Sportsman’s paradise remembered
Recalling the days of hunting guiding in southwestern N.S.
With deer hunting season underway, the woods are thick with hunters in southwest Nova Scotia, where for a time in the latter part of the 1800s and the first half of the 20th century, the area was well known along the eastern seaboard as being unsurpassed for big game country.
Parties of American sportsmen would travel to the area by train and ferry, where they would be picked up by local guides and transported into hunting lodges and camps by ox teams and wagon for a wilderness adventure with hunting and fishing at its finest.
“When they first came it was a moose hunting camp,” recalls Stanley Scott, who guided hunting and fishing parties from the late 1940s through to the 1960s to the family’s camp on the Barrington River at a place called Musquash.
He was following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Tom, grandfather Uriah and father Tom Scott. “They were all were guides,” he says.
“Going with the ox team was the thing,” says Scott. “People loved it, going with the oxen. They liked to have them around the camp.
“Some liked to take them down to the river for water or if they got a deer they’d take the ox team to get it,” he explains. “The ox team made the party. It wasn’t the same after we went to machinery, we went to tractors first, but it wasn’t the same.”
There was one hunting party in particular from the Boston area that is fondly remembered by Scott. Rene Pfister, Phil Howell, Travis Whiting and Fred Whiting “came for a lot of years,” says Scott. “They came every year even in war time they came. They never missed.”
While the Scotts had a hunting cabin, the Americans wanted a log camp, says Scott, “So they put the money up and my father and grandfather built it, but it was our camp.”
That was about 85 years ago. The camp is still used by the family today.
Scott says there were three hunting parties that came from the U.S. on a regular basis as well as some local parties.
“The camp was busy for trout fishing too and salmon,” he says.
“There was a lot of salmon in the Barrington River in my younger days. You could paddle up the river and sometimes in shallow gravel beds you could see the salmon laying and spawning there. A lot of big salmon went up the river. No one goes up here no more. The trout is pretty border line too,” he says, noting when the Cape Sable Island causeway was built, it closed off the salmon’s migratory route to the Barrington River.
“The salmon just went on by,” he says.
Scott recalled when he started guiding. Moose hunting season had come to an end in western Nova Scotia (the last season was 1936).
By the late 1960s he gave up guiding.
“The deer got scarcer. These fellas got older. I lost interest and there wasn’t no money in it, so I gave it up,” he says.
The Barrington River wasn’t the only place where guided hunting and fishing took place in the early days of southwestern Nova Scotia.
The Milford House in Annapolis County, still in operation, and billed as ‘Nova Scotia’s Longest Running Family Oriented Wilderness Resort,’ was started in the late 1800s – not long after Kedge Makooge Lodge, now Kejimkujik National Park.
Guiding is also a skill still called for. Last year 467 non-resident deer hunting licenses were issued by the province, each requiring a licenced guide.