MODERN HISTORY
The Last Ten Generations

Market Hunters & Swamp Busters

By the mid-nineteenth century, fine restaurants in most major eastern cities offered
wildfowl on their menus. And in 1849, the United States Congress authorized
government subsidies for draining wetlands and swamps.

Here in Canada, The Hudson Bay Company was relinquishing ownership of Manitoba
and a national railroad, from sea to sea, facilitated settlement throughout the region.

Market hunters flourished with Remington’s introduction of the double-barrel shotgun
in 1873. While the Audubon Society was being founded in 1886, Winchester patented its
Model 1887 lever-action repeater shotgun. And in 1902, Browning introduced the first
auto loading shotgun.

First A Sod Hut

The first homesteaders arrived from down East or the British Isles to settle in the
Whitewater Lake area in the Spring of 1880. They built and lived in sod huts but the life
was good and within a year 328 homesteads had been filed. A Canadian Pacific Railroad
spur-line extended to Deloraine in 1886.

In the year 1900, market hunting was outlawed as was the inter-state shipment of wildlife.

On October 4, 1904, a rare whooping crane was shot in flight with a 12 gauge shotgun
just a few miles west of Whitewater Lake.

By the time the last passenger pigeon died in 1914, the hand cradle for cutting grain and
threshing grain by flailing had been replaced by horse drawn binders and threshing
machines.

And Finally Conservation

Finally in 1918, the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed in both Canada and the
United States of America prohibiting spring shooting and setting daily bag limits on
waterfowl.

The age of conservation and wildlife management was now upon us.