugar which was rationed into 1947.
Added to that massive meat purchases by the government impacted supplies in any event. Military disruptions of regular food supplies and transportation were an enormous feature of the war. So even if you had enough in the way of ration tickets to buy a leg of lamb at the grocers, there was really no guaranty that it was going to be there.
Contrary to the way a lot of Americans chose to remember it later, rationing was very unpopular. Black markets and cheating were endemic. The government always knew that it wasn't popular but in an effort to reduce its impact promoted gardening to alleviate shortages. Victory Gardens, as in World War One, were common in World War Two.
With that being the case, Victory Hunting, if you will, made sense. If you couldn't buy meat downtown, shoot it out in the field. If you couldn't buy fish, catch it.
Big Game
The best way to put quite a bit of meat on the table would logically be to get an animal that's pretty big. So logically, we'd expect big game hunting to have increased. But there were a lot of factors going into that, including of course that a lot of hunters were serving in the military.
Western ammunition advertisement from World War Two. These are posted here using the educational and commentary exceptions for copyrights. This advertisement gives a good example of how ammunition companies used their wartime manufacturing in the form of patriotic advertising while also providing the reason for the absence of their product from store shelves.
On that, however, let's note that there was never an era in which every single American male was in the service, as sometimes we also like to hear suggested. A huge number were, but quite a few were exempt from service also. Additionally, a lot of North American men never left our shores. Stateside service is service, and that should not be noted. But not everyone's service was like being in Saving Private Ryan.
Anyhow, it occurs to me now that what my grandfather hunted is what we'd expect a Mid Westerner to hunt in the first half of the 20th Century, which is what he was. Bird hunting was good from where he was from, and it wasn't bad here. So that's what he'd grown up doing and that's what he did.
By his early years deer hunting had likely declined in the Mid West and all big game hunting had very much declined here. Indeed, Antelope, which outnumber people in Wyoming, was closed to hunting at some point point in the 1890s and the first hunting season wasn't reopened for antelope until 1943. This is hard for modern Wyomingites to imagine, as antelope are now so numerous they're a road hazard in town.
For that matter, deer are also. Both of these events, however, developed in my own lifetime. There were no antelope in town until I was in my twenties. Now there are deer, antelope and turkeys in town. Deer appear in a lot of towns all over the United States, and for that matter elk show up in towns like Estes Park, Colorado. That's all quite new.
In 1943, when antelope was reopened, antelope hunting had been illegal in the state for fifty years. However, anemic law enforcement meant that it likely continued to occur until around World War One. It was in that decade that the Game and Fish really began to become effective and have the real ability to actually enforce the state's game laws. Indeed, we've already seen an instance here in which a Game Warden lost his life in 1919 trying to enforce the law, something that is in fact exceedingly rare, thankfully.*
Men my father's age who had grown up here always remarked how much more big game there was in the state in their later years than when they were young. They attributed it to the solid work of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and also to ranchers, who began to police illegal hunting on their own lands and who put in a lot of water improvements. People don't think much about that now, but men of that generation frequently remarked how water improvements had created big game populations were they'd never, and we do mean never, been before. They were well aware of the changes.
This is true for Wyoming but it's also true for lots of the West. The huge elk, deer and antelope populations today are a produce of those early 20th Century efforts by hunters and fish and game departments.
What that does mean, however, is that in a lot of the country there wasn't nearly the big game there is now. There were deer camps in the Midwest and deer hunting in the South and East. In the West it occurred as well. But the huge populations we see today, well that's new and post war.
And all of that is a pretty significant factor.
So, just to start with, for family's like ours, in much of the country, there wasn't a really high chance that you were going to rely on deer or elk for the year simply because the numbers weren't there. In some parts of the country, this wasn't the case and you could.
Which takes us to the next big game factor which had really changed, and then also hadn't changed to the present level. Before we do that, however, we'll look at small game and birds, which are actually hunted more than big game.
Other Game
Another example of wartime advertising, this time for Remington ammunition and shotguns. The dress shown for the duck hunter is correct for this period. Note the lack of camouflage.
We've spoken mostly about big game so far. Frankly much of what we've noted would apply to other types of hunting as well (and fishing to some extent), but as big game hunting is more of a dedicated enterprise, and as small game populations were very high in this period, with bird populations recovering from market hunting earlier in the century, the situation was truly different as to hunting these categories. You could plan, however, to pretty easily supplement the table with game birds of all types as well as rabbits, as long as you could secure ammunition, and by and large, while it was very much limited, it was at least somewhat available.
In fact something odd about mid century not only made rabbits available for hunting, but had risen them to a threatening pest. Rabbit populations exploded to such a level during the 1920s and 1930s that a lot of communities had "rabbit drives" to try to knock the population of them down. In spite of repeated annual efforts, it was only partially successful, and rabbits remained easily available.
Rabbits, in fact, had established themselves as a category of poverty food during the Depression, when their vast populations coincided with desperation. Lots of people in various parts of the nation supplemented their tables with rabbit, and sending out a younger member of the family to hunt rabbits as a serious endeavor was extremely common.
Waterfowl was also in good supply during the 1940s and large numbers of men hunted ducks and geese on a dedicated regulated basis. Indeed, waterfowl hunters fell victim to one of the great stateside disasters of the World War Two period, the 1940 Armistice Day Blizzard, that hit the Midwest. Forty nine duck hunters in Minnesota alone were killed in the blizzard. That was the year prior to the U.S. entering the war, of course, but it provides an example of how waterfowl hunting was doing well during the 1940s.
Indeed, one of the things if you look at ammunition posters and the covers of sporting magazines of this era that strikes you is how often they depict scenes of small game and waterfowl hunting. That's what was on hunter's minds, as that's what they were doing.
Of course, if you were going hunting during the war, for whatever you were hunting, you had to get there. . . .
Motor transportation.
In our earlier post on this topic, we noted that in the 1917-1919 time frame, motor transportation isn't what it was today.
So good to go, right? Just pack up and drive out and go hunting. After all, there were no "deerless" or elkless days.
Well, that's where the difficulties really begin when we look at this topic.
So things had changed by 1939-1945, right?
Well yes and no.
Motor vehicles came on rapidly after the Model T was introduced, and indeed it didn't take very long for the Model T to have substantial competition. In fact, we've been running, in a different context, Gasoline Alley cartoons from 1919, in which the use of, repair of, and the buying of selling of, automobiles was a common and repetitive theme. And that cartoon started in 1919.
By 1939, a mere twenty years later, the early automobiles had yielded to the next generation of automobiles, which are more recognizable to us. As they came in, as another thread will shortly explore, so did the pickup truck.
Having noted that, a lot of early cars were in fact pretty truck like, or at least SUV like, if we don't require a SUV to be a four wheel drive. They had good clearance and relatively low gearing, both of which were features of the fairly primitive roads they were expected to have to be driven on, at least on occasion. As the other thread will note, even the 1954 Chevrolet Sedan I once owned had surprisingly good clearance and I'd use it to go fishing in the summer. Lots of people did just the same with their 1920s and 30s vintage vehicles, which are the ones that would have been in use in the 1939 to 1945 time frame.**
Also in this time frame the pickup truck came in, with the first examples of production models come in during the 1920s. The pickup truck rapidly became a highly common vehicle in the West.
Just like today, right?
Well. . . no.
What didn't exist in average hands were four wheel drives.
Four wheel drive as introduced mechanically very early, and it actually predates World War One. But it was also extremely primitive and heavy duty. The details of how to make an effective four wheel drive vehicle on a less than industrial vehicle level really weren't worked out, with some odd ball exceptions, just prior to World War Two and frankly because of it. Four wheel drives made their appearance in various armies between the wars and in the American Army and the British Army in particular there was a lot of emphasis put on developing them. Indeed, in the U.S. Army the push was such that a dissatisfied artillery branch developed its own 6x6 vehicles between the wars and the Army manufactured them itself until the cost was simply to high to rationalize. By that time, however, they'd advanced the technology sufficiently that by the late 1930s civilian manufacturers were ready to take over.
Just prior to the U.S. entering the war civilian manufacturers were at the point where they were ready to make 4x4s for the military in the light vehicle roll. The Army adopted 1/4 ton and 1/2 ton trucks, and spinoffs of the same, just prior to the war Fairly early in the war these had been supplemented by 3/4 ton trucks. In the light category, 1/4 ton, Willys was the leader with its Jeep, although the light vehicle manufacturer Bantam had taken a serious run at the field, and Ford was in it as well. At the 1/2 ton and 3/4 ton truck level, Dodge was the leader in the U.S. but Chevrolet was in the mix as well (and oddly the leader for Commonwealth 4x4s, which were heavier) and International was also making 4x4 trucks.
All that set the stage for post war, but it didn't mean anything in terms of civilian vehicles. Civilian vehicles were 2x4.
And 2x4 vehicles, including trucks, are limited in the winter and in rough country.
Indeed, while it comes well after this, this enters into the area of my personal experience.
My father, who was an outdoorsman, only ever owned one 4x4 pickup, and it was one that he bought from me. Otherwise, he didn't ever own one. He acknowledged the rough country merits of 4x4s, but like a lot of drivers of his generation he never owned one as he believed that the increased number of moving parts they had meant they had to be maintained more and wore out quicker. This belief was common.
Indeed, this belief was so common that area ranchers held it as well. Quite a few ranchers in this region, well into the 1960s, relied upon 2x4s for daily ranch duties. They often, but not always, had a 4x4 but it was often a really heavy duty one like the flat fender style Power Wagon and they used it only for rough use and feeding. They typically didn't use it as a daily driver, with there being some exceptions.
As an example of this, my father in laws father, who was a rancher and farmer his entire life, didn't drive 4x4s, just 2x4s.
For men of that generation, if conditions were really bad, they'd used tire chains to remedy it. Everyone who had a 2x4 pickup had tire chains. Now, a lot of people who have 4x4s do not have chains, although people who traverse the really nasty country in really nasty conditions do. I do. Even more amazingly, however, it was fairly common for men, and they were mostly all men, to just chain one tire. In an era prior to positrac, all rear axles were "lockers" and that would usually work.
The point of all of this is this. The same generation that relied on 2x4 pickups didn't go out in really horrible conditions when they could avoid it. So, once winter really hit, and in a lot of areas it hits early, a lot of the country was just shut off. There were no ATVs (I wish there wasn't now) and most urban dwellers didn't have horses, so the seasons in the really remote areas shut down at that point, whether they were open or not.
Added to that, the pickups of the day had surprisingly short range.
Up until at least the late 1960s pickup trucks had "saddle tanks", which were gasoline tanks that were in the cab of the truck. The bench seat, and they were all bench seats, was right in front of the gasoline tank in the cab. Off hand, the only exceptions I can think of were military trucks in the pickup truck class, which did have gasoline tanks that were located under the box. Why this wasn't universally done I have no idea of.
Anyhow, the tanks usually only held around 13 gallons of gasoline. As trucks of this era all got bad mileage, the far edge of your range was really only around 140 miles at the most. Indeed, when I drive a 1960s vintage truck from Casper and Laramie, and vice versa, as a student, I stopped off in Medicine Bow to top off the truck. Laramie is 145 miles from Casper.
Given this, it was the universal practice of outdoorsmen to take cans of gasoline with them if they were going way out into the hills. My father, for example, would take a Jeep can with five extra gallons of gasoline if he was going up into areas that today I would never think of doing that for. Not too surprisingly, therefore, most people stuck much closer to town that a person might otherwise suspect.
Added to that, during World War Two gasoline was rationed in the United States.
The story of gasoline rationing is a little more complicated than generally portrayed. For one thing, it didn't come into effect in all states at the same time. Originally seventeen states on the East Coast were subject to it starting in May, 1942. In order to make the pain of the effort universal, the Administration brought it to the remaining states by the end of the year.
Oddly, the effort didn't exist in order to conserve gasoline, but rubber. The logic was that with less gas there would be less driving, and that would save rubber. Rubber was in short supply during the war and there were constant concerns about rubber. In order to even get a ration stamp you had to demonstrate that you didn't have more than five rubber tires. For the same reason, the speed limit was made to be a maximum 35 mph nationwide, half of that which applies on many of the state's highways today.
Stamps were affixed to car windows indicating their gasoline acquisition priority. A stickers limited a car to 4 gallons of gasoline per week. B stickers could get 8 gallons per week, and were issued to those who worked for a military industry. C stickers were issued to those who were essential to the war effort, such as physicians, and X were priority stickers which allowed for unlimited gasoline purchases.
For most people, therefore, you weren't going to get much gasoline in the first place and therefore your ability to go very far was constricted. You weren't going very far. And if you saved up so you could, you were only going to do so maybe once. That would certainly impact how you did things, at a bare minimum.
But people did indeed go out. Saving up gas rations, traveling with companions, there were ways to get it done, but with an economy of resources.
Shortages of other things
Among that economy of resources, we'd note, were cartridges.
Wartime advertisement explaining part of the reasons that shotgun shells were in short supply. . . they were going to the military.
Every manufacturer that could be pressed into making war materials was, and those that basically made something that was a war material was naturally pressed into service. Such items as washing machines, for example were not made during the war as their makers were making other things for the military. Cars weren't precluded from being manufactured for civilians after a date in 1942 and therefore 1942 was actually the last model of civilian vehicle until the war was over.
Ammunition manufacturers obviously had a specific wartime role to do.
While most civilians probably don't appreciate it, the military has made its own ammunition for a very, very long time. Those familiar with cartridge cases can identify which government arsenal ammunition came from simply by reading the information stamped into the cartridge's base.
Be that as it may, the military never makes enough ammunition during war time or times of crisis to supply its own needs, so companies that made ammunition were busy during the war making it for the military. That means, for civilians, ammunition was hard to get. People did get it, but at least based on what I've been told, the supply of ammunition really curtailed a lot of hunting during the war. Even hand loaders would likely have found supplies of components very hard to get after a certain point, although I suspect that those who were dedicated shooters probably started stocking up in 1939.
Indeed, they would have had reason to as American ammunition manufacturers also supplied ammunition to Allied powers. I don't know how extensive this was during WWII, but I know that at least the British purchased U.S. manufactured ammunition. As during the war certain U.S. weapons spread to our Allies, U.S. ammunition no doubt did as well.
Yet another example, this time from Savage. The Savage Model 99 was the most modern and unique lever action of the time and in fact had been purchased in small numbers during World War One by at least one Canadian militia unit. The hunter is again shown in correct clothing for the era, note the red hat.
Suffice it to say, arms manufacturers also were busy with wartime production. However, while the war lasted for the U.S. from December 1941 until August 1945, there was no shortage of civilian arms and therefore this would have had very little impact on civilians during this time frame.
On those arms, quite a bit had happened since World War One, because of World War One.
Prior to World War One, the great American hunting rifle was a lever action and the great cartridge in most hunter's minds was the .30-30 Winchester. We dealt with that, somewhat, in a footnote in the post on this topic in relation to the Great War.
The First World War exposed millions of American men to bolt action rifles for the first time, and by the same token to the U.S. .30-06 cartridge. The combined impact didn't cause the lever action .30-30 to disappear, but it did make huge dents in its occupation of this field. Soon after the war hunters took up hunting with bolt actions in greater numbers, some of those rifles being 98 Mausers that were brought home as war prizes. More than a few of those rifles are still in use today. Surplus M1903 Springfields and M1917 Enfields soon became available as well. Winchester introduced its Model 54 bolt action, a rifle based on the M1903, in 1925 and a real evolution in this era began.
The Model 54 never achieved the legendary status that its successor the Model 70 did, which was introduced in 1936. It went on to be a legend and achieved that status nearly from the onset of its introduction.
Remington actually beat Winchester to the punch, introducing the Model 30 in 1921. In doing that, Remington was making a virtue out of necessity, as the Model 30 was a civilian version of the M1917, a rifle that Remington had made over 1,000,000 of for the Army during World War One, but which had seen an abrupt and financially devastating contract termination for as soon as the war was over. Left with a large number of M1917 parts in process, in 1921 it took to using them for a civilian bolt action rifle.
In some ways the Remington rifle was better than the Model 54 and Model 70. For one thing, it's "dog leg" bolt handle was so law that it would accept any scope without modification. This was not true of the pre World War Two Model 70s. As it was, however, this hardly mattered as few American hunters of the time used scopes. Indeed, the Lyman Alaskan, with a mere 2.5X magnification, was introduced just prior to war and was about as popular of scope as there was, which says something as its a marginal product at best. Target shooters were using the expensive 8X Unertl by this time, which is a super scope for the range. The inadequacy of American scopes of the period is shown by the fact that the Marine Corps chose to use this scope, rather than the anemic Alaskan, in spite of it featuring fragile mounts and being rather complicated to use.
Shotgun wise, the years between the wars made the Winchester Model 12, which had been introduced in 1912, absolutely dominant. Other designs existed but the years between the war were the years of the Model 12, when it achieved absolute dominance.
That it achieved dominance is remarkable for another reason. Up until extremely recently, and even to a fair extent now for that matter, most men who hunted big game tended to own one rifle, or perhaps two. Multiple gun batteries were uncommon.
Frankly, they are now as well. And it would be totally untrue to suggest that there were not men who owned multiple rifles. There very much were. But the rule tended to be that a man acquired a rifle, often as a gift, when he was of hunting age and that rifle, if it was new, tended to be the one he used the rest of his life.
That was very much the case for men that I knew who had grown up in the 40s, and for that matter it was also generally the case for men my age as well. My own father had first gone big game hunting in the late 1940s with a borrowed .30-40 Krag lever action. As he wanted his own rifle, and had limited funds, he ordered a surplus M1903 from the government soon thereafter but the onset of the Korean War precluded it from arriving. At some point, his mother bought him a Remington 721 .30-06 and he used it for the rest of his life. Two friends of his had Winchester Model 70s they had acquired when they were young and they never owned another rifle even though they were dedicated hunters. All of these rifles were fitted with scopes from the period when they were new, and those scopes were never replaced.
For boys here, when you were old enough to big game hunt, which is somewhat older than it is now, the topic of rifles was an intense one. Types and calibers were debated, and hit was hoped that whatever was given to you as a gift fitted your hopes as it was assumed you'd use it forever. Quite frankly, that assumption was largely correct and undoubtedly many big game rifles given to boys here in their teens remain in use by their owners today exactly as anticipated.
This is noted here for a couple of reasons. One is that it means that a lot of hunters in the 1940s were using rifles that were from much earlier decades and always would. Bolt actions may have been the acknowledged cutting edge, but for men who had been shooting lever actions since their teens, that wouldn't have been persuasive enough as a rule to cause them to acquire something else.
Something about shotguns, however, was different. It always has been to an extent as seemingly shotgun shooters are a lot more likely to change guns as time moves on. Even in industry history this has had an impact as Browning's Auto 5 design became a gigantic success as hunters in North American and Europe adopted it, but the same design in the Remington Model 8 sold hardly at all. Bird hunters were willing to give up the guns they were using in favor of the new automatic, rifle hunters weren't.
Before moving from the topic, hunting with pistols didn't exist, even though advertisements of an earlier era often shows a handgun carrying hunter defending himself against a bear. Only one magnum cartridge existed for handguns at the time, the .357, and it was carried mostly by law enforcement officers. Indeed, it was favored by highway patrolmen.
Bow hunting, that is hunting with a bow and arrow, made its reappearance in North American in this time frame.
A host of early bowhunters made their appearance after World War One, with the best remembered one today being Fred Bear, who was a bow manufacturer as well. Dr. Saxton Pope and Arthur Young, however, were also quite active and today the records on bow hunting are kept in a periodic journal named after Pope and Young.
I'll confess that like a lot of topics in this thread, I'm fairly ignorant on the early history of bowhunting as, in part, I'm not a bowhunter. I'm actually surprised to see how early its 20th Century reappearance was.
In my state bow hunting became legal, I think, in the 1970s. Most, probably all, states have cartridge regulations that provide how large a cartridge must be, and by implication bow hunting was illegal. That's really changed and now there's "bow season" and "rifle season". In the 1940s, there was only rifle season most places, or simply the season. Being not sure when cartridge requirements came in, I can't say exactly how that worked at the time.
Fishing
I haven't touched much on fishing, and I didn't in our post on World War One as well. That's really a significant omission.
One really notable development in the past few decades has been the development of "catch and release" fishing. This really didn't exist when I was a kid and I frankly find it odd now.
Almost all of the men I at least somewhat knew when I was a kid fished, and frankly a huge number of them do now as well. But the fishing when I was young implied fishing for the table. People did let fish go, but if they were really too small to eat. Going out and fishing for a day and letting everything go would not have occurred and frankly it's an odd thing to do from my prospective now. I get why its done, but living a bit closer to nature than most, I still find it odd.
One thing that was notable to me even when I was young was that the men who grew up here who came of age in the 1940s tended to be fishermen first and hunters second. They did both, but they were inclined somewhat more strongly towards fishing. Men who grew up after that, and now women, tend to be hunters first and fishermen second. Men who grew up in neighboring Nebraska in the 40s, however, tended to be bird hunters overall. Men who came from neighboring Montana were almost always big game hunters.
Why this was never occurred to me but in retrospect I suspect it had to do with available game populations. People hunted (and fishing is hunting) what was available. In Wyoming, the fishing was good but the big game hunting really wasn't. This must have been the case for Colorado as well, as Coloradans were heavily fishermen. Elsewhere, other game animals were more available and that reflected in men's primary focus. People did everything, but there was, and tends to remain, a focus.
Anyhow, around here I know the fishing was good and all the men who grew up in the 40s had lots of stories about fishing. They did a lot of it. The fishing was for the table. For men who came from Catholic or Orthodox families, moreover, fishing for the table meant fresh fish on Fridays, something that really mattered during a time when all Friday's were meatless. That rule had become so habituated with my family that, as my father fished at least twice a week during the warm months, that we routinely had fish on Fridays long after it ceased to be a requirement.***
One thing about fishing that is different from hunting is that in some places you can do it basically in town, or very close to town. In my area a major river runs through town, for example. Having said that, it's also the case that it wasn't until the Clean Water Act of the 1970s that a lot of water in and around towns was safe to really take much out of, at least near town. Here too, in my area three refineries bordered the river, and that may be perhaps why I was in my 50s before I saw anyone fishing in town.
Also, in the West, the summertime control of rivers was extensive. This simply isn't done now, but rivers wtih dams were often choked down to nothing. In Wyoming this is only done now in the are of Guernsey for some reason, but it was widely done in the 1940s.
An example of a pre war manufacturer showing its much different wartime production, again providing a reason that its products were not readily available.
World War Two came before the cost of fishing equipment became insane following the film A River Runs Through It, so it was additionally affordable. But here too the war impacted things. Companies that were capable of making rods and reels were capable of making other things, and they were. Moreover, one thing that was used by fisherman as a matter of routine, lead, used a critical war material that was being heavily used for war production. So, here too, there were shortages.
On materials as we've noted changes in various things over time, one thing to note here is that the modern Spinning Reel didn't exist.
Ancestors of the Spinning Reel did, but at this point in time fishermen were usually using fly reels or Bait Casting Reels. Spinning Reels of the modern type would be introduced by the French company Mitchell in 1948 and they've dominated in their application ever since. But in the 40s, if a person was fishing a lake, he was using a Bait Casting Reel. For that matter, he might be using one if he was fishing a large enough river.
I have a Bait Casting Reel that dates back this far as it was my father's. I have no idea whatsoever how to use it. I also have a fairly old Mitchel Spinning Reel. Until doing this post, it never occurred to me how old it might be.
Fly Reels haven't changed that much since the 40s and indeed well before that, except that this period saw the height of the popularity of the spring loaded fly reel. I have one of these and when my daughter was young I pressed it back into service.
Pemco automatic reel
The action of this reel is rather odd, and I wouldn't buy one if it were offered now. It's an automatic reel. That is, the line retracts when the trigger is pressed. Having said that, I'm rather surprised by how well it works.
Anybody know anything about these?
Epilog
I had the occasion to take this apart the other day, as I had to add line to it. In the process, I stripped it down to clean it. Turns out it works much like a wind up clock.
Here's what keep the whole thing running. A long steel spring that is set to an axle, which is set by tightening the base.
This is another item that was my fathers' and it likely dates back to the 1940s.
Refrigeration
One thing that had definitely changed between the wars was the advance of refrigeration.
In our post about hunting during the Great War we noted:
Here too we have to consider something that came in during the last century but hadn't really arrived yet. .. refrigeration. And more particularly freezers.
Now, this had changed and was changing.
The first home freezers were introduced just prior to the United States entering the war. It's estimated that somewhere between 45% and 55% of American homes had home refrigerators, rather than "ice boxes" by the very early years of World War Two. That's a pretty rapid transition, but of course it also means that roughly half the homes in the United States were still relying on ice boxes.
The first really successful widely used home refrigerator was General Electric's "Motor Top" refrigerator, which was introduced in 1927. A separate freezer compartment was added to home refrigerators in 1940 for the very first time. Some time after that giant freezers came about, but exactly when I don't know. That may not have been until after World War Two, but I don't know that. What I do know is that it's not uncommon to find freezers even today in some households that likely date back to the 1950s, or at least the 1960s. While the GE Motor Top refrigerator contains some dangerous constituents, they were so well built that apparently its not uncommon for them to still work today, although there are dangers to that.
The first large home freezer, or "deep freeze" as they used to be called, was introduced in 1945, too late to be common for homes during World War Two. Today, big freezer units are really widespread and in fact they became so very quickly. In fact, by the 1970s the number of homes that had a freezer was statistically 50% in electrified homes. I don't know what it is today, but if it was 50% in the 1970s, it has to be at least that today.
Our home acquired one in the 1970s and big game hunting was the reason why. It gave us the ability to freeze antelope and deer and keep them for long periods of time.
Now, while I have addressed this in the earlier thread, there's obviously something I'm missing here and I'm not sure what it is. There was a lot of deer hunting across the country prior to the 1940s and people were keeping the meet somehow, but how?
One suspicion I have is that I think you may have been able to rent space in meat lockers, but I frankly just don't know that. And I doubt every hunter would have done that. Something was done, but what?
One other thing to note is that in the cold parts of the country, and not all of the country is cold, meat was likely kept for a long time just by hanging it. This is done in Alaska and the Canadian far north today, but I suspect it was also done in the more northerly regions of the country earlier on. Indeed, I also suspect that some people simply hung meat in cool places, if they had some sort of cellar in wich to to that.
You wouldn't do that now, as there'd be the fear that you'd get something awful, bacteriological infection wise.
Of course, fairly recently in this blog we looked at meat preservation. I've never heard of anyone speak of meat preservation in terms of wild game, but there's probably some of that which occurs. Indeed, in thinking on it, I know that people smoke fish now. If you follow the links on this site you'll find that people even now do in fact smoke wild meat, including deer, and some salt it. There's plenty of recipes for corned deer, or corned bear, for example. So maybe a lot was going on like this in earlier eras and I just don't know about it. That's highly likely, in fact.
A note on equipment
I thought about adding a comment on this here, determined not to, and then changed my mind.
One thing I thought I'd note is that frankly equipment hasn't changed as much as people might suppose it has, either from 1914-1918 to 1939-1945, or from 1939-1945 to the present. If you look through a hunting catalog and you aren't a hunter, or even if you are, you might naturally leap to the opposite conclusion about the present. With one basic assumption, or maybe two, modern hunting equipment is very close to what it was in the 1940s, or frankly to what it was in the 1910s.
One thing that changed somewhere after World War One, and I'm not sure exactly when, is that regulations came in requiring visible clothing for big game hunting and that clothing was red. Now its blaze orange, although in Wyoming it also includes florescent pink. Around World War One there were no such regulations, although it was already the case that in much of the country hunters were wearing red coats. By the 1970s the laws had changed from red to orange. I'm not sure when the change itself actually came about.
A lot of people would note that outdoor clothing has certainly changed since 1945, and that would be true. For one thing, warm coats in the 40s were almost always wool.That's true, but I'm not going to really get into the history of outerwear here. I would note, however, that recently I've been seeing a lot of winter wool coats show up being worn by ranchers, so the wool mackinaw is coming back in some heavy outdoor uses. Wool vests certainly have.
At any rate, the 1940s remained very much in the wool era, although cotton had started to come on strongly due to the washing machine becoming common. During the Great War the modern washing machine was just coming on and it was still, quite frankly, more than a little bit frightening. By the 1940s washing machines were arriving, their universal onset, as we've already discussed, only retarded by the Great Depression. It was the modern washing machine that made cotton the clothing of choice for everything as it is so easily washable. Lots of cotton clothing was becoming quite common for everyday wear and rough wear by 1939 and so we'd expect to see this in the game fields as well. We do, but not as much as you might suspect. The durability of wool really caused it to keep on, keeping on.
One thing a person would note about hunting clothing of the 10s, or the 40s, or for that matter the 50s and 60s, is that it was likely a uniform color or checked, assuming that it was purpose bought. Red "buffalo checked" shirts, for example, were common for hunters of the 40s. Checked coats were as well. Otherwise, a person might expect to see dark green or the like, a color associated with hunters since Medieval times. Duck hunters commonly wore cotton duck coats, as cotton duck, the heavy canvas, is nearly water impervious and in fact can be water impervious if waxed. Camouflage wasn't seen in game fields.
Camouflage has come in, and in strength since World War Two but it was not a feature of hunter's clothing at the time, something that modern hunters may well wish to ponder. Duck hunters brought it in after World War Two and probably because of World War Two, as the "frog pattern" introduced by the US during the war was adapted to duck hunting clothing. Indeed, this was so much the case that by the early 1960s Cuban counterrevolutionaries deployed in the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion and U.S. Special Forces troops sent to Vietnam who are seen wearing what appears to be WWII frog pattern uniforms are usually in fact wearing civilian "duck hunter" pattern clothing. When bow hunting became big, however, and as bow hunters are exempt from the blaze orange regulations in most places and they increasing adopted it. At first, camouflage in big game hunting indicated either that the hunter was a bow hunter or had served in the Cold War military. Now its extremely common irrespective of the fact that most big game animals have a type of vision for which camouflage is fairly irrelevant. Waterfowl are distinctly different, which is why it appeared first here.
For one reason or another camouflage has so come into American society that at the present time its seen simply everywhere. Some of this is due to companies that want to associate with the activities of their employees, so they have camouflaged company hats, but a lot of it is simply a fashion trend. Camouflage started to make its way into everyday wear after the Vietnam War and its very much everywhere now.
One change in clothing underappreciated, is that by the 1940s outdoorsmen were wearing rubber soled boots. In the teens they weren't. The era of hobnails had come to an end in North America, if not in Europe, where millions of soldiers were still marching in hobnailed boots. American soldiers weren't. The era of the universal vibram sole was still thirty years away or so, even though the Swiss design already existed, but rubber soles were now standard in American outdoor footwear. Interesting, soles that were regarded as revolutionary at the time would be regarded as inadequate now.
Hobnails were standard on most heavy duty outdoor shoes well into the 1930s. Alternatively, men simply wore leather soled shoes with no hobnails. Shoes of this type are incredibly slick, but that's what was around. Good rubber soled shoes started to be introduced in the 1930s and in 1937 Italian Vitale Bramani introduced the Vibram sole after designing it in the wake of the deaths of two friends of his mountain climbing. Even before that Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. had praised much less aggressive rubber soled shoes in his book East of the Sun, West of the Moon, about hunting in the Himalayas. Vibrams were so much of an advance that the U.S. Army had adopted them for mountain boots by World War Two, although the adoption of that sort of sole for combat boots in general had to wait until they appeared on Jungle Boots, from which they spread to all types of combat boots thereafter.
Sportsmen were quick to pick up on rubber soled boots and they were very much in the fields by the 1940s.
In terms of equipment simply carried by hunters, by and large most hunters today would find the equipment very similar and for that matter they would all the way back to 1910 and back. I've already dealt with rifles and things associated with them, so will not deal with that again. Beyond that, most hunters carried a hunting knife and maybe a few accessories. Some, if they were way out back, might carry a compass and maps. All this is still true, except the compass has been replaced by now almost entirely by the GPS which is now almost a universal item owned and carried by hunters. While I don't appreciate a lot of modern technology, rather obviously, I"m a huge fan of the GPS. Between WWI and WWII there were no advancements of that type at all, so there would have been no changes.
One thing I should note is that once in the game fields hunters were afoot. That sounds obvious, but today thanks to the unfortunate introduction of the ATV, this is much less the case. I despise ATVs and are the one thing, together with the cell phone,t that I wish I could banish. Anyhow, in the 1910-1920 time frame, as with the 1939-1950 time frame, once hunters were where they were going, they were afoot.
Well, maybe.
Most hunters I knew who had started hunting in the West early on weren't shy at all about driving across the prairie if they felt it warranted. It was very common. It still frankly is with ranchers, who while they may complain about people "making new roads" aren't shy about doing it themselves. In recent years, due to the onset of the ATV, there's been a dedicated effort to restrict vehicle access in all sorts of ways, and I"m in favor of that. Hunters with vehicles in the 40s, however, were only really restrained from doing that out of concern for damaging their vehicles or wearing out hard to replace tires. In the 1910-20 time frame vehicles were amazingly durable off road and this was no doubt the same, for those who had them.
For really rough country, then, before, and now, there were horses and mules. I don't know the extent to which town people in the 40s kept horses, but it may be a lot more common than I'd imagine. I know that in my own town there were places to rent horses on the edge of town forever, and as far back as I can personally remember there were men who kept horses for no other purpose. Indeed, this takes us back to vehicles a bit in that at least as far back to the 1920s and all the way through the 70s there were men who carried horses in the back of pickup trucks with stock racks. I haven't seen this done now since that time. There were also quite a few very light duty horse trailers that were towed by trucks we'd regard as light now.
Turning to fishing, I've already discussed reels. Fishing equipment itself, beyond that, changed very little between World War One and World War Two, other than that the first primitive waders started to come in.
This was due to advancements in the production of rubber prior to World War One. Commercial waders were offered as early as 1850, but it was really in the 1910s when they started to be really practical. Having said that, rubber production in that period still wasn't really perfected for clothing, and it wasn't until 1942 that this would be the case, due to World War Two.
Anything that came in during the war wasn't available commercially until after the war. Therefore, modern waders really came in at that time. Prior to that, therefore, most men simply waded in with clothing somewhat suitable for that, something most would not do today. Cotton trousers and canvas tennis shoes were very common for this in the 1940s. Chuck Taylor high top tennis shoes were in fact very common in this use, having come in during the 1920s, and that was the early practice of my own father.
Indeed, being short of stature and having a hard time finding waders, and beyond that simply being cheap, wading in with light tropical weight Army trousers and tropical combat boots was my own practice up until extremely recently. It's definitely different that using waders and even now in streams I'll do that. Anyhow, if you want an idea of what the practice was during the Second World War era, or the First World War era, watch the fishing scenes of A River Runs Through It and you'll know.
Conclusion
Well, that covers a lot of ground, more than I meant to cover at first. Hopefully its been interesting. If you know something that's been omitted here, add to it. Or if there's something to correct, do that.
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*I should note the seriousness with which Wyomingites take game and fish laws is not universal everywhere. Recently an oilfield electrician told me about an event, some years ago, in which he was part of a local electrician's crew that marveled at the stew and chili that was served by a Texas oilfield crew everyday on location. They learned, in the process of this, that the crew was poaching deer and that is what they were eating. They accordingly turned them over to the Game and Fish.
The Texas crew was stunned. They just couldn't grasp what is that they'd done wrong.
**During World War Two civilian manufacture of automobiles ceased. So basically it's nearly impossible to find civilian vehicles manufactured in model years 1943 to 1945 and there were really not many 1941 and 1942 models either.
***This is another way that I compere very poorly with my father. For that matter, I compare poorly in every respect, of which this is a notable one.
Labels: 1890s, 1910s, 1940s, 1943, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 4x4, Clothing, fishing, Food, hunting, It was because of World War One, technology, Transportation, Trucks, Weapons, World War Two, Wyoming
