Oral History Program Gwenith Rader Interviewed by Carmen Anderson 12 July 1972 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Gwenith Rader Interviewed by Carmen Anderson 12 July 1972 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Gwenith Rader, an oral history by Carmen Anderson, 12 July 2012, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Gwenith Rader Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Gwenith Rader, conducted by Carmen Anderson on July 12, 1972 at the Railroad Museum in Corinne, Utah. In this interview, Mrs. Rader discusses her father’s ownership of the Bear River Duck Club. Her father, Vince Davis, was named the “best duck shot in the world” in The History of the Pioneers of Utah. Mrs. Rader also explains the process of picking ducks and the difference between the different species of ducks taught to her by her father. The Bear River Duck Club was sold by Vince Davis in 1900 and became the Bear River Club Company. CA: Mrs. Rader would you tell us a little bit about your early childhood and a little bit about yourself? GR: I started working at the Perry Cannery when I was very young. They let the young girls work and snip beans there when they were fourteen. I think we worked all day long for a dollar and a half. My father taught me to pick ducks when I was just young. He and his father, George Davis—my father's name was Vince Davis—homesteaded the land out west of Brigham City where the Bear River Club and the other clubs are now. My father had a clubhouse out there in the early days. My grandfather was a good church member so he walked for about thirteen miles to get to his meetings on Sunday because they were always out at the club. They were interested in duck hunting and shooting ducks for the market. Of course, our whole family was out there most of the time. My mother would go out there and cook for the men and had most of the children out there with her. We often times came across the barrens straight from the clubhouse to Perry in a white 1 top or a wagon. That's the way they traveled in those days. I can remember how we children would get out and run on the barrens with bare feet, which we thought was a lot of fun. My father was claimed to be the "best duck shot in the world," which was the notation given to him in The History of the Pioneers of Utah. I don't know how authentic that is, but he was really a good duck shot. He, of course, had a clubhouse and they used to dress ducks for the market in those days. He had a lot of hired help out there—duck pickers and all. I don't remember much about his clubhouse because he sold out to the Bear River Club Company. I guess it was around 1900, because they built a large clubhouse there in 1902. A lot of people call it the “Millionaire Duck Club,” but the real name is the Bear River Duck Club. They have members from all over the states, some from back east, Kansas, Wisconsin, Denver, and quite a few other states. Recently, they have had a lot of men from California buy memberships. In the year 1918, my father took me out there to help pick ducks because they closed the schools for the flu epidemic which was raging at that time. I didn't have anything to do so he took me out there to help. I learned quite young to pick ducks. I was out there a lot on the weekends even before that, when I was just maybe twelve years old and helped them out. I worked steady all fall because they had closed the school. When I first picked ducks, they paid three cents a duck. In picking ducks I could earn three dollars a day. I was just young and I thought that was real good. So I've been a duck picker all my life. I realize it isn't a very elevating position, but it 2 earned me my livelihood. I didn't quit because I could make such good money. I picked nearly every year with a different duck picker. It seems like one or two years was all they wanted to do it. Since all the family had learned it so well, I didn't mind it. If I had waited until I was older, why, I probably wouldn't have done it. Since I was broken-in when I was so young, I just grew up with it. I never have minded picking ducks. Long before the refuge was built, there were two clubs down below where the refuge is or approximately. The Provo Club was where the refuge is now. Then there was a club below that called the Cache Valley Club. The manager of that was Mr. Olsen. He went by a nickname but I can't think what his first name was. He used to run a boat up the river, just a small motor boat up to Knudson's Landing. That's situated just above or just east of the Bear River clubhouse. They would pick up members there and occasionally go to Corinne for supplies because there was no road out on the south side of the river at that time. The Bear River Club Company built a road after—well, I guess it was before 1920. They built a road down the north side of the river where you'd go out through Corinne and out west as far as the Chesapeake Club. From there, there was a road built over some of the marsh land that went right to their clubhouse. Then they had to ferry across to get to their clubhouse because it was on the south side of the river. The Bear River Club had a large gasoline boat that would carry maybe thirty passengers. This boat went to Corinne just about every day. My father, at first, ran this boat. They also had one man to take care of the engine. My father steered the boat. He knew just where the currents in the river ran so that he knew how to guide 3 this boat to make the best time to Corinne. They had a large flat boat that they ferried across. They could take their cars across or anything. All of the lumber for the Bear River Club Company clubhouse was hauled on this flat boat from Corinne. It was purchased from the Merrill Lumber Company in Brigham. They hauled it to Corinne and then it was put on this flat boat and taken down the river to the club. This clubhouse was built in 1902. I might say that the Bear River Club bought this land from my father because he and his father had homesteaded it. They had good duck shooting. They shot for the market and dressed the ducks and shipped them everywhere for the market. Many of the club members were millionaires, so often the club was called the Millionaire Duck Club. Later, my father was made superintendent. He hired the help for the kitchen and also the guides. They had a dining room there in the kitchen and four bedrooms where the help stayed. Then they had a house where the guides stayed—they were the people who took the club members out shooting on the marsh. We called the club members "sports." The guides took the club members out in row boats and also took care of their guns. They didn't have motors on their boats until later years. My father also had charge of the duck picking, the shipping, and the packing of the ducks. He'd get up about four o'clock in the morning to pack the ducks for shipping. He also had his cows out there to furnish the club with milk and cream. He'd separate the milk so that they'd have plenty of cream to use at the clubhouse. Most of the members, in later years, claimed their own ducks and they could ship only so many. Then there'd always be some ducks left which they would usually 4 use at the clubhouse for lunches. They cooked the little teal ducks for their lunches and put a whole duck in the member’s lunch. The limit, when I started to pick, was twenty-five ducks. But when I was younger and went out there just for weekends, the limit was fifty ducks. There were so many ducks that we culled them right and left. If they were a little bit dark, we threw them away because we had more than we could pick and more than they could use because it was such good shooting on the Bear River Club Company grounds at that time. Then of course, they cut the limit down to twenty-five. It seems that the ducks were in so much better shape in those days than in later years. I can remember picking a limit of Pintails. At the first of the season, there were little pin feathers so it took me a whole hour to pick a limit of nine. When the ducks got better in the next month, I could pick nine in a half an hour—that was when the ducks were fat and plump. I believe I got seven cents apiece for picking ducks at that time. In later years, they raised to ten cents, and then they rose to twenty cents. They had quite a lot of deep water ducks to pick. They were the Canvasback, the Redhead, and the Bluebill and others that like the deep water. We always hated them because it took us three times as long to pick a deep water duck as it did to pick what we called the “puddle ducks,” which were the ducks that feed in the shallow water. The Canvasback and Redhead dive to the bottom of the lake for their feed. They live on the moss roots and things like that—more like a vegetable diet. They are better eating than the shallow water ducks. At least in my estimation they are. The meat is rich and not wild tasting like the other ducks. Since the Canvasbacks 5 were so much harder picking than the other ducks, we sorted them out and didn't want to pick them. My father said, "Well, the club will just have to pay more for picking those." I remember when we were getting three cents for “puddle ducks,” they paid ten cents for Canvasbacks. In later years, when we got up to twenty cents for the “puddle ducks,” we got forty cents for the Canvasbacks. But we still couldn't make as much picking them. We could pick three of the “puddle ducks” easily while we were picking one Canvasback. I guess because they're in the deep water all the time they have a layer of fuzz under the feathers and that's hard to get off. They take a lot of energy to pick. I picked for the Chesapeake Club when I had a few years off at the Bear River Club. Their ducks are nearly all “deep water ducks.” The water is deeper there around the Chesapeake. I picked seventy-five Canvasbacks in one day and believe me that's hard to do. Your arm wouldn't take much more. The Canvasbacks came into the marsh a little later than the other ducks. I picked, on the average, between 4,000 and 5,000 ducks in a season. We would try to get all the ducks picked in a day that we possibly could. My sister-in-law picked with me and we'd sometimes have over 200 ducks piled up in the corner on the table to trim at night. We'd pick all day long and then we'd have to trim them and clean them. The guides would draw the most out of them, but we'd have to take the heart and lungs as my father was very particular. They were really clean when we worked under my father's supervision. Then we threw them in a big trough, as we called it. It covered one side of the duck house and we pumped river water on them and stirred them around in there and washed them. Then we had to dive into that water clear to our elbows to get them out. We hung them on racks. 6 My father had pounded nails through two-by-fours with the sharp end sticking out so that we just pushed the neck onto the nail. They were all hung individually so they could drain. In the morning, they had dried off and that's when my father packed them to ship. I might say that the Duckville Gun Club was built out there after the Bear River Club Company. I don't know what year it was built. It's a nice clubhouse now, but it was an old rickety one before that. It was there years before, probably when my father had his club farther up the river. They also had a large boat that made trips from the clubhouse to Corinne and back every day. That was the only way they had of transporting club members and supplies to the club. Well, life at the duck club was real fun for me. We even had dances out there in the early days. The dining room where the guides ate was quite a good sized room and we had some guides out there who could play the guitar, the mandolin and the violin and so they would play. The club members would come down and dance with us girls. We sometimes had two or three duck pickers and two or three women in the kitchen and, of course, up at the clubhouse they employed a lady cook and two waitresses. So all in all, it made eight or nine couples to dance. The times have changed considerably. There's no sociability out there now. The guides drive out from Brigham every morning and drive home as soon as they're through at night. It's just get to work and get home again. 7