by Dennis Anderson Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Published September 29, 1995

When an estimated 150,000 Minnesotans assemble on Saturday in marshes and swamps, along lakes and on passes separating two or more of these waterways, they will continue a duck and goose hunting tradition that is as old as the state itself.

No state or province in North America can claim as many waterfowlers as Minnesota, and few, if any, can boast of as many conservation-minded hunters.

Certainly Chesapeake Bay has its duck and goose hunting histories. So, too, Louisiana, the Gulf Coast of Texas and California.

But unique among these and all states is Minnesota, to which, in the 1880s, many Europeans came each year - in spring - to shoot ducks and geese returning north.

These gunners braved 10-day steamship rides from Europe to New York and three-day trips by rail to Minnesota before turning north, toward Fergus Falls, where, in April, their double-barreled guns would boom from morning until night.

Into this environment traveled, in 1888, James Stroud Bell , coming from Philadelphia to Minneapolis not as an outdoorsman but as a successful flour broker. Bell would assume leadership of the Washburn Milling Co., which later became the Washburn Crosby Co., which, on June 22, 1928, became the catalyst for the creation of a national flour company called General Mills.

Bell was not an outdoorsman. But his only child, James Ford Bell , would become an outdoorsman and a bird hunter whose interest in, and love for, ducks helped shaped waterfowling history in Minnesota and the world.

"When my father was a boy of 16 or so, he would walk to the marshes that existed at the time at what is now 26th and Park Avenue in Minneapolis, to hunt ducks," said Charles (Charlie) Bell , one of three sons of James Ford Bell .

Charlie Bell , 88, lives in California, but was in Minneapolis this week and talked about the times that helped shape Minnesota's waterfowling traditions. "Heron Lake was where father and his friends hunted first," Charlie Bell said. "The canvasbacks down there were plentiful. I remember on Fridays, we would get on the train at 8 p.m. in Minneapolis, headed for Heron Lake. I was 9 years old when I was first taken there. Our dogs were crated and loaded into the baggage car, and we all took berths, so we could sleep on the way down. We would arrive about 2 a.m., unload the dogs and our other gear, and be driven to our hunting club, ready to be on the lake before dawn."

On those autumn days, Heron Lake, in extreme southwest Minnesota, would be inundated with ducks - oversized flocks of canvasbacks, one flight arriving after another, the big birds eying a set of decoys with little wariness before cupping their wings, banking hard and settling in.

So enraptured with Heron Lake and its surroundings was James Ford Bell that in 1910 he commissioned the famed Louis Agassiz Fuertes to paint, in watercolor, the canvasbacks there. Titled "Canvasbacks - Heron Lake," the painting now is in a vault at the James Ford Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota.
"I'm not certain exactly why, but in 1921, my father switched hunting areas, leaving Heron Lake for the famous Ten-Mile-Lake road pass at Dalton near Fergus Falls," Charlie Bell said. "I don't know if it was that the hunting had declined significantly at Heron Lake, but it might have been. Or it could have been that the hunting near Fergus Falls was just that much better. Whatever the case, my father was a very acute individual who had an ability to look into the future and see how things were likely to turn out. And he was right more often than wrong. So it could have been that he simply wanted to be ahead of the times when Heron Lake no longer would provide the kind of hunting he had come to enjoy."

James Ford Bell was, of course, correct about Heron Lake and its eventual decline as a waterfowling mecca. This year, Heron and a few surrounding waters are the only places in Minnesota where canvasback hunting is not allowed. The reason: The Department of Natural Resources is attempting to rebuild the stopover traditions that canvasbacks enjoyed at Heron Lake for the thousand or so years that preceded this century.

Many of James Ford Bell 's friends and hunting buddies came with him to Dalton. These included F.M. Crosby, C.C. Bovey, C.D. Velie, Fred Atkinson and others - each of them successful, some of them wildly so, in their businesses.

In this respect, these men were representative of an era when the field sports largely belonged to America's upper classes. Whereas today, relatively few of the nation's rich and powerful call themselves sportsmen, at the turn of the century, the ability to shoulder a Boss or a Parker or a Purdey double and shoot it well was a sign of proper education and proper breeding.

"My father taught me to shoot beginning at 9 years of age," Charlie Bell said. "My first gun was a Parker 16. He also taught his three boys to fly-fish at a young age. We would stand on the dock and he would place a book underneath our casting arms, and we were instructed, as we cast, not to allow that book to drop."

When hunting near Fergus Falls, James Ford Bell , his sons and friends again would board a train on Friday afternoon in Minneapolis. By this time, the water spaniel was the dog of choice among these hunters, and crates of them were loaded in baggage cars - the animals' anticipation of the weekend being no less keen than that of their owners.

"Simultaneous with taking a hunting club at Dalton, father believed that if he were to preserve duck hunting for his three sons, he would have to go farther north, still," Charlie Bell said. "That's when he first began buying land around the Delta Marsh, northwest of Winnipeg. He knew that, as a non-Canadian, he might have trouble buying as much land as he wanted to buy, so he had two lawyers in Winnipeg put the land in their names."

Eventually, the land was donated to conservation purposes. More important, he would find what would become the Delta Waterfowl Research Station. His goal was to raise and release as many or more ducks as he and his friends shot on the marsh each fall.

In this undertaking, Aldo Leopold, widely regarded as the father of North American conservation, would be employed, as would other top biologists and ecologists. One of these, Al Hochbaum, was hired in 1938 as the first director of research at the Delta station.

The influence of the Delta station on North American conservation history can't be overstated. It is there that scores of waterfowl biologists have been trained, and research projects undertaken.

Perhaps more important, the conservation ethic that James Ford Bell assigned to all of his waterfowling interests, including his hunting, was passed to his children, his friends, to their friends and to acquaintances that probably numbered in the thousands.

In this manner, the hunting habits and enthusiasms of generations of Minnesota waterfowlers were molded. Saturday, the current generation of Minnesota waterfowlers will continue this tradition, assembling in marshes and swamps, along lakes and on passes separating two or more of these waterways.

Looking skyward, they will, upon spotting a duck, know the same feeling that on opening days so many years ago inspired James Ford Bell and his friends.

Copyright 1995 Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Republished here with the permission of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.