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THE IOWA JOURNAL OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

JULY NINETEEN HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX
VOLUME TWENTY-FOUR NUMBER THREE

VOL. XXIV-23

FISH AND GAME LEGISLATION IN IOWA

I

INTRODUCTION

In the Territorial and early Statehood days of Iowa fish were caught and game was hunted not alone for the sake of the sport, but largely to provide food. The idea of protecting or fostering the wild-life of Iowa was far removed from the minds of the Iowa legislators. Indeed game and fish were so abundant that the suggestion of legislative regulation of hunting and fishing would doubtless have been looked upon as purely visionary. An early settler in Iowa Territory wrote as follows:

Our rivers and creeks abound with excellent fish, among which are speckled trout, white perch, black and rock bass, pike, catfish, shad, red horse-sucker, white-sucker, eels, sturgeon, shovelnose sturgeon, and numerous other varieties

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The wild turkey may frequently be seen in all parts: Turkey River derives its name from the numerous congregation of these "gobblers" upon its borders.

The prairie hen abound in great numbers

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often purchased them in the Burlington market for 25 cents per dozen; the meat is tender, and its flavor delicious.

Partridges . . . abound throughout the territory
The woodcock is frequently met with

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Geese, ducks, swans, loon, pelican, plover, snipes, &c., are among the aquatic birds that visit our rivers, lakes, and sluices

Foxes, racoons, opossums, gophers, porcupines, and squirrels of various kinds, are also numerous The muskrat is

found in every part of the territory, and common rabbits abound in every thicket and roadside Deer are also quite

numerous, and are valuable, particularly to that class of our population which have been raised to frontier life; the flesh affording them food, and the skins clothing. No sight can be more captivating to the traveller, than to witness a flock of deer gracefully bounding over the prairies with the fleetness of the wind.1

With such conditions, any legislative policy other than one of "laissez-faire" so far as the wild-life of early Iowa was concerned would have met with disapproval. It must have been evident, to be sure, even in those early days, that with the increase of the population and its accompanying transformation of the haunts of wild-life into habitable regions, fish and game would not always be as abundant as in pioneer days. But mankind has never been particularly far-sighted; in the field of law-making it is perhaps not inaccurate to say that the guiding principle has unconsciously been, "Sufficient unto the day is the legislation thereof".

As late as 1858, in fact, the Senate of the Seventh General Assembly summarily tabled a bill which apparently aimed to provide for a careful study of the bird and animal life of Iowa, perhaps with a view to making such a study the basis for the determination of a legislative program looking toward the perpetuation of the wild-life of Iowa.2 Later in the session the measure was called up by one of the Senators, apparently in a facetious mood, and not a little sport was had with the bill. The Senators began by offering amendments increasing the original appropriation the bill carried to an outlandish figure. Then one member moved to amend by adding the following: "The person authorized to carry out the provisions of this act be required to catch the Giasticutus, the sand hill Crane, 1 Newhall's Sketches of Iowa, pp. 29, 32, 33.

2 Journal of the Senate, 1858, pp. 170, 247.

the Katy Did, and the large Mosquito." This motion prevailed and thus the bill was buried amid an atmosphere of levity.

Indeed legislation providing for the destruction of wildlife almost antedates that concerned with its protection. For the early law-makers seemed to be far more concerned over the current problem of protecting the sheep from the ravages of the wolves than over the visionary idea of insuring later generations of Iowans fish and game in reasonable abundance. And the agitation for bounties on wolves begun in the Fourth General Assembly continued until a bounty act was finally passed by the Seventh General Assembly.*

But the opposition the bounty bills encountered is evidence that the destructiveness of the wolf was not taken too seriously by some of the earlier legislators. This was due in some measure, perhaps, to the suspicion that the motive behind the bills was to some extent prompted by a desire to provide the hunter with pin-money. And the following amendment to a bill for the destruction of wolves offered in the Iowa Senate in 1856 by one of the bountylaw skeptics doubtless provided not a little merriment to the law-makers:

That any wolf or other voracious beast which shall feloniously, maliciously and unlawfully, attack with intent to kill, or do great bodily injury to any sheep, ass, or other domestic animal shall on being duly convicted thereof, be declared an enemy to our Republican institutions, and an outlaw, and it shall be lawful for the person aggrieved by such attack, to pursue and kill such beast wherever it shall be found, and if such beast unlawfully resist, the injured party may notify the Governor, who shall thereupon call out the militia of the State to resist said voracious beast, and if the 3 Journal of the Senate, 1858, pp. 606, 607.

4 Laws of Iowa, 1858, Ch. 62.

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