The Duck War of Horicon Marsh

The Marsh the Rich Guys Tried to Own

Before it was a national wildlife refuge with a visitor center and a gift shop, Horicon Marsh was 32,000 acres of the best duck hunting in the Midwest — and for about forty years, a handful of very rich men did everything short of putting up a castle wall to keep it to themselves.

Horicon wasn’t unusual in this. By 1892, Wisconsin counted something like thirty-five hunting clubs across the state, evidence of a swing already underway — from the free-for-all commercial market hunting of the mid-1800s toward organized clubs that looked, at least on paper, more like conservation than the wholesale slaughter that had come before. Horicon just did it on a bigger, richer scale than most.

It started innocently enough. In 1883, a local sportsmen’s club tallied the marsh’s output — something like 500,000 ducks a year, plus 30,000 muskrat and mink pelts — and word got out the way it always does. By the turn of the century, five hunting clubs had planted flags on the place: the Kaw Kaw Club, the Fond du Lac Shooting Club, the Horicon Shooting Club (aka Strook’s Club), the Greenhead Hunting Club, and — the main character of this story — the Diana Shooting Club.

Above, the Horicon Hunting Club, aka, The Strooks Club, so nicknamed because it was on Ferdinand Strook’s Farm and he, and his wife and family helped guide, feed cook, and clean.

The oldest and most storied of the five was the Kaw-Kaw Shooting Club — sometimes spelled Caw-Caw — founded all the way back in 1866 on a small island in the marsh’s northwest corner, near what’s now Misling Island Road. Ten Milwaukee men bought the island, evicted (shot and killed) the black-crowned night herons nesting in its trees (their harsh “qua-qua” call gave the island, and the club, its name), cleared the brush, and put up a clubhouse — guided to the spot, club lore has it, by Harry Clark, son of the marsh’s first settler Satterlee Clark, and by a map a friend had “sketched on a blank leaf resting on a bale of buffalo robes.” Their first season on the marsh they shot something like 3,000 ducks and geese, plus sandhill cranes, snipe, golden plover, quail, and ruffed grouse — a haul that says everything about how thick with game Horicon still was. The club’s run at Horicon didn’t last, though: when the Horicon dam came out in 1868, water levels dropped too low for easy travel to the clubhouse, and members were losing their taste for puddle ducks in favor of diving ducks anyway. Sometime between 1869 and 1872 they pulled up stakes for the deeper water of Lake Puckaway in Marquette County, where the club kept hunting for nearly seventy more years, until 1940.

Not all five clubs held the marsh the same way. From 1883 to 1920, two of them — Diana and the Horicon Shooting Club — held actual leases on Horicon Marsh itself, carved out of land owned by the Mechanics Union Manufacturing Company. Diana leased 4,000 acres on the marsh’s south end; the Horicon Shooting Club took 9,000 acres on the north end, its roster drawn mostly from hunters around eastern Wisconsin. Both clubs signed on in 1883 at the going rate of $100 a year, locked in for 25 years, and both used the leases to shut everyone else out — no hunting on the leased water, no setting foot in the clubhouses, no exceptions, without a member’s permission. The rest of the marsh stayed open to the market hunters who’d been working it for decades. Locals who’d hunted Horicon freely for generations were, understandably, furious about the part that wasn’t.

Diana was not messing around. Founded in 1883 on the Miescke farm on the marsh’s west side, it drew its membership from the moneyed set of Milwaukee, Chicago, and Madison — including Willard Van Brunt, of the farm-equipment fortune that later became part of John Deere. The club leased several thousand acres, put private wardens out on patrol, and arranged for its own railroad stop at Swan Road, so members could roll in by private train and step directly from the parlor car into a duck blind. It was, by any measure, hunting as a lifestyle brand.

Down the shore and considerably less fancy sat the Greenhead Hunting Club, founded in 1902, then incorporated on July 29, 1903, by locals who paddled downstream from the Rock River to hunt the marsh, and who — radically, for the era — assumed the water belonged to everybody. This clubhouse sat on land originally owned by Albert and Blonda Nietschke, who then sold it to Louis Ziegler for $100. Then later transferred to the club. (Note: Greenhead Club has grown; in 2023 the Club acquired another 100 acres in the town of Clyman off of WI 60 near the 26 bypass, from Junction Road Farms LLC. )

That assumption got tested in the fall of 1913, when Greenhead officer and attorney Paul Husting paddled his canoe straight into water Diana considered private. Diana’s wardens arrested him for trespassing, which turned out to be a mistake, because Husting was exactly the wrong guy to try that on. He took it to court, and the case — Diana Shooting Club v. Husting — climbed all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In 1915, the justices ruled against Diana in resounding terms: Wisconsin’s navigable waters were public, full stop, “free to all for commerce, for travel, for recreation, and also for hunting, and fishing.” It remains a foundational public-trust water rights case in the state today.

The ruling gutted the whole premise of an exclusive marsh, and the Diana Shooting Club closed up shop that same year. Husting rode the win into the U.S. Senate in 1914, the first Wisconsinite ever elected to the seat by popular vote, and kept fighting for public access to the state’s waters from Washington.

Then, two years after securing the public’s right to hunt those waters, the sport turned on him. On Sunday, October 21, 1917, Paul and his brother Gustav were duck hunting on Rush Lake in western Fond du Lac County. Around 4:30 in the afternoon, a flock of eight mallards dropped into their decoys. Paul stood to take his shot; Gustav swung his gun at the same instant and hit his brother by accident. Paul was carried to the nearest house on the lake, the Blackburns’, where he was tended until doctors could reach him. Family rushed to his side — brothers Gustav, Berthold, and Bonduel among them, though his sister Bella and brothers Otto, Max, and Leo couldn’t get there in time. At 10:45 that night, Paul Husting died of his wounds. His last words were, “Tell them I did the best I knew.”

Three thousand people came to his funeral in Mayville. President Woodrow Wilson wrote to the family: “Your son’s death has come to me as a great personal grief. He was one of the most conscientious public servants I have ever known… I grieve with you with all my heart.” The man who’d just spent the courts’ patience proving that a duck marsh belonged to everyone was killed doing the very thing he’d fought for the right to do — undone by one shot, on a lake very much like the one he’d made public.

It didn’t much matter to the marsh’s fate anyway — decades of unregulated market hunting had already crashed the duck population, and a failed 1910–14 scheme to drain the marsh for farmland left the land looking, to most eyes, worthless. A 1933 wildfire piled on more damage before conservationists finally turned things around: the Wisconsin Legislature passed the Horicon Marsh Wildlife Refuge Bill in 1927, and by the 1940s the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was buying up the northern marsh outright. Today it’s split between the 21,400-acre Horicon National Wildlife Refuge and a state wildlife area run by the Wisconsin DNR — public land, exactly as the courts and Husting said it should be.

And the old clubs? Gone, all but one. The Greenhead Hunting Club — the scrappy, public-minded outfit that started this whole legal mess — outlasted the drainage attempts, the Depression, drought, and Prohibition, and is still hunting the marsh today. Sometimes the little guy actually wins.

Addendum