Hunting at the Albrecht Ranch near Long Lake, South Dakota By John E. Miller The ranch of Milbert and LaVerne Albrecht is located south east of Long Lake, South Dakota. The ranch and an additional 80-acre piece were sold to Ducks Unlimited in December 2001. The 80-acre piece belonged to me, John Miller and I had hunted on the property since the early 50’s. The following is my recollection of the hunting on the ranch. The ranch had, at times, plenty of water, (but not flooding) and several sloughs. The largest of sloughs is about a 3/4 mile long and perhaps 1/3 mile wide. The lake was once called “Bogart Lake” and there are the remnants of a foundation of a much earlier settlement on the southwest corner of the lake. On the east end of the lake is a hill that rises about 40 feet or so. Further to the east, on the other side of the hill, is a large round lake with vegetation on the North West corner. If one were to stand on the hill, you could see both the entire round lake and the Bogart Lake. Both of these lakes were inland to the road system. Thus driving along the road network surrounding the lake and farms one would not detect the presence of either slough. In addition to these two sloughs there is a smaller slough south and west of Bogart Lake. This is shallow most of the time. It has rushes surrounding the slough and the puddle ducks loved it. We often shot this slough by getting a couple people on the northeast side where there is a draw. Then a person goes to the opposite side and raises the birds. At times they came off in clouds and shooting was fast and furious, but brief. I tried hunting this in the boat, but it was very difficult. The bottom is very soft and muddy. Getting the boat through the rushes was tough. Then because the lake was so shallow, you could not use the motor. Picking up the ducks was also difficult. A bird dropped in the rushes was impossible to find. In the 1930’s two inveterate Aberdeen duck hunters, Adolph Olander (Ole) and Max Stokes discovered the lake. In the late 30’s and during World War II water became plentiful and the lake returned to good levels from the drought of the early 1930’s with a large covering of rushes and cattails surrounding the entire Bogart Lake. There was a long island in the center, which was also covered with a growth of rushes. The lake was not very deep and supported the ideal food for canvasback and redhead ducks. The shores 1

would be banked with wild celery that had been torn up and washed along the shore. The rushes proved ideal water for puddle ducks. Olander and Stokes made arrangements with Milbert Albrecht’s father to have the hunting rights to the entire ranch. Olander had a small cabin that had been built in about 1910 at Tacoma Park, which is on the James River east of Aberdeen. This two room building (about 10 feet by 20 feet) along with a boat house and outhouse was moved to the south side of the lake and nestled between a couple of large cotton wood trees. On the hill at the east end of the lake four one man pits were dug and lined with wood. The pits were fairly shallow such that when you stood up one could see both lakes, but if you sat down only the top of your head was visible. Ducks would fly from one lake to the other and as they came to the hill they would rise to clear it and dive over the other side. Shooting was great but hitting was often sparse. By the time I started hunting the Bogart Lake in 1954 the water level had dropped somewhat and the boathouse had started to fall apart. The cabin had two rooms, a sleeping room with two double decker bunk beds and a kitchen room with an ancient large cast iron range. Lights were gas lamps and you had to bring in all your water. There was an outhouse, which on cold mornings, was a trying experience. It was not fancy, but very doable for a hunting camp. Olander told me that one time with three hunters staying over night at the camp, they banked the stove high and went to bed. In the night the person on the top bunk was very warm so he got up and opened the camp door. Soon it got pretty chilly and the person on the bottom bunk got up to close the door only to discover a skunk had wandered into the warm house. Being a seasoned outdoorsman, he casually used a flashlight to guide the animal back out the door and closed it. If that skunk had let loose, the house would have been unusable. Olander and Stokes would hunt it on Saturday and Sunday, and then rest the lake and go back perhaps one day during the week. They kept a record of the kill at the camp (which I still have) including the species of duck killed along with the hunter’s name. Through the study of these records they learned that around the 12th of October was the peak of the canvas back migration on the lake. They also learned that by about the 25th of October the ‘cans’ and ‘reds’ had moved south and the lake was frozen. In subsequent years the lake has stayed open much longer but the ‘cans’ have kept to the same

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schedule... Once Olander came up late in the season just before freeze-up and discovered the lake white with full plumage ‘Cans’. The next day was a boomer shoot as he alone was on the lake. He stayed over night only to discover the next day not a duck remained and the water had almost completely frozen. Table 1 Record of Ducks Killed at Bogart Lake Year

Total Ducks

Canvasbacks

Redheads

Mallards

Killed 1945

556

185

83

95

1946

473

187

79

79

1947

207

44

4

48

1948

211

37

65

38

1949

69

27

9

10

1950

223

62

81

23

1951

213

127

44

16

1952

282

199

14

50

1953

185

53

74

21

1954

121

41

33

20

1955*

150

49

65

22

1956*

192

34

54

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* Years that John Miller hunted at Bogart Lake Opening day was always a spectacle with lots of hunters in the surrounding area. This kept the ducks on the move. Olander would invite guests to come out and they would go to the pits for the shooting. Those diving ducks flew very fast, especially as they dove over the hill. It was great sport and often I would ask the guests how they did. Several times I got the response “We shot two or more boxes of shells and got two ducks.” They were just not used to that kind of pass shooting. Opening days when there were numerous hunters in the vicinity, the birds would be driven from slough to slough so shooting was pretty constant. Especially thrilling were those flights of redheads that would come across the hill and pits making a loud flight noise. Often you heard the birds and before you could find them, they were out of range. Those flocks exceeded 100 3

ducks many times. The Fisher slough, which is north and west of Long Lake, held lots of diving ducks. When Fisher’s was being hunted shooting was very good. By the 1960’s Max Stokes had stopped hunting and Olander has contracted pernicious anemia in his feet and legs. He could not get around easily. I was continuing to come out to shoot often alone. I would take the boat to a point in the rushes north of the cabin. Years of hunting showed this was the best place to be for the ‘cans’. There I would set up the ‘can’ decoys. Most of the time I had great shooting. I quickly learned that if the canvasback you shot did not have its feet up you better shoot it again quick or you would never find that duck. They are excellent divers and swimmers. I had two classmates from high school, the Conley brothers, Chuck and Dick. Both were inveterate hunters and expert shots, missing only rarely. Together we would pick up Olander and take him with us to the lake, leaving the morning of the shoot. The Conley’s never spent a night in the camp. We would get Olander in the boat with a set of canvasback decoys and the 1-½ horsepower Evinrude motor (probably built in the early 30’s and I still have the motor), and shove him off. He would motor over to the rushes on the north side, set out the decoys and have a great shoot. In the meantime, the Conley’s and I would go to the pits on the east end for shooting. If it got a little slow, Dick Conley would get bored and start off on a walk to go from slough to slough, traveling for miles, raising ducks that would come over the pits for us and down to the decoys for Olander. In the 1970’s Olander could no longer come to the camp to shoot. The Conley’s and I continued to hunt. I was now a non-resident as I had left the military service in 1958 and lost my South Dakota residency. I tried to come each year during the peak of the can flight. Near the end of the 70’s Olander gave me the duck camp. By this time, I had purchased an 80-acre piece of land on Bogart Lake that was mostly under water, from Leonard Albrecht, Milbert’s brother. The Conley’s had quit shooting as Chuck could not get around easily anymore. The old Evinrude motor was used as recently as 2001 and it still runs beautifully. The many brass and bronze parts is a reminder of the first days of outboard motor construction. I started hunting with a Massachusetts friend, Dr. James Wallace. We would come out for the opening, stay at the camp and enjoy the shooting, mostly from the pits on the hill at the east end of the slough. We did enjoy numerable hunts from the water on

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the point of rushes north of the camp. Each year I would do some improvement on the camp to make it more livable and keep it up. We only shot in the morning as we rested the lake in the afternoon and evening. The late afternoons were a glorious experience. You could hear the birds quacking, especially the mallards. You could stand on the dock and see flights come in, circle the lake and light. Soon there would be a large collection of birds both in the rushes and open water. The ‘cans’ and ‘reds’ liked the open water. With the binoculars you could watch them diving and feeding. It really gave you a warm feeling and anticipation for the coming morning. Several times the lake was a stopping place for the tundra swans on migration. One year we both had swan permits and killed our birds from the pits. In the late 1990’s with the vast amounts of water in North Dakota we ran into real trouble. The water flowed south and filled the lake to over flowing. The rushes were covered up and the camp got water first up to the doorstep, then onto the floor. As more water came over the first and subsequent years it rose into the camp up to the windowsills. As there were no rushes anymore, the north wind brought huge waves to buffet the camp until it finally collapsed. We ceased hunting on the lake as the great open water no longer attracted puddle ducks and the canvasback food was now pretty deep. It was also very difficult to drive to the lake. Milbert had put the ranch in water bank along with my property. While before the cattle had grazed the grass to low levels, it now became a high grass prairie country. If it snowed the high grass filled with snow and drifted over the trails. It took a four-wheel drive to venture out to the lake. One word about the decoys. Most of them were quite ordinary although there were some very old solid wooden blocks. There was one set of two dozen can decoys that were exceptional. They were over sized, about twice the size of a real ‘can’. The cork bodies were on a Michigan light pine base, called sugar pine, removed from old logging camp siding. The heads were solid wood and connected to the base so the head could be a solid handle. The decoys were made probably in the 1930’s. Those were rescued from the drowning of the camp. These big decoys would bring in the ‘cans’. When I used them I regularly counted the decoys and several times I had more than I should. So I would proceed to see if I could find the live bird in the decoys.

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Bogart Lake was a marvelous duck hunting location. As the water recedes to more traditional levels, the rushes will return and so will the big flights of ducks. As there is no outlet for the lake, evaporation will have to take the water down. But any experienced South Dakota resident knows that we have rain years and drought years. We don’t know when, but we do know they will cycle.

Background on John Miller and Hunting Experiences. My parents, Lucille and Edwin Miller moved to Aberdeen from Minneapolis following World War I. I was born in 1925 and my sister, Barbara four years later. We grew up in Aberdeen and graduated from Aberdeen Central High School. Immediately following graduation in 1943, I entered the Army. In 1945 I entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, graduating in 1949 and entered the US Air Force. Following the end of the Korean War in 1958, I left the Air Force and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During all my service days in the military, I was able to keep my South Dakota residency. This permitted me to hunt waterfowl. When I left the military, I had to wait for South Dakota to open up non-resident waterfowl licenses. From then on I was limited to 10 days of hunting. I have had so many memorable times hunting in South Dakota. Early Days before World War II My dad was a great hunter. From my earliest memories, I wanted to go and be part of the fun. When I was about 10 he gave me a single shot .410-gauge hammer gun. I was told I could go hunting when I could cock the gun, and then slowly release the hammer so the shell would not go off and I could safely unload the gun. I practiced daily until I could reliably demonstrate that skill. In the late 30’s about 1935 or 6 water started to come back to the Dakotas and so did the ducks. We first tried shooting on Richmond Lake. It had recently been dammed and was filling up. Shooting was not so good there. I killed my first duck there, a hell diver (grebe). Dad told me never to do that again and I haven’t.

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Next we hunted around Holmquist, which is east of Aberdeen where there were a couple of sloughs. Then the limit was 10 ducks. We almost always got our limit. One particular time my dad and I had our limit of 10 ducks apiece and returned in the evening to Aberdeen. On the outskirts of town there was a road check of hunters by the game wardens and state police. We were legal with our birds. I distinctly remember young kids running up and down the ditches and finding strings of ducks and pheasants, discarded by those hunters that had exceeded the limit. By the 1940’s the duck population had started to recover locally. Sand Lake refuge was a haven for mallards in the late season. Those birds were pretty smart. When you had to quit shooting at 4:00 PM they would start to fly out to feed. Later when the shooting time was extended to sunset, the ducks left at sunset. You needed to wait for a windy day. Then they left early and you could find them in range either going out to feed or coming back for water. The big Armistice Day storm, that killed so many hunters in Minnesota, came to South Dakota on 10 November. In the morning the wind started to blow and the snow fell. We left to go to the refuge. The mallards were flying and we shot our limit. Then we had a tough drive home. The next morning all was quiet. The snow was high and had drifted. We got the car out and drove up to Sand Lake. We did not see a duck. They all left in that storm. I hunted in another heavy blizzard. There were two of us east of Aberdeen about 60 miles. The morning started off very calm, but by mid afternoon the wind came up and the blizzard started. We found a cornfield where the mallards were flying in and out. I sat in the cornrows and those ducks flew against the wind. You could only shoot one duck and mark it down. Then go after it and find your way back to where you left the other ducks and shells. If you shot more than one duck at a time you couldn’t find them. We got our limit and started for home at dark. The drive home was treacherous. The snow was horizontal and you couldn’t see 20 feet ahead. I had been up late the night before and rose at 4:00 AM to go hunting, so I was already tired. After an hour or so of driving I was very sleepy. My partner took over. The next thing I knew we were home and it was 2:00 AM. But we had some very nice greenheads.

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I was able to hunt during World War II in the 1942 season. You could not buy shells and with gas rationing you were pretty restricted. But game was everywhere. The pheasant population really bloomed. I did get a furlough in the 1943 season. It was easy to get the limit of ducks and pheasants. In 1950 I was a Lieutenant stationed in New Mexico. I was able to hitch a ride on a military airplane to Aberdeen during November. It was a very late winter and the lakes were open. Sand Lake refuge held huge flocks of mallards. We had a camp over at the Claremont slough, which is east of Sand Lake. This is now a public shooting area, but then it was privately owned. The mallards would feed at night east of Sand Lake and in the morning fly back looking for water to swallow down the corn. They would come high over the Claremont slough in huge flocks of 50-100 or more birds, one flock after another. They would then start to fly around the lake pin wheeling down. Eventually the first flock would come into the decoys and we would shoot. The limit was 10 birds per license. As soon as we picked those up another big flock was upon us. Then we would repeat the process. Several days of this marvelous experience and I had to return to duty in New Mexico. Pheasants were very plentiful. During my high school days, I could take my .410 on my bike after school. I could ride around outside of town and often came home with several birds. Those were the times when the limit was 10 and you could have either hens or roosters. Sunday was a great day to go hunting for them. After church, my mom would have packed a picnic lunch and we would head out of town. There we would meet up with other families, and have lunch. The hunting would start. It seemed to me we never missed getting the limit. Mom cleaned all those birds. We never wasted anything. The pheasants were canned and the ducks were frozen. In those days she picked the pheasants, cut them up, put them in ball glass jars and cooked them. As they came out of the oven she would test the jars for leakage. If they didn’t leak they were dipped in paraffin and if they leaked, the jars went back into the oven and were then re-sealed and re-tested. Over the winter and into the spring we ate all those canned pheasants. They were delicious. The ducks she picked, saving the breast feathers. Those birds were frozen as we had a locker in the frozen food plant. Nobody had a home freezer at that time. Those

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boxes of feathers saved from the duck breasts were turned into pillows with enough so that both my sister and I received, at our weddings, a pair of those pillows. It was pretty nice having your mom clean all the game. We have some pictures of a limit of ducks, when it was 25 per person per day. She picked ALL those ducks. Later she told me she had done her share and I would need to find another way of cleaning the birds. I learned, from watching her, how to do it. I also learned from her how to cook ducks and pheasants. We never had a bad meal when she prepared the birds.

Long Lake Camp Adolph Olander (Ole) on the left. This picture was probably taken in the 1920’s at the time when they were hunting the Sand Lake. This was before it became a game refuge. The ducks are mallards. They mad a practice of trying to shoot only the greenheads.

On the left is my father, Ed Miller and on the

Adolph Olander pictured with a days shoot of

lower right is Adolph Olander. This was probably mallards, again probably at Sand Lake, South Taken in the 1920’s.

Dakota. There are very few hen mallards in this picture.

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The duck camp at Long Lake on the south side of Bogart Lake. Note the rushes that follow the shoreline around the lake. Directly across the lake from the camp is the point where we often set up for canvasback shooting. This picture was probably taken in the 1950’s or early 1960’s.

This is the duck camp taken in the 1980’s after a number of improvements and fix-ups had been done. Note the ducks on the boat along side the camp.

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This was a morning shoot at the camp. During this time, which was near the season opening, there was a great variety of ducks in the area.

Canvasback ducks on the lake. There were often at a peak migration times, several hundred ‘cans’ on the lake.

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John Miller taken at the camp after a morning shoot.

One year when we had swan permits, there were a number around in the area. This morning I was in a pit on the east end of the lake and a couple came over well within range. The teal in the left hand shows the size difference.

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In 1998 the floods of North Dakota found there way south and into the lake. As there was no natural outflow (like a stream) the water buildup continued. Here the water has covered the rushes and is on the camp floor. The previous year the water was under the camp, but not in the building. Covering the rushes left the camp exposed to the waves. Also the high water made for a poor place for ducks and there was no shooting.

The following year the water and waves pounded the camp under.

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