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9 r EARLY DUCK SLAUGHTER IN MINNESOTA A writer in a recent issue of the Saturday Evening Post, iu describing the number of wildfowl to be seen iu the State of Minnesota in the early days, says: "Minnesota is known as the state of a thousand lakes and has more than that number. In the autumn of 1880 I was for several days a guide for a party of sportsmen from Chicago who were tiic guests of the traffic manager of a railroad. There were ten in the party and they came in the managers private car, -with a freight car trailer full of supplies for their ten days outing.. The cars were sidetracked at Tracy. IThu evening of the second day the freight car was filled with ducks, geese and ice and started for Chicago to carry a feast to the sportsmens friends. A second carload was shipped two days later; and when the party rolled away at the end of the last perfect day of sport the trailer carried another load. The total of that slaughter must have been thousands. There were hundreds of hunters in that region. But there were millions and millions of ducks and hundreds of thousands of geese and brant, and they seemed so innumerable that such wholesale and unrestricted killing did not bother tho-consciences of the sportsmen who annually went there from all parts of the country."
