re: Deer Hunting 50 years ago (Update in OP)

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Good on you then, not the case with dog hunters around Homochitto National forest however. As a kid we got to go squirrel hunting with dogs several tines and it was a blast since we didn’t have to be quiet,

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Had family land (60 acres) surrounded by Homochitto Forrest. I remember when they first stocked deer there and there wasn’t a season to hunt them for years. Used to fox hunt with my grandfather until the dogs started running more deer than foxes
Paid $30 for my first out of state liscense when they finally opened a legal deer season
Does were off limits for a long time. Took my first spike at 16 years old. Still remember the spot I killed him off Middleton Creek. My grandfather didn’t get one till years later ( probably in his 70’s) Good memories from an old man

If any of that happened, it is perfectly reasonable to think that every dog hunter everywhere is like that

I once saw a buck running around with an arrow sticking out of his back. By your logic I should think that all bowhunters are slob hunters.

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We only have +/-2000 acres so we switched to beagles about 15 years ago. In the last 10 years they have gotten away from us twice.

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When dog hunting, we were hunting over 10K. And yes, after years of big dogs, we went to beagles too!. But dam, just something about a pack of walkers that is hot on a trail.

I killed my first deer in 87 on a deer drive with a bolt action .410 when I was 8 years old sitting by myself and its one of my best memories. We used to do man drives every Saturday and Sunday and walked everywhere. We never sat in a stand or even spent the night. At twelve years old I knew just about every square inch of our land and didnt need a compass. Now my nephews are 17 and and have no idea what are woods even look like, only what food plot they are going to sit. I hate a food plot and while I sit them now with my 6 and 8 year old occasionally, there is nothing better than sitting in the woods or stalk hunting with them and actually hunting and not waiting.

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They had 12,000 acres and it was 225 bucks a year.

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Damn, how many does were they taking....

All these stories sure do bring back a lot of memories. Back in the early 70's I'd make two trips a year to Pike County, Alabama to deer hunt. Had a lot of family down there with a lot of land. The first trip was always in December, usually right before Christmas, to dog hunt, with my second trip during January and the rut to stalk hunt. My uncle, a WW II European combat veteran, loved to hunt anything with dogs. He ordered his running Walkers from John E. Jackson in Boone, NC. Paid $500.00 a pup for those dogs back then. Picked them up at the bus station and trained them himself. He always had a new bunch of young pups being trained with his older dogs. He would bob their tails to identify his dogs in case they slipped a collar or somebody tried to steal them. Those Walkers were beautiful to hear in the woods trailing deer, too. Beautiful music...if you're a dog person. We had lots of land to run the dogs, so nobody ever had a problem. The number 1 rule was to stay near your stand location and not go somewhere else. The number 2 rule was to not let a dog or dogs get by you, if at all possible, so we all kept leashes and bailing string in our pockets to hold the dogs that we could catch. We'd run one pack on a drive, catch them up, and go release a fresh pack somewhere else. Everyone hunted with shotguns and buckshot. Hearing those dogs get closer and closer to your stand location, and not knowing what is in front of them and headed your way will get your blood pressure up there in a hurry, too. The comradery was very special with the drivers whoopin and hollerin and all the usual, off color jokes and teasing. Some of the group started using beagles and that was a real hoot, too. I've seen the deer run out in front of the beagles and lie down until the beagles got too close for comfort and they would take off again. The beagles wouldn't push nearly as fast as those running Walkers, but their music was just as sweet to hear. My Uncle had one Walker that you sure better not let get by you because he (Yellow Boy) would run until he just couldn't run any more. He got by me on the last day of one of my December trips and my Uncle got a phone call a week later from a man in Montgomery who found old Yellow Boy laid up in his barn. That dog had run just a little bit over 50 miles from where we released him. Back then, the limit was a buck a day and you didn't have to check them in. Man, I would lie awake for hours trying to go to sleep each night before I left for the trip. Those were the good old days, for sure.

Sounds like a good country song

It wasn't deer hunting back then, it was drinking, eating, and telling lies while hoping to see one. I would gladly take the old IP camps back in our area just for the atmosphere. Ole drunk men playing cards teaching you how to cuss and spit.

I wasn't around then but by stories, if you had a pack of dogs and a trailer of horses in SW MS you were popular.

My grandfather had all these, ran em from Rodney to Fort Adams. All the deer lived in the swamps. Our place in the hills was acres of beans and corn with no deer anywhere until the 80s. I remember doe days and then the first doe tags we were awarded for being one of the first clubs on DMAP. We thought we were in heaven when you could kill ten does legally on 2k acres. Now we kill more than we can fool with just to keep them from eating the dirt.

Back then "going to the camp" meant you stayed for a few days. No cell phones or even land lines. My Grandfather had a two room camp on west bank of the Tensas River. One large sleeping room with a big wood burning stove and a second room that housed the kitchen. Outhouse only, no running water.

It was a bitch getting in if the road was muddy. If I remember correctly, it was around 5 or 6 miles off the blacktop. Sometimes we would drop a boat into the river at the Highway 4 bridge and motor down river if we weren't bringing in the dogs and horses.

During the old Gilbert Clubhouse days, they would simply open the pen and let the dogs run. There were thousands of acres of unbroken hardwood. Most would take stands on the ground and wait. My Granddaddy always rode a horse behind the dogs with two or three other men.

Later on, they would boat across to the Tensas side and hunt once the land began being cleared for ag use on the Franklin Parish side of the river.

In 1974 my Grandaddy bought a new Bronco but passed away shortly after. It sat in the backyard until I was 13 when my Grandmother decided I was old enough to drive it and go hunting. Hell, we had all grown up driving tractors with large implements up and down the highway, driving a truck was pretty easy.

By then a lot of the men in my hometown were hunting Buckhorn in Tensas Parish. It was the early 80's but the hunting was still done the same way. The hunters would go out before daylight and take up stands either on the ground or in home made ladder stands. Sometime after daylight the older men of the camp would get up, saddle their horses and turn the dogs out. As others have mentioned, it was shotguns and very little camo.

The afternoons were used for still hunting as the dogs were usually rounded up and back in the pen shortly after lunch. You were expected to shoot any legal buck that came by and we were NEVER allowed to shoot does, even on legal doe days. I can remember a biologist coming to the camp one day and trying to talk the camp elders into shooting does. I thought they were gonna get a rope and string him up.

I loved those camps, the wood burning stoves and the fact that we actually had cold winters back then. We saw tons of deer in those swamps and I sometimes wonder if we haven't ruined the sport to some degree with all of our technology.