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"How true it is that " half the world does not know how the other half lives. Sixty miles from New York exists a different race of people, who never see a city paper, and only know of what is going on in this great Babel from those who visit them or those who take their game to market.

There is a large population living on and about the barren Fire Islands whose whole means of livelihood is the game they kill. These men do not hunt for sport, but as a business; and the amount of wild fowl annually slaughtered on the southern shore of Long Island, for the New York market, is enormous. A descendant of an old family here, which has owned a large terri- tory on the south shore ever since New York was a colony of England, told me that two families, genera- tion after generation, have had the lease of two islands of barren rocks, for the sole purpose of killing the wild fowl that frequent them. They allow no others to hunt about them. These hunters pay no attention to the railroad, and make no use of it for the trans- portation of their game to market. They keep a wagon going constantly to and from New York, as they did years ago. When winter sets in, and game becomes scarce, many of them go south, in a sloop of their own, or hire a passage in some vessel, and shoot on the Chesapeake Bay, about Charleston and Mobile, supplying the southern market with game."

---- Excerpted from: Headley, Letters from the Backwods and the Adirondac, 1850, Full Text of book: is at http://www.archive.org/stream/lettersfromback00headgoog/lettersfromback00headgoog_djvu.txt