Blood Money and Texas Feathers

Excesses of the market hunter, with his prodigious harvest of migratory birds destined for local markets and game dealers, are well documented. Less well-known are accounts of feather hunters, whose guns furnished American and European cities with the latest conceits in ladies’ hats. Compared to the market hunter, the feather hunter’s tally was larger, his profits greater, his territory wider, and after laws were passed to curtail his livelihood, he resorted to more violence.

Before feathers were fashion, they were a staple in homesteads to fill mattresses, pillows, and bolsters. Texas wildfowl feathers in the 1840s sold for 50 cents a pound, a price not all settlers could afford. Instead, they shot their own birds or bartered for them – local lore in one coastal community was that a pound of duck feathers could be traded for a 16-year-old bride. Demand for feathers in growing towns in the late 1850s was met by wholesale merchants who purchased feathers in half-ton bales. Shipped to stores, prices dropped to about 25 to 35 cents a pound.

There were also thriving markets in wing feathers from pelicans, geese, and swans used to manufacture quill pens. Bird skins were popular with collectors and museum curators, as were wild bird eggs. Nest robbing, known as “egging,” was practiced in every Texas port town, with boats scouring the coast during spring and summer in search of nesting sites. But the flame that ignited the feather market was fashion, notably plume-bearing and ornately feathered wading and shorebirds used to decorate ladies’ hats.

Doing the damage

Feather hunters aimed their guns at plumage and shorebird spring nesting sites, or rookeries, and dozens of these avian oases dotted Texas bays. At first, the hunters were mostly local, but after Atlantic Coast plumage birds were largely eradicated by the 1880s, commercial hunters and commission merchants discovered Texas. Their methods were so efficient that, by 1905, snowy egrets and a host of other plumage birds were considered “very rare on the Gulf Coast.” As a result, feather hunters mostly left the Lone Star State to ply their trade in what became a global enterprise that reached Central and South America, the Pacific Islands, Asia, Africa, and Europe.

The list of Texas birds targeted for the feather market was long, made up of several of the egret and heron species, roseate spoonbills, whooping and sandhill cranes, terns, ibis, pelicans, gulls, grebes, avocets, skimmers, and a host of smaller shore and wading birds. In order not to offend delicate feminine fashion senses, the business of bird killing, plucking, and skinning was cloaked in euphemisms. Feather hunters went by the stylish French name of “plumassiers,” and procurers of skins and those who thieved eggs from springtime nests amongst screaming and squawking hen birds were merely “collectors.”

Feathered hats were popular in U.S. fashion as early as the 1840s, but demand was low. Even as late as the 1870s the “artistic milliner was something of a rare bird.” With the late 1800s came a frenzy in European and American taste for feathers, the millinery industry growing from a half million dollar industry to five million dollars a year. New York was the center of America’s fashionable millinery, and at its peak, 10,000 women and children labored in the city’s hat factories.

In the rigorous culture of style that defined the late 1800s, women did not leave home without top wear, their choice of style and accessories a reflection of their social standing. Milliners and fashion houses designed a dizzying array of hat styles, their adornments including short feathers that circled hat crowns accented with longer nuptial plume feathers, or “aigrettes,” with bird wings, stuffed bird heads, or whole birds peering out from the mélange of feathers and trimmings. Hat fads included dyed bird feathers formed into the shape of butterflies that, suspended on wires, flitted in the air.

Societal demand

Bird parts migrated from hats to entire wardrobes, and American and European society pages followed the most spectacular of the feathered fashions. One popular style was grebe breast feathers that were all the rage for trimming “muffs, collarettes, and capes.” Trendy, too, was the gown of a London woman adorned with 600 Brazilian hummingbirds, and the evening dress of another trimmed with 50 canaries. All eyes were cast on a New York girl bearing a parrot on her hat with a matching one on the handle of her parasol. After the turn of the century, nuptial feathers and whole bird mounts from New Guinea’s bird-of-paradise were in vogue.

Dozens of Texas milliners carried the latest in feathered hats and accessories. Moke’s Millinery Parlor in San Antonio advertised a stock of 6,000 “fancy birds” for its line of hats in 1890. Levy Brothers in Houston sold a creation of ribbon and lace with aigrettes topped with “a small white bird” for the lofty price of $16, or about $575 in today’s currency. At the 1894 grand opening of Miss J.M. Reagan’s “French Pattern Hats, Bonnets, and Millinery Novelties” in Houston, ladies could choose from hats replete with birds “large, plain, and frosted,” swallows, pigeons, white birds, and doves in “natural colors.”
 
The source for bird plumes—rookeries—was a vastly different environment from the refinement of the milliner’s parlor. To penetrate a Texas rookery was to enter an alien world. Its flora varied with geography, the thicker the better of wolfberry, wax myrtles, black mangroves, black willow, and live oaks. Careless nests, mostly a tangle of mud, grass, and sticks, crowded a canopy alive with a moving mass of white, blue, and pink from egrets, herons, and roseate spoonbills that collected to feed their young. Most everything in a roost stung, bit, or poked, like the thorns of the retama, mesquite, and prickly pear cactus, spiders in webs that threaded through densely packed branches, and writhing rattlesnakes and cottonmouths.

Rookeries were eerie during darkness, as skunks, opossums, racoons, and red wolves prowled its depths, the wolves yielding to the big cats farther south. Even without guns, it was a place as much about death as life. Owls and hawks preyed on birds and fledglings in nests, littering the ground with eggs and birds that provided a feast for, as one hunter described the scene, “wild beasts of prey” that made a “hideous uproar” as they fought to devour the spoils of the dead, dying, and mangled.

The smells were as foreign as the sights and just as seared into the memory of those who endured them. There was the reek of saltwater, gumbo mud, decaying carcasses, and the rancid, sulfur odor of thick guano and rotting eggs that burned the nostrils. The cumulative clamor of amassed birds was loud but, as one Galveston Bay gunner recalled, not as deafening as the moment of the discharge from a “heavy-loaded gun” into their midst. “Thousands of birds instantly flew up,” he wrote, “with such a fluttering, and screaming, and yelling, that no scene of noise I ever witnessed could be at all compared with it.”

A few of the names of the Texas feather hunters remain for posterity. One was Forest McNeir, a market hunter who lived and hunted on the edge of Galveston Bay during the late 1890s. Billy Griggs, who was called the “King of the Market Hunters,” shot plume birds for the millinery trade from Florida to Texas each spring. His Texas haunts, like Forest McNeir’s, were rookeries along Galveston Bay. Griggs, who always carried a thick roll of cash in his pocket, said his average profit each season was about $1,000 ($37,000 in today’s dollars)—a number he likely deliberately understated.

Corpus Christi’s Henry Palmer and Captain William Anderson, who supplied bird skins destined for milliners, museums, and collectors, shipped 2,000 skins from North Padre Island to New York in 11 months during the 1870s. Frank B. Armstrong, in Brownsville, established a national following as a dealer in “Mexican and Southern birds, Mammal Skin, Bird eggs, and Specimens of Natural History.” Armstrong’s catalog listed 400 species from the Rio Grande Valley, his inventory including whooping crane skins priced at $18 ($667 in today’s currency) each. In Laredo, F. Lozano advertised specialized bird mounts and wings, assuring customers that both “English and Spanish [are] spoken.”

Brownsville hunters in the 1890s cornered the market in grackles, locally called jackdaws, killing thousands that fetched 6 to 10 cents a bird. Skins were treated with plaster of Paris and arsenic, then stuffed with cotton in a paper cone before shipment to Northern milliners from Rockport. The venture was so lucrative that many gave up market hunting, concentrating their powder and lead on the grackle instead. A writer who covered their occupation dryly remarked that the Brownsville hunters also killed “white egrets, sea pigeons (gulls), blue cranes (great blue herons), and other varieties,” although these were “supposedly protected” by an 1891 Texas game law.

Ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey wrote of Corpus Christi feather hunters in 1900 who killed an average of about 1,000 birds a week, mainly terns, yellowlegs, avocets, skimmers, gulls, herons, curlews, and willets. By the time of her visit, they had already taken so many pelican skins, feathers, and eggs that the bird was nearly “driven from the neighborhood.” Bailey was sympathetic to the Texas gunners who, she said, were “mainly poor settlers in a country where it is hard to make a living, and they shoot the birds merely to add a little to the meager support they can give their families.”

It was blood money, but it was big money. Most profitable were the long, delicate plumes of the snowy egret. These were the jewels in the feathered crowns, in such demand that the bird was dubbed the “bonnet martyr.” Snowy egret plumes cost the most, and numbered the fewest, with only about a dozen from each bird. Although prices varied by geography, supply, and the year, it was a sum that motivated men to travel long distances, endure great hardships, and later to defy the law.

Galveston Bay hunter Forest McNeir was paid $3 ($111 in today’s dollars) a plume—and that single feather was worth far more than what he received for a pair of canvasbacks. Billy Griggs was paid prices for plumes that ranged from a low of $140 ($5,180) to, as the noose tightened on the feather industry in the early 1900s, as high as $640 ($23,700) per pound.Their buyers were New York merchants, like the one in the 1880s who contracted with Texas hunters for the remarkable volume of 10,000 egret plumes several times each spring. It only grew from there.

As they steadily disappeared along America’s shores, wading and shorebirds became one of the symbols of the things gone wrong in man’s relationship with nature. They helped, in part, to create the first rumblings of what would become the storm of public opinion to protect migratory birds in Texas, a battle that would pit powerful shooting, shipping, and millinery interests against sportsmen, naturalists, and conservationists. Theirs would be a contest waged in the media and the legislative halls of state and later national politics.

Combatting the problem

Texas’ first successful effort to protect plumage birds came with the 1891 Game Law. There was little notice of the statute. One Texas paper opined that “a man is laughed at who would urge its enforcement,” and another observed that, 12 years after it was passed, “not a single prosecution [had] been made.” Sixteen years later, in 1907, the legislature passed a Permanent Game Law and hired its first game wardens.

The federal government’s first foray into the choppy waters of bird laws was with the Lacey Act in 1900, followed by theWeeks-McLean Law in 1913. Most relevant to the protection of plumage birds, however, was the 1913 Revenue Act that carried an amendment prohibiting the importation of bird feathers for commercial use. The 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) strengthened federal jurisdiction over birds and provided for federal enforcement. By then it almost didn’t matter. Plumage birds had been largely exterminated in much of the United States.

State and federal laws passed between the late 1800s and 1918 looked good on paper, but didn’t curtail the importation of feathers from overseas. Instead, the restrictions mainly mostly served to enrich smugglers who successfully outmaneuvered the legal gauntlet. The only way to prevail would be to defeat the milliner, but it wasn’t going to happen until women stopped paying exorbitant prices for forbidden feathers. It was women, most often organized through Audubon societies, who eventually led the offensive.

Trying to end the transport of plumes

The earliest, if not the most persuasive champions, were Boston cousins Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall, who organized bird protection awareness among New England society women in the 1890s. In Texas, the mantle was carried by Elizabeth Gilmer, who penned columns such as the “Woman’s Century” for the Dallas News. In 1899, Gilmer said that a woman’s role in the bird crusade would be best served by organized women’s clubs, the bastions of what she called the “thinking woman.” She instructed women to ask questions of their milliners and boycott any hat embodying a “bird graveyard.”

Advocates were often graphic in their depictions of the feather hunter and his trade. In 1910, prominent West Coast activist La Reine Helen Baker garnered national attention with her editorial “A Plea Against Murderous Millinery,” in which she shocked readers with her unflinching rhetoric describing abandoned, starving fledglings orphaned by the slaughter of defenseless parents who refused to desert their brood. She poetically, but darkly, described a rookery as a “woodland dripping with blood” in the name of adornment.

Baker was not alone. Across the nation, women sent editorials of support to city papers, like a 1913 letter from a New York woman published in the Houston Chronicle. Women wore aigrettes as fashion, she opined, only because they “are ignorant of the unspeakable horrors that attend their procurement.” She sought to enlighten them, writing that “bird skinners tear the head off a living bird and throw its quivering body upon the heap” before “the skin bearing the plumes [are] stripped from their backs.” She added how they also “pull the plumes from wounded birds, leaving the crippled birds to die of starvation, unable to respond to the cries of their young in the nests above, which were calling for food.” It was heavy stuff.

Not everyone sided with the birds. Supporters faced opposition from milliners, feather hunters, game merchants, and a host of women who valued style over wildlife. One was a New York socialite and fashion columnist who used the pseudonym “Mrs. Cholly Knickerbocker.” In a 1908 column, she advised that the fashion scene was a feather frenzy that year “in spite of world-wide protest.” No sentimentalist, she discounted the need for bird preservation. “Naughty women,” she wrote, favor “a bird on a hat [more] than in the bush in faraway New Guinea,” adding of their potential extermination that no one “shall be disappointed if we go to New Guinea” and find no more birds-of-paradise “hopping from bush to tree.”

In 1906, the New York Feather Importers’ Association, representing 50 millinery firms with millions of dollars at stake, planned a strategy of “vigorous resistance” to the litany of pending state and federal legislation “prejudicial to the interests of local feather importers.” One of those statutes was New York’s Audubon Plumage Bill prohibiting the sale of native birds. In response, hundreds of delegates from across the United States converged on Milwaukee in 1911 to attend the National Milliner’s Jobbers Association Convention, where they organized action against what they denounced as a “cruelly unjust” edict.

Perhaps the fiercest opposition was faced by Florida game wardens. Recognized as the last frontier for many of America’s vanishing species, Florida passed a 1901 state law prohibiting the killing of non-game birds for their feathers. During his terms in office, President Teddy Roosevelt established Pelican Island bird reservation in 1903 and later added several other bird nesting refuges. Florida’s refuges were under the auspices of game wardens, hired not by state or federal entities but by the National Audubon Society and the American Ornithologists Union. Two of their wardens, Guy Bradley and Columbus McLeod, were killed by plumage hunters between 1905 and 1908.

By 1913, most wild plumage birds sold in America were smuggled from overseas. But the end was in sight. In an arrest carried in newspapers across the country, prominent New York feather merchant and milliner Alexander Luban and his agent, Abraham Kallman, were charged as part of an elaborate smuggling ring that read like fiction, complete with German agents operating in Europe who coordinated with Mexican shipping agents along the Rio Grande. Luban traveled to India in 1915 to purchase over 500 bird-of-paradise skins—worth $370,000 in today’s dollars—that he shipped through England and Mexico. Kallman was arrested by customs officials as he loaded the feathered contraband on a Laredo railcar. Fined $2,000, he spent six months in jail. The scandal ruined Luban, who declared bankruptcy.

It was a quiet day in the Jefferson County marshes in Southeast Texas. Against a dark purple sky, the caretaker of a private hunting club saw a pink bird and shot it. The year was 1913, and it was the first roseate spoonbill—once one of the most prized of the milliner’s targets—that had been seen in the area for a long time. By then it was so uncommon he donated it to an area museum. A century later, many of the once depleted rookeries are back. It was a mighty hard fight.
 
Much of the material for this column was sourced from Texas Market Hunting (2013), available at www.robertksawyer.com. The story of America’s—and the world’s—feather trade has finally been told in The Feather Wars—And the Great Crusade to America’s Birds, authored by James H. McCommons, and will be available in spring, 2026 at www.jamesmccommons.com.

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