The Spirit of the Times was the magazine catering to American sportsmen. It’s where the stories got told and debated among the cognoscenti.
So it’s no surprise that, after the publication of Frank Forester’s account of Long Island deer hunts in his 1849 Field Sports of the United States and British Provinces of North America, a swift rebuke appeared in the Spirit.
An unsigned letter in the May 19, 1849 issue sought to set the record straight. The author, after some faint praise for Forester, got straight to the point: his description was a lie.
To be more precise, Forester (William Henry Herbert), missed the point. The real excitement and skill in the hunt lay in the riders who, along with their noble hounds, tried to head off and kill the deer before they entered the river to become sitting ducks (to switch sports for a minute) for the hunters waiting on their river-side stands.
To prove his point, the letter write relates an account told him by L. of deer hunting to the east of Snedecors (probably at Carman’s River). He does make it sound good, with a double-barrel kill shot taking down two deer after a long chase. He also gets to immortalize two of the hardworking dogs in Snedecor’s kennel: Harkaway and Shot.
The “high play at night” that Forester disparaged is dismissed as the fault of the “designing stranger hunter” who brings his bad habits with him from the city. In addition, our defender of the deer hunt comes up with a great line that could have served as the Island’s first motto (and a warning to stranger-hunters everywhere): “…he who plays a regular built Long Island party is bound to lose.”