of
Muscatine County Iowa
1911
| History of Muscatine County Iowa 1911 | |
Source: History of Muscatine County Iowa, Volume I, 1911, pages 263-264
KEYSTONE GUN CLUB. It is worthy of comment in this article that the very first cultivation of the soil in these bottoms, between the toll road and Copperas creek, the Mississippi river and the Illinois bluffs was done by hunters to supply their tables with vegetables. In 1882 a hunting club, or an association of hunters known as the Keystone Gun Club was formed. They purchased twenty-three acres of land known as Braunwarth's Landing, upon which they built a hunting lodge. In 1883 other buildings were erected and in the spring of that year they started the cultivation of the soil at the very point where now stands the new pumping station at the Drury drainage system. A few years later more ground was purchased, their holdings being increased to one hundred and twenty acres and farming was inaugurated on a larger scale. In recent years this ground has grown over one hundred bushels of corn to the acre. Nearly all this bottom land is capable of doing as well, but these low lands do not excel in corn and wheat but rather in producing cabbage and other vegetables, which should make Muscatine one of the greatest canning localities in the land.
In the years to come it will be hardly possible for the people of this locality to realize that the latter half of the "eighteen hundreds" saw deer in herds of six to ten, and that all along any of the sloughs wolf, beaver, otter, coon, mink, muskrat, fox, squirrel, rabbits, opossum and wild cat would be seen, or that wild geese, duck, brant, swan, pelican, blue and white heron, wild turkey, rail, prairie chicken, quail, wild pigeon and snipe built a part of the year. This article has been confined to but a small portion of the area of the hunting grounds in these bottoms and practically the people we knew, or knew of. Ten times as much could be written should we cover the upper and lower bottoms in this great tract of land and relate of the hunters who have enjoyed hunting over it from Davenport, Rock Island, Monmouth, Aledo, Kewanee, Springfield, Peoria and Chicago, and who have maintained hunting clubs, some of them to the present day, in these bottoms.
The events of the recent years of the early twentieth century must be left to others, as our guns and hunting outfits have long been laid away, although we fondly take them out to oil once in a while and feel again the old inspiration and remember with pleasure and regret combined the dear old associations. "The call of the wild" will no longer come from the Illinois bottoms opposite Muscatine. That famous and delightful hunting ground will henceforth know the farmer, the plow, the harrow and the reaper far better than the hunter, his boat, his dog and gun, and this is the better, for the richest of soil capable of supporting immense communities of people lies just beyond the river.
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