EP 595. Grandad’s Mississippi Delta “Goose Camp”

“You have accumulated a tremendous amount of history. But I’m always reminded every time I’m here that museums are not collections of stuff, they’re collections of stories.”

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I’m in the heart of the Mississippi Delta at the Mississippi Wildlife Heritage Museum in Leland, Mississippi. And I’m going to start like this because today’s topic is near and dear to my heart. Some of the most prized possessions, and I hate to be that guy, but some of the most prized assets of my life consist of some really thin and deteriorated copies on what they called onion skin, very, extremely thin paper that’s not good for preserving. But it’s the Mississippi goose camp budgets from my grandfather from back in 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, right here on the banks of Greenville, Mississippi, on the Mississippi River. He and his buddies would go out and hunt Canada geese. Just imagine a group of 5 to 10 men back in that era, so well organized that somebody like my grandfather was the treasurer. And some of the notes and some of the stuff they did and I stumbled across after he died, I stumbled across a little tiny seed sack, I’d call it of a lease clover probably come from delta seed and pine and inside it were about a half dozen old Johnson paper folding decoys. And his entire hunting life, he died at age 72, his entire hunting life here in the Mississippi Delta is just summarized perfectly on about 20 pages of little magnetic photo albums, just tiny little pictures. And so many of those photos had to do with his Mississippi goose camp experience. Billy Johnson is the director of the Mississippi Wildlife Heritage Museum, which is a compendium of Mississippi outdoor history. And every time I walk in this museum, Billy, I’m reminded, it’s a lot of stuff in here. You have accumulated a tremendous amount of history. But I’m always reminded every time I’m here that museums are not collections of stuff, they’re collections of stories.

Billy Johnson: They are history.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And you’ve done a good job at putting it together.

Billy Johnson: Well, I appreciate that. So many kids come in here, the field trips, school field trips, and stuff and a museum is virtually a classroom where you learn and you got kids now that may not ever get to quail hunt, but they can see what it was about and like what we’re doing today, talking about this Mississippi River Canada goose hunting. You always say every time you come in here you can see more stuff that we’ve got.

Ramsey Russell: You’ve got more and more stuff, I brought a few things today myself. But it’s just amazing the stuff you’ve got in here, it just continues to grow. You’ve expanded down the city block more, you’ve opened up a whole new wing that is already full. That wing didn’t exist last time I was here, but it’s already getting full and it may be all of downtown Leland for you.

Billy Johnson: Well, we just acquired, it was a family had a 70 year old furniture business in 3 buildings and we’ve acquired those buildings and we’ve renovated one of them and that’s where the Canada goose display is and then the other two buildings, one thing I’m excited about, we’re going to tell the history of the Mississippi Department of Wildlife & Fisheries & Parks, what all they’ve done since their inception in 1932. But the Mississippi River is a public waterway.

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah.

Billy Johnson: And 99% of the land on both sides is private now. In the era of time when you and I are talking about the first half of the last century, these guys goose hunted up and down the river. They’d have a wooden houseboat, a mothership and it would sleep 10 to 12 people, have an inboard motor and they would have a couple of skiffs to go back and forth from the houseboat to the sandbars. And then they’d have one or two of those Chris craft outboard, little outboards, inboard motors, boats and they have ski boats and they would take people back and forth to the landing in Greenville or Chess Wilson had a landing, 0 foot landing north of Greenville and those were the jumping off places. And some of these guys would fly the river and see where the geese were and come back and know where to situate the houseboat and all. But you talking about, those grocery lists your grandfather had, once you get out on the river, it ain’t no convenience store or Walmart or grocery store, if you forget something, it’s just forgot. So they were real meticulous.

Ramsey Russell: It’s as wild today as it was then. I mean, once you get inside those levees, it’s just no man’s land.

“I’m going to tell you, I’m 71 and from when I was a child to now, when I’m out there on that Mississippi River, it makes me realize how small one person is in the universe. And I mean, I tell people, what do I need to do in Mississippi? I said, well, two things you need to do. You need to see a sunrise on Lake Washington and you need to see a sunset on the Mississippi River.”

Billy Johnson: I’m going to tell you, I’m 71 and from when I was a child to now, when I’m out there on that Mississippi River, it makes me realize how small one person is in the universe. And I mean, I tell people, what do I need to do in Mississippi? I said, well, two things you need to do. You need to see a sunrise on Lake Washington and you need to see a sunset on the Mississippi River. I mean, the Mississippi River it’s just a vast wonderland of fish and wildlife.

Ramsey Russell: Historically, it cut this great delta of ours. I mean, Deer Creek right here on the banks, I mean, all of this stuff was tributaries or river runs back in the day. These soils that surround Washington county are so high, some of the most fertile cotton ground on earth. And it was all devised by the Mississippi River pre levees.

Billy Johnson: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: All this sediment, all this water and all this energy that comes down the river was deposited right here on this landscape in the Mississippi Delta before they put that levee up,

Billy Johnson: I think it’s 41% of the continental United States drains through the Mississippi River into Canadian provinces. I was hunting up in northern Montana, and the water in the creek that comes out of Canada where we were hunting flows into the Milk River. The Milk River flows into the Missouri. Missouri into the Mississippi. So, you can be 2200 miles away and that water, come right here, down the river by my house. Ramsey, in putting this museum together, we started getting vintage photos of these old Mississippi River goose hunts and people like Herman Caillouette, who won the World Duck Calling Championship with his mouth in 1942, and his buddy Herb Parsons, who was exhibition shooter for Winchester, and he also won the World Duck Calling Championship. But in the day of all these 3.5 inch magnums and all this, these guys were out there hunting them with Model 12, 2 and 3 quarter inch shotguns.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Billy Johnson: And they had to get them in close and they would dig pits out on these sandbars and pull driftwood up around it. And one of the most interesting collections we’ve got in this museum is this Canada goose collection. We’ve got a set of handmade canvas Canada goose decoys that were made by Robert Weinman and his wife in 1918. And they used them, and set them up on sandbars and I mean, goose hunting was the big thing back then. These guys would go out and stay a week or 10 days and hunters would go back and some more would come in. But they were living in those houseboats and a lot of times they were stuffing geese and eating them. And it was just a different culture than it is now when you got all these fine hunting lodges up and down the Mississippi River. I mean, they would get in those houseboats and it sleep 10 to 12 people and they’d take turns cooking and it was just a special time in waterfowling history, for our area. And you talk about your grandfather, hunting and all and I mean, and look, it was dangerous back then. We had a group of 4 hunters, a man named C.Q Hallowell would build these houseboats and my uncle Albert Bowler and Liam Gower and trying to think who else was with him, C.K Fuller and Gordon Jones. You get out on that river and it’s a foggy day and a towboat, hit the houseboat and they were able to get over into the two skiffs they had. And I mean, 2 of those guys, when they hit the bank of that river, they became born again Christians. I mean, it scared the life out of them.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve had those moments out there on the Mississippi River myself.

“I was shocked to learn we were talking about some of the famous duck hunters from the state of Mississippi and you were explaining to me that up to a certain point that that generation they were not duck hunters here in the Mississippi Delta, they were goose hunters. All these men out here in the delta, they went to the river to go goose hunting, Canada goose hunting.”

Billy Johnson: Well, people that hadn’t been on the river much don’t think about stuff like this. But in our area of the world, oftentimes when the rain comes in, it’ll be southwest winds and you’ll have 5 or 6 foot waves out in the river and then right behind it, like as soon as the warm front passes, the wind will get out of the northwest. And where those curves in the river, those bends in the river, you’ll have southwest waves hitting northwest waves. And I’m going to tell you something, it’s not somewhere you want to be. But now, Herman Caillouette and them were excellent goose callers. And they could call those flocks down and they put a lot into their hunting. And a lot of times they would have these tent camps, they’d have a tent camp of hunters on the bank of the river. So the whole culture, that whole Canada goose hunting culture on the Mississippi River is pretty much in our area of the river, it’s pretty much a thing of the past, it’s all duck hunting now.

Ramsey Russell: But you told me one time, one time in a previous interview here. I was shocked to learn we were talking about some of the famous duck hunters from the state of Mississippi and you were explaining to me that up to a certain point that that generation they were not duck hunters here in the Mississippi Delta, they were goose hunters.

Billy Johnson: That’s right. They were goose hunters.

Ramsey Russell: All these men out here in the delta, they went to the river to go goose hunting, Canada goose hunting.

Billy Johnson: Go goose hunting. And that was a big thing.

Ramsey Russell: If you had to put the heyday on a timeline, when would that have been? The 30s, 40s?

Billy Johnson: Up until the 50s.

Ramsey Russell: Up until the 50s. That have been the time somewhere in the 1950s, that the Canada geese didn’t migrate to the state of Mississippi anymore.

Billy Johnson: I don’t know. I mean, you got to realize it got colder back then more often than it does now. I got pictures of the river in 1941 where it’s ice chunks, I mean, it’s just a solid, it looks like Antarctica, the river’s frozen. And one thing that happened is when the Cajuns moved to the delta and started growing rice, a lot of ducks started overwintering here instead of – they’d clear that land, buckshot land back then, they’d clear the timber off of it, the trees off of it, and they’d grow cotton on it 7 or 8 years and then it would land and wear out. Well, all these Cajuns came in here and started land, forming that land and planting rice and it changed things. But I mean, the Mississippi Flyway, the Mississippi River is the center of the Mississippi Flyway. And back in those days, I think it got colder and I think the more geese came down. But I mean, like I said, those guys, especially during the depression, I mean, they made their own decoys, they had these little charcoal buckets, it had 2 bottoms, and the top bottom had holes in it where the ashes would go down and they’d have those little charcoal buckets, down in the blind with them. And let’s face it, they didn’t have the clothes that we have now.

Ramsey Russell: One of my favorite pictures, my grandfather would have been in his 30s, I’m going to guess, looking at the picture in his 30s and it’s a black and white photo, but you don’t need to see the color, he’s a young man and he’s wearing his US Air Force Flight suit, uninsulated, just a jumpsuit, cotton canvas jumpsuit. They broke down camp, he’s on the top of a bluff, a sandbar on a Mississippi River. And I’ve just noticed as I looked at the photo, his fists were kind of balled up. And that’s because that north wind is just cutting him in half. And they’re fixing to come home, but he just took a picture at the end of his hunt, him just sitting on that sandbar in a beautiful, and you can tell as blue as the sky is with those type clouds, so high in the sky as they were, that that north wind is blowing hard. And I don’t know how they did it back in those days.

“Now, I tell you one thing they had, I think it was either Herters or L.L. Bean, they had a belt, a felt belt that you would wear, and it had two pockets in the back and you’d take those metal hand warmers you’d put lighter fluid in them, and you’d light them and you’d put them on your kidneys. And my daddy said all the blood in your body goes through the kidneys, and that would keep you warm.”

Billy Johnson: When I started hunting, I was born in 1954 and when I went to Montgomery island, first deer hunt when I was in 1960 or 1961, all of the men wore army surplus stuff. They had army surplus jeeps, they had army surplus clothes, I guess if one of these drones went down one of those old Mississippi River camps, they’d think it was some terrorists or something. But that’s the way it was. Now, I tell you one thing they had, I think it was either Herters or L.L. Bean, they had a belt, a felt belt that you would wear, and it had two pockets in the back and you’d take those metal hand warmers you’d put lighter fluid in them, and you’d light them and you’d put them on your kidneys. And my daddy said all the blood in your body goes through the kidneys, and that would keep you warm. But we had those old canvas coats and pants, and they came up with that old marshmallow tie, I don’t know what you called, quilted underwear. And it would have you bundled up where you couldn’t move. But I’m going to tell you tell, when that wind’s 25 or 30 miles an hour out of the north and you sitting on a naked sandbar looking up that river, I mean, it’ll freeze you quick. But those guys, they put a lot into their hunting and they got a lot out of it. But I mean, it was just an era back then where they either hunted out of a tent camp or they hunted out of these houseboats.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Billy Johnson: And it was an era time when goose hunting was the thing.

Ramsey Russell: I sent you a lot of photos, I went through those photos and kind of took snapshots and sent to you the other day. And I know there was an inboard boat, like you see at the yacht club, just a wooden boat with a little cabin, I guess, beds in it. And that’s how they would a lot of times go down river to camp. But I’ve also got pictures of really just temporary ephemeral tar paper houses that they would build on the riverbank somewhere. They’d find somewhere to build it and then I knew, don’t know what became of this, but I actually at one time had one, an old army tent. It had to been 10 by 10, 12 by 12, 15 by 15, it was humongous like something you see on that old MASH television show back in the 70s.

Billy Johnson: Those are heavy.

Ramsey Russell: It had a floor, it had walls, it had a tent, and to set it up, we cut 8 foot 2 by 4s on each end and a 10 foot 2 by 4 across the top at the frame and then stake it down in the backyard and that’s what they slept in too.

Billy Johnson: Those tent were real heavy duty.

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah.

Billy Johnson: And I mean, these little weekend tents, you get them out there in the kind of wind and cold that I’m talking about and they’d rip them apart. But those heavy military canvas tents, would hold that wind off of them. But it was probably 10 or 15 different men that lived around Greenville that had those big houseboats. And I tell you what else they did, those wooden houseboats, they used them in the summer to jug fish for catfish on the river. But those old goose hunting days, I mean, to kill a greater Canada goose with a 2 and 3 quarter inch shell, you had to get them close. You had to get them –

Ramsey Russell: They did have lead 4s back in the day and 3s and 2s. You talk about those Model 12s and I knew that the only shotgun my father and my uncle ever owned, they were given when they were 15 years old. And it was Model 12, 12 gauges, modified chokes, 28 inch barrels, consecutive serial numbers, we don’t know what became of my dad’s. But what I didn’t know until I met with my uncle not too long ago, I was sitting there meeting with him and he asked me if I still had that 1100. I said, yeah, I still got it. He said, well, you know that your grandfather bought 3 Model 1212 gauges, don’t you? I go, no, whatever happened to his Model 12 and it’s somewhere in the bottom of the Mississippi River. Because what they would do is they would go out either in the big boats or they’d fly, having their stuff transported out there. But once they got on those sandbars, they didn’t use those big houseboats to hunt, they would go hit the channels and whatnot with just small john boats or pirogue or canoe and one of the most legendary family stories. Now, my grandfather, since World War II, that about that era, somebody he knew from Greenville, Mississippi, had come home from Holland with a pair of springer spaniels and said, this is the most amazing retriever for the Mississippi Delta. And he embraced it. And heck, man, all these years later, that would have been in the mid to late 40s and all the years later, I was 13 years old in the late 70s when the last of that line got run over in a dove field over there in Inverness, Mississippi. But he did own a lab at one time, a lab named Klinger. And to hear my grandmother say it, and my uncle and daddy, the lab was big and it was powerful and it was unruly, and it killed every other male dog it could ever lock his jaws on. And it was hard to contain in a duck boat, it wanted to be all over. And I somehow or other remember that the loss of that Model 12 shotgun involved my granddaddy going across a chute with that unruly lab, and that resulted in his Model 12 ending up on the bottom of the river somewhere. Too deep to go get, too deep to find, too deep to fish out.

Billy Johnson: Well, my dad, Clint Johnson, was born in 1927, and he told me when he got old enough to hunt that a Model 12 was $59.

Ramsey Russell: $59.

Billy Johnson: And it was a widow woman that lived down the street and he had a newspaper, daddy had a newspaper route, and he got enough money and bought that man’s Model 12 from that widow lady for $40 and I still got that gun. But those old river landings, like I said, Chess Wilson’s and that one down at Warfield Point, and all that was the jumping off place for anybody going out on the river.

Ramsey Russell: Were they on public land or private or did it matter back in those days?

Billy Johnson: Okay, well, Warfield Point is a park now.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Billy Johnson: So, I mean, I guess. I don’t know. I think that Chess Wilson landing might have been on a private place. But I mean, you got to realize, like, Lake Whittington, Lake Atlanta and Lake Whittington, I mean, Lake Whittington wasn’t formed until in the 30s, and that was a landing what’s Lake Whittington now used to be part of the river.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I see. I did not know it was that new, I did not know that.

Billy Johnson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Was that a corps project that actually formed that lake?

Billy Johnson: I’m sure it was. But you know up and down the river, Ramsey, it’s just a lot of legendary waterfowl hunters and those old times when they were carving decoys out of cypress wood and they were making those canvas decoys and all, it’s a culture that once technology changed everything, it’s just gone. But, yeah, I mean, you got to realize that were hunting with paper shells back then.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Billy Johnson: One funny story I heard one time, I think you could use live decoys up until, like, those English calling mallards and stuff, up until, like, 1935 or something. And it was some guys, they were down there on a sandbar in the river, and they had some homemade goose decoys and had 8 or 10 white chickens, and they had some grain thrown out on top of the sandbar and those chickens was pecking, and I guess they were getting the geese close enough, with those white chickens and the game warden came along and said, get them damn chickens off that sandbar. It just said you couldn’t use ducks or geese, it didn’t say. I don’t care what it says, you all get them chickens out of there.

Ramsey Russell: Never thought about decoying birds with chickens?

Billy Johnson: No. And I’m going to tell you something. Like when the 1927 flood hit and all the Mississippi River bootleggers had the biggest, fastest boats on the river, and Herman Caillouette was the pilot of the ferry at the Warfield Point Ferry south of Greenville. And it wasn’t a bridge across the river’s end, and that little ferry would haul 12 or 15 cars across that. And he had a big boat. And if you read that book, Rising Tide, Herman Caillouette, he rescued over 200 people off the top of barns and in trees and in houses that were flooded, doing the river.

Ramsey Russell: Who was Mr. Caillouett in real life? Was he a Bootlegger?

Billy Johnson: No, he wasn’t. He ran that ferry and he had a –

Ramsey Russell: A river rat.

Billy Johnson: He had the Kings Rest Motor Lodge in Greenville, and he had a bait shop, he had what he called his Minnow Ranch. He was one of the most colorful characters in the history of the Mississippi River in our area. But he had a very close working relationship with all those bootleggers, and they saved a bunch of people during the 1927 flood. And all of these people, these highbrow folks over here in Greenville that look down on those river rats and those bootleggers after they saved so many people, it took a whole lot of a contempt that they had for those kind of people away and replaced it with respect. And they also, what I’m getting at, also through the years, those bootleggers saved a lot of stranded goose and duck hunters out there on that river. They would go out there, they had big fast boats and somebody called in, people didn’t come back, and they found their boat and couldn’t find them and they saved a lot of those people. That was dangerous hunting.

Ramsey Russell: I bet sales were brisk among them goose camps, too. What made Herman Caillouette such a colorful character?

“They said, Herman, why are you wearing a pistol? After he had lost that election, he said, anybody ain’t got no more friends than I got needs to wearing gun. But it was the people that Herman Caillouette associated with, people like Herb Parsons.”

Billy Johnson: He would do stuff like he ran for sheriff one time and he didn’t get but just a few votes and Jim’s Cafe was a gathering place down there on Washington Avenue and where all the movers and shakers ate breakfast. And he showed up the next morning after the election with a pistol on, looked like John Wayne. They said, Herman, why are you wearing a pistol? After he had lost that election, he said, anybody ain’t got no more friends than I got needs to wearing gun. But it was the people that Herman Caillouette associated with, people like Herb Parsons. And I mean, they would go up at Friar’s Point, a guy had a big pecan orchard and the crows were eating up all the pecans. And he would go up there and he would call the crows with his mouth and Herb Parson, would shoot them. But he was a real colorful. I mean, anybody can win the World Duck Calling championship, beat out 279 other people calling with your natural voice, I mean, he just was charisma.

“I was looking over at one just a minute ago about all, because this is not like going out and in a boat with just enough to get bound, these were almost military expeditions and it showed in just the amount of stuff that they would take out there.”

Ramsey Russell: You know these papers I’ve got at my grandfather’s the Goose Hunt, Goose Hunt he called it. The Goose Camp Budget. But the title up top is Goose Hunt and 1943 to 1949 which is not to say that it didn’t exist before or after that, it’s just to say this is the only record I’ve got. But I’m sitting here looking at one of them 1943 Goose Hunt wartime report in parentheses without the red tape. And it’s just a simple budget of stuff they’ve got, groceries, boat, gas, miscellaneous, case of beer, more groceries. I was looking over at one just a minute ago about all, because this is not like going out and in a boat with just enough to get bound, these were almost military expeditions and it showed in just the amount of stuff that they would take out there. Here we go, groceries, gasoline, equipment, other necessities, labor, stovepipe, more gasoline, I mean, it was just unbelievable. A tent. One time, purchase of a tent. One of them tents we’re talking about, they would pay local labor, they had a budget for that right there. But one thing I was going to ask you, we were talking on the phone the other day, and you recognized some of these names. Here are some of the names. Russell, which is my grandfather. Parkinson, Henderson, Wilson, Mullins, Felts. Do any of those names ring a bell? I believe Parkinson owned Greenville Lumber Company for the longest time.

Billy Johnson: Yeah. Wilson rings a bell. Ernest Bueller had a boat and it was a guy named Jody Yeager over there that hunted on the river a lot. And all of those guys, Tom Walsh was an accountant from Greenville and he won the first World Duck Calling Championship in Stuttgart, Arkansas in 1936. And I got the letter, a copy of the letter that he wrote to Kiwanis Club, who was putting it on. And he and Jody Yeager and Dr. Otis H. Beck, were all entered into it, and Tom Walsh won it. So, I mean, that era that we’re talking about, I mean, you got to realize deer hunting wasn’t as widespread as it is now. And waterfowl hunting and quail hunting were at the forefront of outdoor activities, back in those days. But those guys, one thing we ain’t talk about that we need to say something about is weather forecast weren’t nearly as accurate.

Ramsey Russell: No, you just couldn’t open your phone and see what the weather’s going to do tomorrow.

Billy Johnson: So, those guys went out there on the river and they just were just whatever came, is just the way it was. One other thing they used to do, they used to take those Cub airplanes and fly people out on sandbars and leave them and come back. And the Verdon family from Greenville, were big duck and goose hunters and Lynn Verdon flew his brother and sons and their dog out there, and the dog had gotten into a fight with a skunk and they had the dog tied out, they wouldn’t let him come and get in the blind or the tent and everything. And when Lynn landed, he thought that was the funniest thing until he realized he had to put that dog in his airplane and fly him back. The river, I mean, they talk about Alaska right now, the last frontier and the way to see it is in a boat and an airplane. In the era of time that we’re talking about, that was the way to see the Mississippi River and to jug fish out there, frog hunt out there, or goose hunt out there, that’s the way they did it. And I mean, it was a lot of people, that’s what they did. I mean, they had 3 or 4 different guys, building those boats around here like that.

Ramsey Russell: You talk about them flying out on the river like that, Billy. And I just remember my grandfather apparently learned to fly when he was in the Air Force. He was stationed down around Laredo, and that was some of his proudest memories. Some of the stories I heard about them flying out to the sandbar, my daddy and uncle would talk about them landing on a sandbar with that little plane, they had a little fixed wing aircraft. They would fly out of, where Favor Brothers is off air off Bowman Boulevard, it used to be.

Billy Johnson: That was Joe Call’s Cypress Garden Airport.

Ramsey Russell: When he pointed and said, that’s where they did it, it was nothing but a bean field or a cotton field.

Billy Johnson: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, call it an airport if you want to, it might have had one of them wind socks on it, but that was the beginning and ending, it was just a dirt field.

Billy Johnson: Well, I mean, a lot of them would fly over to Paradise Lake, on Ashbrook Island to hunt.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Billy Johnson: And to fish. And Fred Ballard, a friend of mine, went over there with a guy named Fred Frazier, and the tire came off, the whole bracket came off the plane. And Mr. Ballard got up under the wing, the wing above where the tire had broken off, where the wheel had broken off. And Fred Frazier was going down the sandbar and Mr. Ballard was running, holding that wing up, and he took off and went back. I don’t know how he got it lit, but he got it fixed and came back, got Mr. Ballard and all the rest of this stuff. He didn’t think he could land with a loaded plane. So on the time that Hal Brown and Gus Pitt were fishing at paradise and a big storm came up and they got under the wing of the plane and lightning struck the plane and it went down through Mr. Brown’s left foot. And the rest of his life he couldn’t stand any cold at all on his left heel and it knocked Gus Pitt out and it was another plane there and another couple of guys fishing and they were there and helped them and flew them back.

Ramsey Russell: You tell stories like that it reminds me, Billy, we are talking about the world’s greatest generation, that’s exactly who they were.

Billy Johnson: Well, if it wasn’t for them being who they were, we might not be here, who we are now.

Ramsey Russell: Might be speaking German.

Billy Johnson: But I guess my point being, and whether you went out there in a houseboat or a plane or whatever, you were directly exposed to whatever elements it was on that river. And I’m just telling you, you get out there on a foggy day and you can hear that towboat coming, but in that fog you can’t see them and all and I mean, it wasn’t an easy time to be out there. I got a friend that got in Alaska and he said more people get killed in Alaska from having the, I got to go home today disease. They take off and try to fly instead of waiting a couple of days and letting the weather calm down, it was the same way out there on that river. I mean, oftentimes they got back to Greenville when they could instead of when they wanted to. But like I said, it was some world class duck and goose callers from this area, back in that era. And they put a lot into their hunts and it was just an era of time that’s kind of gone now.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to read off. I can’t read the whole thing. I mean, but like I’m sitting here thinking of my kitchen cabinet at home today stocked, what we keep in there. And this is a list, a shopping list, example of things they took this just an example. I can’t possibly read it all, but we’re talking 20lbs of potatoes, 7lbs of onions, 10lbs of cornmeal, 10lbs of shortening, pints of salad dressing, vinegar, mustard, Morton Salt matches 6 boxes, paper napkins, bacon 10lbs, mixed cakes for 50 cents, American cheese, peaches, pears, pineapple, all kinds of canned goods. Tomato, ketchup, vanilla flavoring, lime beans, cabbage. Sweet potatoes, macaroni, pancake flour, marshmallows, somebody’s hot chocolate, sardine, sandwich bread, Vienna sausage, sauerkraut, 2 cans of sauerkraut, 2lbs of hot dogs, bell pepper, celery, cheese, liquor. I mean, I think everybody brought a bottle of liquor. This was a full blown military expedition. So not only were you out there digging and hunting, you had to eat good, too. And it wasn’t like you could walk into the camphouse and turn on your Viking range, this is cooked over Coleman stoves and campfires.

Billy Johnson: Ramsey, when you went out there, just say you were going to go out there and stay 2 or 3 days, the weather get bad and you can’t come in, I mean, you had to have enough food out there to sustain you in an emergency.

Ramsey Russell: Baking powder, toilet paper, paper towels, crackers. I mean, baking powder, they weren’t even using white biscuits back in the day, son. They were making them from scratch.

Billy Johnson: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Somebody had to be a good cook, he was probably the most important guy on the trip.

Billy Johnson: Well, a lot of these old pictures and old stories off that time in the river back then, it was some legendary hunters that hunted that river back then. And I’m just glad we got part of our history in here. And I want to congratulate you, Ramsey Russell is being inducted into the Mississippi Outdoor Hall of Fame.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, shoot, I’m hardly deserving of that, but thank you.

Billy Johnson: Well, anybody hunted in many places as you have and represented Mississippi all over the world, you is deserving of anybody. But we appreciate what you’ve done, introducing the waterfowl world into people all over the world. And we’re proud to have you in the museum and proud of you being from Mississippi.

Ramsey Russell: Man, I appreciate that. I’m proud to do it. When will that, sometime in mid-June is when you all have the ceremony?

Billy Johnson: The induction will be the 7^th of June, but you going to be gone then and we got another inductee that is. So we’ll probably just have a reception for you all later on in the summer and where you all friends and family can come.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I’ll invite a few people, that’s for sure. Who else were some famous, notable folks not to Change the subject. But who else were some notable folks in the Mississippi Delta, the Mississippi River goose hunting from back in the day? Who would be some of the people that stand out to you?

Billy Johnson: Well, a man named Aaron Moss and Fonse Carolla and that bunch in the McCaskill family, they all had holes over on Lake Whittington and they would leave the Benoit Outing Club and oftentimes they’d end up hunting in the river, but they were trying to call ducks and geese off the river into the woods, into the Lake Whittington. One of the –

Ramsey Russell: Is that the family that’s got the collection of mallard curls here in the museum? Tell that story right there because that’s amazing.

Billy Johnson: They would pull those curlicues off and they had a big styrofoam board of them and it’s thousands and thousands, that’s a man and his 4 sons and 30 years of hunting. But yeah, Fonse Carolla, he was a legendary waterfowl hunter. He had a place called Owl Supper Club in Greenville. And during duck season, he would sleep in the afternoon and he’d wake up about 4 o’ clock and he’d go in Owl Supper Club. And when he got to, he closed up, he’d go to Alum at and eat him a big breakfast and he’d go to Lake Whittington and he’d go duck hunting, goose hunting. And he’d come back about dinner and he’d sleep till about 4 o’ clock, he’d do the same thing every day and all kind of stuff happened to him. His dog set the blind on fire and his dog, every dog he had lab would call Battle and he’d name Battle and pull the dog, get his leg hung up in the string that had hooked to the boat plug and the boat plug full of water. Another time his throttle was frozen and he ran up in a tree in a 45 degree angle in a tree and the McCaskill boys had to go over there and pull him down. So, I mean, it’s a lot of those duck hunters and goose hunters from that era. And I don’t know where the tide changed to where it got to be more duck hunting and goose hunting. But I mean, from the 20s to the 50s, those guys with those houseboats and all were really, I mean, from the teens they were Canada goose hunt.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Billy Johnson: And that’s what they’re – I mean, Mr. Cox, Mr. Biddle and what I tell you that guy’s name was? I can’t think right now, Robert, his wife made the decoys, they made the decoys. But I mean, they were big goose hunters. And I mean, it just got handed down from one generation to the next in there.

Ramsey Russell: I wish I had a lot of that stuff. I showed you this morning, those old paper Johnson decoys and the seed sack. But in those pictures were some homemade wooden silhouettes and who knows what happened to those things. You know that generation, the world’s greatest generation, they didn’t really value, it was just a tool, like a hammer.

Billy Johnson: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Or like a can of beans that you’re going to take to the river. It wasn’t a cherished item that they realized that future generations are like, displayed in this museum would treasure. I mean, but that’s something about waterfowl hunting, whether we’re talking about that collection of thousands of duck feathers or old decoys or something like that. I can remember watching my grandfather, for example, I can remember sitting at the table, eating dinner, whatever he’s doing when he’s cleaning out his billfold every year, him throwing away his hunting licenses and his stamps and man, if I had that. But as I was going through – see when my father passed 16 years ago, after everything was settled and everything else, I went by the house to kind of shore things up before I locked the house and put it for sale and went through some and found a couple of boxes of papers, one box was unbelievable that he had every Father’s Day card, birthday card, every letter, everything I’d ever given him, all in one box. Boy, I put it in the truck. Then I put another one that had some of my grandfather’s stuff in it. And I remember looking through it and seeing some of these goose papers and some of these notes I’d heard about. And it was 16 years ago, he died just a couple of months ago that I climbed up in my closet and dug them out and started looking through some of this stuff

Billy Johnson: Found it all.

Ramsey Russell: I knew it was there, but I’ve been just letting it sit. My grandfather passed in the 80s, but as I was going through those papers the other day to send you some pictures, I found a duck stamp. Why he kept it or why he didn’t throw it away like all the rest of them, I have no idea. But it was a federal duck stamp, had some Ross’s geese on it, the year was 1978, which would have been, I cannot remember him hunting at all after that year, that must have been his last federal duck stamp. Got his signature on the face of it, I treasure it and it was just his last federal duck stamp, I didn’t get them all, but I got the one. But so much of the stuff, I’ve got calls, I’ve got a pocket knife, I’ve got a few little accoutrements of the hunt that represent that generation, but most of what lives is just the stories told. They just threw everything else away, they didn’t really carry it on like that. I mean, I wonder why this paperwork from his goose hunting existed.

Billy Johnson: Ramsey, you got to realize, coming out through that Depression and all, most men had a case, pocket knife, they had a Timex watch, they had a Model 12 shotgun and I mean, it wasn’t all this different kind of stuff that was available to them. Those people that made those decoys were very innovative. I mean, they’d carve their own oars, this guy we got in here, Henry Milner, he used to make his own nets, talking about doing the Depression, going out and picking cotton all day for $3 and it started raining and he got hooked up with an older fisherman and they would take those nets and he said first time he took some fish to town and sold them for $3, he figured that was a whole lot easier than picking cotton. And they’d have knot gauges where they’d make those nets and the squares would be certain sizes and then they’d lay it out on a table in the sun and put beeswax on one side, and let it dry a couple days and turn it over and the knots wouldn’t slip. Man, those guys, they wanted to hunt and they wanted to fish and they didn’t have the money to buy the stuff ready made. So they made the duck calls, they made the turkey calls.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, just some of the stories you’ve told about can do and they were very handy by necessity. But something you just said reminded me that in my grandfather’s lifetime, he was born into poverty in Ittobena, Mississippi. He believed in an education because it got him out of poverty, but he remembered the Great Depression when nobody had nothing. Shortly thereafter, the levee broke or maybe it was the levee broke first, right over here with a great levee break, he was living in Greenville, Mississippi.

Billy Johnson: The levy broke. Those guys –

Ramsey Russell: The levee broke then the Great Depression.

Billy Johnson: Yeah, the levee broke in April of 27, then the stock market crashed in 29.

Ramsey Russell: But he lived through that. And that would have been when he was a young man, he lived through that. And then the Jap bombed Pearl Harbor, he told the story, he knew exactly where he was. He was sitting on the front porch of a house eating dinner after church when a radio came on. And he said everybody he knew, every able bodied man that he knew got up from dinner and committed himself to joining the fight.

Billy Johnson: That was it. That’s what I said.

Ramsey Russell: That was that generation.

Billy Johnson: If they hadn’t done what they did, it could have been a story of our country could be much different than it is now. But it’s the will, the desire, the will to want to go out there and hunt and carve your own paddle, make your own lures. I mean, let me just say this, and it’s a very big underestimation of what I’m trying to get across. But that generation of people appreciated the things that we take for granted now. Because of them, because of their being ingenious and innovative and everything, it makes it easier for us to have the hunting and fishing opportunities that we have now.

Ramsey Russell: Of course it does.

Billy Johnson: It would have been easy for them just to say, well, I ain’t got this, I ain’t got that, I ain’t going, but they didn’t. And that whole group of Mississippi River Canada goose hunters, man, they were some kind of tough old guys now. I mean, they didn’t take no for an answer and they didn’t let the weather hold them back. When it was time to go, they went.

Ramsey Russell: They didn’t have Gore Tech, they didn’t have Thinsulate, they didn’t have nothing, they just went and toughed it out.

Billy Johnson: And like I said they would – then you got to realize that the river, of course normally in the fall the river is at its lowest stages for the year. But then you had the rising and falling river, but I mean, just like we sat on a deer stand wanting to kill our first deer, imagine, 14 year old boy sitting in a pit blind out there on a sandbar.

Ramsey Russell: You could call it a pit blind, but in the current sense a pit blind is warm and comfortable and sunk down the hole. It’s just a hole dug out holes in the sandbar.

Billy Johnson: Waiting to kill his first. It’s a story through the years as more and more of these pictures. I mean, when I first started getting pictures of these houseboats and it’d be a guy with a cypress skiff tied to the side and they’d have some geese tied across the top of the houseboat, the top of the side and taking a picture with it, I just thought it was some isolated deal. But after you end up with 20 or 30 different pictures of different boats and different groups of people, you realize it was pretty widespread. And the goose hunting too. You take like Tom Walsh, he had a flock of English calling mallards and he was an accountant and he’d come home in the afternoon and get the newspaper and go sit in the backyard and talk to them ducks like anybody else would do a dog, and he learned and that was his teaching and he ended up winning the first world duck calling championship. So, I mean, modern day waterfowl hunting has come a long way from the days in which we’re talking about.

Ramsey Russell: It’s come a long ways different, it’s come so much different. And I don’t know if the progress is for good or for worse, when I think back to some of these stories and some of these days. At some point in time the goose hunt did end though. Among those photo albums I’ve got very few pages of it, there’s a Cairo, Illinois Chamber of Commerce Canada goose hunting brochure from 1965, that correlates with a few photos in there of him and his buddies having made the long drive to Cairo, Illinois in search of those geese again, they missed those days.

Billy Johnson: I tell you who was big in all that goose hunting was Dr. Eustace Wynn in Greenville, and they had a lease up in Ballard County, Kentucky.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, Ballard County, Kentucky.

Billy Johnson: And he was big and all that goose hunting. So, I keep talking about, Herman Caillouette, you talking about going through your granddaddy’s stuff, when I went through Herman Caillouette stuff, there was a signed Christmas card from 1941 and from Winchester that Herb Parsons had signed for Herman Caillouette.

Ramsey Russell: Is that here in the museum or a picture of it?

Billy Johnson: It’s still in the safe. It’s too sacred for me to bring it out. But you got to realize communication wasn’t nearly, it was in its infancy back then. And people would call the payphone at Herman Caillouette’s motor lodge and ask him about the ducks and the geese, and he had tell them to come on down. And so, Greenville was the place, it was the jumping off place where people came and they stayed and they went and they met with these different groups and went out on the river in these boats and stayed a week of 10 days and I’d love to have been with them just one time.

Ramsey Russell: Just one time. I’d love to be on that.

Billy Johnson: Yeah, just one time.

Ramsey Russell: I read off those groceries earlier, and we’re talking a military expedition worth of groceries and the total budget for fuel and boats and labor and groceries and everything else worked out to about $39 a member for 6 or 7 guys. I mean, it was nothing. It’s probably a lot back then.

Billy Johnson: It was something back then.

Ramsey Russell: But I mean, by today’s standard, you think 39 bucks. And it’s so interesting how they would put together this formal budget, my grandfather’s treasurer, and I’ll just read one that’s off of, I don’t know what year 1947 it sounds like, but Mr. Parkinson had a credit of $58.97 to his statement of $139, this lessons a balance due to treasury, I mean, so formal. He will promptly remit, if Mr. Parkson wishes to assist the treasurer in collecting the balances outlined above, it will be entirely satisfactory provided he carries a bodyguard. Mr. Parkinson’s statement of account is in the hands of this treasurer and subject to audit upon request of any other camp members. Just so much of these notes read like an inside joke among people. It’s so formal for just a group of guys –

Billy Johnson: It was serious.

Ramsey Russell: $39. But these were some of his best friends. But the 1948 Goose Camp is by a unanimous vote placed in the hands of misters Russell, Hand and Mullen, that’d be Dr. Ben Hand.

Billy Johnson: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Mr. Parkinson and Mr. Felt having been voted honorary members and as such entitled to visit the camp the day after all work has been completed and getting properly erected. It is the writer’s information that Mr. V.H. turner is to be made a special guest for the purpose of carrying all the water supply over the levee in the dark after a good steady all day rain. Better luck next time. It was a level of camaraderie and getting together. Dr. Ben Hand, this was 1940s, my grandfather passed in 1984. And the level of friendship there is, he died at home, my father and grand and uncle were there by him. And Dr. Ben Hand, who he had shared goose camp with all them years later, was sitting on the bed with the man that put a stethoscope to his chest and took it off and announced that he had passed, held his hand, folded his hand upon his chest and sent him away. I mean, that level of friendship, they goose hunted together, they fished together, they duck hunted together, they dove hunted together.

Billy Johnson: Went to war together. I mean, but one thing that we mentioned in an earlier podcast, this building where the Mississippi Wildlife Heritage Museum started was a 14,000 square foot, 2 story, 100 year old hardware store building. And I was born in 54 and when I was 6 or 7 or 8, I mean I can remember coming in here and a box of 22 shorts was 35 cents and a box of 22 long rifles was 45 cents. A small Coke, a short Coke was a nickel and the tall coke was 7 cents. So I mean, and when you put that into comparison to that grocery list you got, the amount of money that’s on that list, $39 a piece that wouldn’t feed people 2 days now.

Ramsey Russell: You couldn’t feed a family. You probably couldn’t take your wife to McDonald’s for that kind of money, I don’t know.

Billy Johnson: Well, it’s just a different time. I mean, popping bugs, I remember in this store where some were a quarter and some were 35 cents, now they’re $3 and something. So I mean, it’s just in the hunting and fishing world, it takes a lot more money now to get you very far at all as far as the equipment, that we use. But those guys, like I said, they’d buy a case knife or a straight razor or Timex watch and it’d be something, a Model 12 that it would last them a lifetime. Unless it was lost in the river or stolen or stolen or something. I mean, it wasn’t, this bow shoots flatter than the one I had before and let me go get, during that depression, it wasn’t. It was a non cash economy in the rural south where people traded stuff, corn and peas for this. My uncle, one of my daddy’s uncles, had a one cylinder grist meal, the kerosene grist meal, and he got an 1/8^th. So when you brought a bushel of corn or a bushel of wheat up there, he would get a 1/8^th of the flour or an 1/8^th of the meal. So I mean, people hunted for food back then too. I mean, that was the height of this era that we’re talking about is during that Great Depression. My friend Hamp Collier, who was one of my heroes, one of the best shots I ever saw, he talked about, I asked him about how bad were things in the Depression, and he said, Billy, hell, folks was fighting over frogs. Henry Milner, I asked him about the Depression. He said, there’s a widow woman with a house full of children lived across the hollow from them that was so poor she didn’t have a match that if her fire went out, one of her kids would bring a metal bucket down there and then shovel some hot coals and put it in there. So, now how much money is out there to hunt and fish in those times? That’s why those guys made a lot of of what they used.

Ramsey Russell: Billy, when you started this museum, Mississippi Wildlife Heritage Museum, Leland, Mississippi, what was your initial ambition and your inspiration for collecting these stories?

Billy Johnson: I’d written 700 or 800 stories for the newspapers when my son Ben came up. I didn’t want the people that I admired from my father’s generation, I didn’t want them or their stories to be forgotten. And one thing I guess I was lucky, I had sense enough that whenever I went and interviewed somebody, I would copy every picture they had. So I ended up with what was supposed to be our master bedroom, just nothing but walls and tables and boxes, old hunting and fishing photos. And my wife came up with the thing, she said, I was on the way to Montana one day and fixing the lease, she said, I need you to do something. I said, well, you have to write it down, I do it when I get back, she said, no, you can do it while you’re gone. I fish a little bit, but I don’t hunt at all, but all these old pictures, these old black and white pictures you got, they’re so interesting you need to think of something to do with them. And it just so happened that I usually go across North Dakota, when I got ready to come home, the interstate was frozen, I dropped down to Rapid City, my dad was a pharmacist. And I called him and told him I was frozen in and he said, can you get to Wall, South Dakota? I said, yeah, it’s right here by Rapid City. He said, go to the Wall drugstore. And a guy had a drugstore there, right on the border of the Black Hills and the Badlands and he had 4 or 5 museums there. As soon as I walked in there and I saw what he did, I just had an apparition or whatever and I said, damn, this is what I ought to do with those pictures, it’s like an acorn hitting me on the tree. But I didn’t want these guys to be forgotten, their stories. I mean, you got people in this outdoor hall of fame, you take Billy Joe Cross.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Billy Johnson: They trapped turkeys on the river and released them all over Mississippi, where people have an opportunity to hunt turkeys now, where there was none. He is the one, he had like 15 or 20 different nationally televised cooking shows, probably 15 different cookbooks, he’s the one that got everybody to fillet and fish instead of scaling them and gutting them and cooking them whole. The guy that he fished with, Eddie Slater from Indianola, he handmade jigs out of squirrel hair and stuff. And the whole transition, instead of crappie fishing with minnows and using jigs. I mean, people like that are the reason we do things that we’re able to do things today and do them the way we do them. And I mean, it’s just god blessed Mississippi with vast natural resources, and it has created an outdoor loving culture of people, our society. Out of less than 3 million people, 760,000 or 770,000 people hunted, fished, or both last year. So all these rivers and streams and reservoirs that we have in Mississippi, I mean, I didn’t want these people’s stories to be forgotten.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Billy Johnson: And I remember one time they took Hamp Collier over here to Catfish Point and they had these great big houses built and they had heaters in the deer stands and all that. And I went to see him afterwards, I said, what did you think of that deer camp? He said, deer camp? He said, hell, they got hotels built in the woods, said they eating beefsteak every night and letting the deer go, said the only deer you can shoot is a great big old buck, he ain’t fitting to eat. So, I mean, it’s the stories of the people from Mississippi, even in my age, I mean, Toxie Hayes coming up with the different kind of camouflage, Will Primos coming up with all these different kind of game calls and you can go 2000 miles and walk in a hardware store and see a Primos poster on the wall or a banner or see Mossy Oak, that all came from Mississippi. I’m proud of the history of our outdoorsmen and our sportsmen. You take the Mississippi Delta, we’re known for the athletes and all the musicians and that have come from here. But I’ll put our outdoorsmen and our hunters and fishermen that have come from Mississippi and what they’ve achieved, what they’ve accomplished, what they’ve conceived of, what they’ve invented against any other state in the nation, and I’m proud of it and that’s what this museum is about. When a kid walks in here, I want them when they leave that if they can do that, I can do it.

Ramsey Russell: That’s grown man, for that matter. Every time I come in here, I see something that I treasure. You know it’s like, there’s a big cultural gap between the young and the old our predecessors. Like so many young people today, feel like they’ve got to have the latest, the greatest, the gizmos, the camos, the hip, the brand, but that’s not our origins. And even though I am far more warm and dry, wearing Sitka or using state of the art hearing protection, shooting a Benelli shotgun than maybe back in those old days at Mississippi River Goose Camp. Boy, I tell you what, it’s that Mississippi River Goose Camp that I came from, you know what I’m saying? I’m humbled, but I don’t feel up to snuff to be added to the Mississippi Outdoor Hall of Fame amongst some of the titans and legends that are listed here that you’ve got exhibits for. But at the same time, it all stems, I realized that it all stems back to Greenville, Mississippi, to the Mississippi River, Lake Ferguson, my grandfather and his experiences waterfowl hunting, but especially goose camp. That was my origins. And see, when I came along, that had been gone for decades. I was born in the 60s, he had started going to Cairo, Illinois, I mean, it was gone. And I feel like, I feel like a little of that wanderlust wanting to see other places beyond my backyard has been searching for that, if that makes sense. I’ve been hunting for that.

Billy Johnson: Well, you duck hunting all over the world and I want the world to come to Leland, Mississippi and see what the state of Mississippi has produced. The conservationists and the outdoorsmen that we produce. I’ve said this before, but I think it needs saying again, the greatest hunters, the best hunters in my daddy’s generation grew up hunting where it wasn’t any deer or turkey to hunt. They were small game hunters, they went out there with a single shot 22 with shorts and they’d shoot a mess of squirrels for supper, those hunters if you can slip up and if you can shoot a limit of squirrels with an open sight 22 rifle, you can succeed in any hunting scenario in the world. And a lot of the people, a lot of the best deer and turkey hunters from my dad’s generation never had the opportunity to do so until they were 35 or 40. But because of people like Billy Joe Cross and Wayne Strider and Pee Wee Horton sharing the turkeys and the deer to all these other places, the places where my daddy grew up or Elmo Cox grew up, and it wasn’t any deer or turkey, it’s deer turkey hunt there now. And it’s because of the people in this museum and that’s why it means so much to me that they had sense enough to know that turkey’s population never stays the same, it’s either going up or going down. And they get overpopulated and they get to the disease, before they got to that point, they were trapping them and carrying them, Fox Hayes had a lot to do with it up there, around their area. Just a lot of people were involved, and a lot of it was secret releases and Pee Wee Horton and Billy Joe Cross were taking turkeys, swapping them to Kentucky, where they had those strip mines, reclaimed strip mines, and they were bringing bighorn deer down here to Mississippi. So, a lot of people from these generation of goose hunters like we’re talking about, they gave back more than they took. And that’s the stories that I’m the proudest of that this museum tells.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, that’s a great note. They took because they were hunters, but they gave back. We are the benefactors of their giving back to future generations through conservation efforts.

Billy Johnson: They wanted to share what they had to areas of our state that didn’t have it.

Ramsey Russell: Last note I’m going to end on unless we hit somewhere else, last little topic. I read that grocery list, we’ve talked about the world’s greatest generation, some of the trials and tribulations of what it took to be a good goose hunter back in those days without the modern conveniences. And I read that long, I skimmed over that long grocery list, now, this is a group of men 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 men going to the river for 7 days to 2 weeks and what is conspicuously absent from that long grocery list is meat. I mean, wouldn’t you think they’re going to have 72lbs of ribeye steaks, hamburgers, no pork chop, no nothing. They brought the sides, they brought enough to make dessert and cornbread and to fry and to cook. They brought the beer, they brought the liquor, they brought some vinyl sausages and sardines and things for snacks, they didn’t bring the meal, the meal was up to them to kill. So they were eating those ducks and geese out there, whatever they could lay their hands on.

Billy Johnson: One guy from this area named Curry Holland, and he grew up in the south delta, and he explained to me one day about, it was never, they never killed enough deer to sustain the camp, that if it got warm, they’d be hunting frogs, they’d be hunting ducks, they’d be catching crappie. And a camp cook then had to know how to cook all that stuff. But he said they would that hunt a whole year, wouldn’t kill but 2 or 3 deer. We’ve come a long way.

Ramsey Russell: I think some of these men cook. I think some of them cooked. But I know because I’ve got a tiny picture. I know I sent you a picture of it. There was a local guy, a cook they had brought in, and it may also have been the local labor, but I know that there was at least one picture of them. But I can remember him telling the story about blackbird pie, that they would go out and shoot red wings when they were coming through, and one of the ladies would make the most amazing blackbird pie he had ever had. And I thought that was the grossest thing I’d ever heard when I was a little boy out here shooting these grackles with my pellet rifle. But you think about it, these blackbirds are completely carnivorous, they migrate. And do that many years later, I was a grown man, heck, I was in my 30s when I went and judged a wild game cook off in Utah, Alabama and I was in the bird competition part of it. And do you know what we gave the blue ribbon to? Somebody brought in a blackbird pie. And it was like she had made a chicken pot pie with mourning doves, but it was blackbirds, it was unbelievable. But that’s the one thing I’ve always thought about, they had a budget of $300, let’s say $40 a piece, they were going out with a military expedition, not only did they have all them groceries, they had had to have all the pots and pans and spatulas to cook it with, but they did not have the protein, the highlight of any day, it was what they could hunt, be it blackbirds, squirrels, geese, hopefully.

Billy Johnson: Billy Joe Cross told me a story one time. He had a guy named Herb Sandusky that was the outdoor writer for the Clan Ledger and Jackson, and he called Billy Joe and said, I need a story. So what we going to do? He said, we’re going to meet up there at Pee Wee Horton’s camp at Catfish Point and said, the best eating I know of is Mississippi River frogs. And they went out and I think he said that in 3 or 4 nights, they killed 200, they got 200 frogs. And they cooked them, they would sauté them in mushrooms and white wine, they’d eat them fried. And they ate frog 4, 5 nights in a row and it was all cooked a different way. So, these guys were innovative hunters, fishermen, sportsmen and cooks.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Billy, I appreciate you. Tell everybody where you located, how they can get in touch with you.

Billy Johnson: We’re at 302 North Broad Street, Leland, Mississippi. And you want to come see the museum, we’re open from 10AM to 5PM, Monday through Saturday. And if you need to have anything you might want to donate or pictures you want me to copy or whatever, my number is 662-347-4223. And I’d love to see what you all have and love you to come see what we’ve got.

Ramsey Russell: Do you have a webpage?

Billy Johnson: Yeah, it’s just mswildlifeheritagemuseum.com.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’ll put a link down below. The last question I got is, how hard is it for you, a guy like yourself to assemble? Because those past generations didn’t really value hanging on to some of this stuff. I mean, how hard is it to find some of the stuff you’ve got in the museum here? Some of these shotguns and coats you got, it’s impressive. I mean, old taxidermy I get because, maybe a grandchild or wife or somebody wants to get rid of it. But how hard is it? How do you even go about collecting to put together these treasures you’ve got here in this museum?

Billy Johnson: Well, like I said, I did it because I was writing stories, and I did that. But it’s people. People don’t want the heroes of their father’s generation to go away. We weren’t hunting at Montgomery island anymore when my son came along and I didn’t want the story or the men that told them and were part of them. Fox Hayes made a statement one time that if you love what you’re doing, you’ll never lose your passion for it.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Billy Johnson: And me and the group that has put this museum together, with us, of course, I collected stuff all my life, but you can collect stuff for any kind of museum for 5 years, 10 years. And once you open that next 6 months, you’re going to get way more, people will come and, hey, I got this, I got that. Hey, you all really did what you were doing. So, I mean, if you love it, it’s not hard.

Ramsey Russell: Some things are so sentimental, it’s hard to part with. It’s very hard to part with. But at the same time, as I was gathering some things to bring up here today, my wife says, what about that? And I go, well, why have it wrapped up in a sock drawer or on a shelf that I see that the world could see? Because I think that collectively, a lot of what you’re assembling here that listeners have tucked away, they might have a museum nearby or in Mississippi. I mean, it really is, it is something that we can share with the world of where we’ve been and where we are and where we’re going. And once I got my mind wrapped around that, I was able to bring a few things, fill up a few boxes.

Billy Johnson: Well, it brings back a lot of memories. And, I mean, one thing about our state, we had all the different Indian tribes that lived on the different rivers and creeks and streams and stuff, and all of them had their hunting and fishing legends, and I just wish we had more of that history, more of that history was still, I mean, we got a lot of it, but I mean, they were the people. Being able to take a sawbrier leaf and call a turkey with it or take a wing bone out of a turkey and make a call. The Indians making their own bows and arrows and all that, that’s where we came from. And I mean, I just hope that, the younger generations will come to this museum and take something back with them, an idea or wanting to do this or wanting to do this. I mean, Mississippi is a wonderful place. I mean, it’s a golden time right now, except for quail hunt, more trophy deer, more deer opportunities, turkey opportunities, long seasons, more women and daughters getting in to hunt now. I mean, it’s a golden opportunity to live in Mississippi and enjoy the outdoor opportunities that we have. And you can come to this museum and learn about a lot of it.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. And I’m end on this note. Thank you very much, Billy. I’ve enjoyed it. It’s always good to see. I love hearing your stories. I know I’ll have you on in the future. And folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where I’m reminded every time I come here and we get on these subjects, an old writer named William Faulkner said the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past. It’s because we are our past. Especially us hunters and fishermen. Tell me one other recreation that all the accoutrements, the guns and the firearms and the decoys and the duck calls and the photographs mean as much and are as treasured as they are right here among us duck hunters. See you next time.

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