BOOK REVIEW: A 'Southern Sportsman' presents a record of life in the field

“A Southern Sportsman: The Hunting Memoirs of Henry Edwards Davis,” Edited by Ben McC. Moise (University of South Carolina, 2010)

Few people today will recognize the name Henry Davis, and even fewer will identify him as an important 20th century outdoor writer. Davis, who was born in Williamsburg County in 1879 and practiced law in Florence until his death in 1966, is instead known among a much more narrow group of devotees of the lore and literature of turkey hunting for his 1949 work “The American Wild Turkey,” which is considered by most authorities to be the classic, seminal work on the history, ecology and hunting of the great bird. Of even less renown are Davis’s more technical works on small arms and ammunition, most of which appeared in The American Rifleman magazine in the 1930s and ’40s and which have been easily lost in the millions of pages of analysis of the scientific aspects of shooting that have been published since.

Nevertheless, Davis is a figure of emblematic significance in the history of American field sports and holds an important position, especially within our region, as an enthusiastic and systematic outdoorsman who took the trouble to record his observations and experiences at a time when the Southern landscape was undergoing its greatest change since the settlement of Europeans. To the extent his work is not widely known, it is our loss.

At the end of his life, after eight decades of active engagement with the woods and waters of the Pee Dee, Davis sought to synthesize these experiences in a hunting memoir which he titled “Old Betsy: Stories of Hunting with the Old Percussion Muzzleloader and Its Successors.” “Old Betsy” languished in the archives as a manuscript for nearly 45 years, but now the University of South Carolina Press has published a handsome edition of “Old Betsy,” edited by Ben McC. Moise, under the title “A Southern Sportsman: The Hunting Memoirs of Henry Edwards Davis.” It is an interesting and valuable book, and one that will reconnect Davis and his work with the Pee Dee.

“A Southern Sportsman” is eclectic — beginning with a short history of Williamsburg County (“My Native Heath”) and running a chapter by chapter gamut from the conventional (deer, duck, quail, dove and turkey hunting) to the unexpected (muzzle loading shotguns and rifles, fox hunting) to the arcane and seemingly bizarre (crow, hawk and owl hunting). Along the way, Davis tells a personal story, beginning as a youth riding to fox hounds and hunting deer in the swamps of Williamsburg County with Confederate cavalry veterans. Davis’s move to Florence in the first decade of the 20th century changed his geographic frame of reference, but his association with the Pearce Preserve and Woodstone Hunting Club on the Pee Dee River in Florence County gave him a base of operations from which he could hunt, shoot and observe game animals in his mature years.

Drawing on his early life in Williamsburg and his adulthood in Florence, Davis’s chapters on various game animals describe through anecdotes how each was hunted during Davis’s lifetime, and give a good sense of the social context that formed the attitudes that Davis expresses. Davis tells of memorable deer hunts in the swamps of the Black, Santee and Pee Dee rivers and of the rules that governed deer drives in his day; of the Florence physician who once killed seven gobblers in one shot and of the customs and tactics used in hunting turkey in the fall; of a day when a Marion County quail hunter killed more than 100 birds in a single afternoon and of his own opinions of the essentials of successful management of property for quail.

Davis’s observations also provide an historical record of ecological events relating to hunting in the Pee Dee that might otherwise be forgotten, such as the “black tongue” epidemic that nearly wiped out the deer population in the 1870s and the less destructive but problematic “screw worm” of the 1930s, which was “brought in by western cattle imported into this state at the behest of crackpot New Deal politicians.” Davis also notes that although “no deer had ever been imported into the Pee Dee valley of South Carolina,” several large bucks killed on the Pearce Preserve in the 1930s were “ear marked with the old cattle marks,” indicating that they were once in captivity.

Davis is also reassuring to those of us who grew up referring to what is today called “quail hunting” as “bird hunting,” only to be asked now when we use the latter description, “what kind of birds?” Davis’s is unequivocal:

“I declare that no such bird as a quail exists, or has ever existed, in this state. It is a misnomer brought here by outsiders totally ignorant of the South and its hunting traditions, and every time I hear a native Southerner use the word, I feel like asking him where he was born and reared and whether he ever heard his father use such a word.”

Despite his partiality to the American Wild Turkey, to Davis the “quail” is “the bird” in the same sense that medieval scholastics referred to Aristotle as simply “the Philosopher.” But if birds must be distinguished, they are “partridges”:

“Not only is the bird a partridge, but no South Carolina hunter worth his salt ever spoke of partridge hunting. When he went after partridges, he said he was going ‘bird hunting,’ and everyone knew exactly what he meant.”

Many of Davis’s observations will surprise contemporary hunters. For example, for hunters today the only turkey season is the month of April, and skill in turkey hunting depends largely on fooling amorous gobblers. But Davis had only contempt for those who hunted during the spring mating season. “Any tyro (novice) can call and kill a lovelorn old gobbler in the gobbling season,” he writes “but I will wager that 95 percent of these spring gobbler shooters could not call or kill the same gobbler in the fall and winter seasons if their lives depended on it.” Nevertheless, in Davis’s world it is perfectly acceptable to kill turkeys from long range with high powered rifles, to shoot ducks on the water, and doves out of roost trees.

Undoubtedly the most shocking aspect of “A Southern Sportsman” is Davis’s self-righteous fulminations on the killing of hawks, owls, and other birds of prey that even hunters today consider an important part of our natural ecosystems. Although the old practice of shooting hawks in the interest of quail and other small game is well-known, and one can hardly fault Davis for sharing a prevailing attitude of his day, there is something about Davis’s description of the practice that is almost chilling. While most hunters of prior generations considered shooting hawks as something one did but did not talk or boast about, Davis proudly describes his Quixotic travels along the roads of the Pee Dee with his trusty .22 Hornet in the back seat, shooting any and all birds of prey he encounters. He clearly enjoys it too much, thinks too highly of himself for doing it, and is eager to describe it in too much detail.

“A Southern Sportsman’s” chapters on hawk and owl hunting epitomize Davis’s attitude toward the natural world and his style as an outdoor writer. In responding to the “apologists” for birds of prey, he declares, “Game birds and animals are the crops to be raised in wildlife management, and hawks have no more place there than have cockleburs and ragweeds in a cornfield.”

Here¸ as he is throughout “A Southern Sportsman,” Davis is overbearing, pedantic and utterly devoid of humor or self-reflection. His engagement with the natural world is completely without humility, and is solely on his terms and in accordance with his own well-developed opinion about the way things should be. Coming from a generation that produced the Wordsworthian wonder of Archibald Rutledge, the self-deprecating humor of Havilah Babcock, and the profound reflection of Robert Ruark, I found “A Southern Sportsman” a disappointment in this regard, and while reading it, I often felt like I was seated next to a boring old relative at dinner.

Although it is by no means a great or even a good piece of outdoor writing, “A Southern Sportsman” is significant as a record of a life in the field at a time when hunting in the South became what it largely is today. It is also a record of a keen observer who had a clear sense of the changing historical context of the sport he loved. Ben Moise has made the most of archival aspect of Davis’s work, researching the places where and the people with whom Davis hunted and has documented Davis’s milieu with photographs that help bring his world to life.

For residents of Florence and the Pee Dee, “A Southern Sportsman” is compelling as a piece of our own history. It is full of descriptions of events that we today can see dimly, if at all: the last flocks of passenger pigeons in Williamsburg County in the 1890s; the great snowstorm of 1899, when temperatures in the Pee Dee dropped to zero; and the cutting of the last large stands of old growth timber in Florence County during the Second World War. “A Southern Sportsman” is also filled with people and places both dear to many in the Pee Dee and significant in our history places such as Mars Bluff, Witherspoon Island, Brittons Neck and Plantersville, and people such as Robert and Frank Pearce, F.H. McLeod, Van Ervin, P.A. Willcox and Fitzlee Howard.

Despite its many imperfections, “A Southern Sportsman” is a book worth reading and having. And for us in Florence and the Pee Dee, Henry Davis is worth claiming as one of our own.