Documented in extreme detail — more than 200 photos — was the grisly death scene of a record-class buck at the jaws of some blood-thirsty coyotes.
Smith, a northeast Texas resident, had placed his Moultrie camera on his 4,800-acre lease in nearby Oklahoma. The property he hunts is owned by a large timber company is located in some foothills far removed from paved roads and county highways. This is the third year he has been hunting the property.
In 1841, a young Wellsboro man named George Washington Sears and a young New Yorker named Herman Melville shipped out of New Bedford, Massachusetts for whaling grounds in the South Pacific. Both returned home to writing careers: Sears as the famed woodsman, outdoor writer, early conservationist and poet known as “Nessmuk” who has since vanished into obscurity, and Melville as the author of the obscure novel Moby-Dick, a critical and commercial failure rediscovered as a great American novel in the Twentieth Century.
It’s time to rediscover Nessmuk.
George Washington Sears was a bearded, “shiftless,” diminutive, five-foot-three, 109-pound character, a legend in the bars of Wellsboro and on the lakes of New York State, who was a famous American outdoor writer for Forest and Stream magazine, author of the classic book Woodcraft who invented and popularized solo canoeing and light-footed camping, a poet compared to Whitman in his lifetime and called “the hook-and-bullet Thoreau” today, and an early conservationist who was trained in the ways of the woods and waters as a child by “an athletic young brave” of the Massachusetts Narragansett tribe named “Nessmuk.”
George Washington Sears (December 2, 1821 – May 1, 1890) was a sportswriter for Forest and Stream magazine in the 1880s and an early conservationist. His stories, appearing under the pen name, "Nessmuk" popularized self-guided canoe camping tours of the Adirondack lakes in open, lightweight solo canoes and what is today called ultralight camping or ultralight backpacking.
Canoeing had been popularized by Scottish lawyer John MacGregor in the 1860s, but the typical canoe trip of the day employed expert guides and heavy canoes. Sears, who was 5 feet 3 inches (1.60 m) tall and 103 pounds (47 kg) had a 9-foot-long (2.7 m), 10 1⁄2-pound (4.8 kg) solo canoe built by J. Henry Rushton of Canton, New York. He named it the Sairy Gamp (the name of a Dickens character) and in it he completed a 266-mile (428 km) journey through the central Adirondacks. He was 62 years old and in frail health (tuberculosis and asthma) at the time. William Henry Harrison Murray's Adventures in the Wilderness, published in 1869, had praised the Adirondacks as having a healthy atmosphere for consumptives and Verplanck Colvin's enthusiastic writing about the Adirondack wilderness had further inspired the trip. The Sairy Gamp was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution and is now on loan to the Adirondack Museum.
He grew up the eldest of ten children in South Oxford (now Webster), Massachusetts. He took his pen name from a Native American who had befriended him in early childhood. He was fascinated by the few books about Native Americans his family possessed, which left him with an abiding interest in forest life and adventure. A period of factory labor while still a child left him with a fondness for the writing of Charles Dickens. At age twelve he started working in a commercial fishing fleet based on Cape Cod and at nineteen he signed on for a three-year voyage on a whaler headed for the South Pacific; it was the same year (1841) that Herman Melville shipped out of the same port bound for the same whaling grounds. On his return, his family moved to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania where he was to live for the rest of his life. However, he continued traveling for adventure, from the upper Midwest and Ontario to an Amazon tributary in Brazil (in 1867 and again in 1870).
Sears wrote Woodcraft, a book on camping, in 1884, that has remained in print ever since. A book of poems, Forest Runes, appeared in 1887. He died at his home in Pennsylvania seven years later. Mount Nessmuk, in northern Pennsylvania, is named after him.
Wildlife Management Units (WMUs) are the geographical units DEC uses to set hunting and trapping seasons in New York State. This map is similar to the online one on the DEC website, however I added random colors to make the different WMUs stand out better. Updated 9/19/17 with the Northern Southern Zone line, shown in red. You may need to zoom in to see the Northern-Southern Line clearly. Updated 1/24/21 with Town, County lines along with DEC Lands shown on a Topographic Map. You can switch to alternative layers in the right hand corner. Data Source: http://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/8302.html
Last week I was riding around South Texas with Jason Vanderbrink, the president of ammunition for Vista Outdoor. In other words, he’s the big boss for ederal Premium Ammunition, CCI, Speer, and now Remington ammunition. This is a pretty wild time to be running an ammo company: There are an estimated 7 million new gun owners in the U.S. this year, consumers have been panic-buying rounds in everything from .22LR to .300 Win. Mag., and retailers are backordered for months; plus, there’s the global pandemic complicating supply chains and workers’ safety.
So, we know the question that’s on the minds of every hunter and shooter: Where’s the ammo?
Click on individual towns to pull up detailed harvest information from previous years.
