Before modern duck limits, before today’s federal waterfowl rules, and before most hunters could imagine a six-bird bag, one Louisiana market hunting operation was sending 2,000 ducks a day to New Orleans, according to a story told on The Southern Outdoorsmen.
In a video hosted by Andrew Maxwell and Jacob Myers, Louisiana hunter and waterfowl historian Dale Bordelon described the old market hunting days around Lake Arthur and Lacassine, where local Frenchmen hunted ducks not for sport in the modern sense, but to supply food markets and restaurants.
Bordelon said the most famous market hunter in the story was Paul Champagne, who hunted with Fred Dudley on roughly 10,000 acres in southwest Louisiana.
“He had to supply the market, the French Market in New Orleans, with 2,000 ducks a day,” Bordelon said. “That was his quota.”
It is a number that sounds almost impossible now. But Bordelon said that in that era, ducks were abundant, laws were different, and hunting was tied directly to survival, trade, and a food system that looked nothing like today’s.
A Time Before Modern Duck Hunting
Maxwell and Myers asked Bordelon whether the people in that area were mostly duck hunters, or whether they also hunted deer, hogs, turkeys, and other animals.
Bordelon said the old-timers around that lake were mainly duck hunters. There were no deer in the area then, and people were not hunting hogs for sport the way some do today.
“They hunted ducks,” Bordelon said. “There was a lot of ducks back then, and there was a lot of people that hunted ducks to sell ducks.”
But Bordelon also warned against judging the old market hunters too simply. He said people need to remember the poverty of the time and the lack of money among the men he learned from.
“You’re talking about a time when there was no money,” he said.
That shaped how they hunted. Bordelon said many of his old mentors did not buy shells by the box. They bought paper shells one at a time, maybe five or ten shells total, because that was all they could afford.
So they did not waste shots. They let ducks land, watched them bunch together, and waited for the exact moment when one shell could do the most work.
The Art Of The Head Shot
Bordelon said the old hunters developed a careful style because they had limited ammunition and because restaurants did not want shot scattered through the bodies of ducks served to customers.
“They didn’t want shots in the body,” he said. “So, he had to get head shots.”
He described the timing as an art. When ducks landed, they would settle, move around, and eventually get nervous. Just before takeoff, they would bunch up and stick their heads high, creating a tiny window for the hunter.
“You got a split second to make that shot,” Bordelon said.
He said that lesson still shapes how he hunts today when conditions allow. When ducks land, he watches and waits, then counts down with the people hunting beside him.
“We always shoot on three,” Bordelon said.
This is one of the more interesting parts of the story because it shows how an old market hunting method survived as tradition, even after the commercial system disappeared. Today, a hunter may talk about ethics, limits, clean kills, and conservation. Back then, the same patience also came from poverty, food demand, and the price of every shell.
Bordelon said one old story involved hunters waiting on a large group of mallards, then holding off when another group landed before they could shoot. After the ducks mixed and settled, they finally got the shot and killed 80 mallards in two hours.
It is a hard number for a modern duck hunter to process. But in Bordelon’s telling, it was part of a different world.
The 2,000-Duck Quota
Bordelon said Fred Dudley had a large operation around Lake Arthur and Lacassine, near where the Lacassine refuge is now located.
Dudley bought about 10,000 acres and hired 10 local men. Their job was to meet the quota for the French Market in New Orleans: 2,000 ducks a day.
“They’d go in dugouts, 97s, Model 12s, and shoot them ducks,” Bordelon said.
The men lived close to the hunting grounds, including on houseboats, and even had a schoolhouse in the area. According to Bordelon, each local hunter might kill around 200 ducks.
After the shooting was done, the work was not over. Bordelon said Champagne and the others returned to camp, where the family helped process the birds.
“The kids, the mama, Paul, everybody just gutted them,” he said.
They did not pluck the ducks. Bordelon explained that the birds had to be sold with feathers on so buyers could see what kind of ducks they were getting.
That detail says a lot about how direct the old food trade was. The ducks were not anonymous meat in plastic packaging. They were whole birds, labeled, packed, shipped, hung in markets, and sold by type.
From Marsh To Train To French Market
Bordelon said the transportation chain was as impressive as the hunting.
After the ducks were gutted, they were taken by steam launch boat on a 12-and-a-half-mile trip to the dock at Lake Arthur. From there, the ducks were packed in barrels with ice.
A train came every day around 3 p.m., according to Bordelon. It did not carry only ducks. It also hauled rice and other goods, while people brought oranges and whatever else they had to sell at market.
The first train line was small and slow, traveling about 15 miles an hour toward Lake Charles. Then the cargo was connected to a larger locomotive and sent on the Sunset Route through Lafayette, Morgan City, and toward New Orleans.
Bordelon said the trains crossed the Mississippi River on barges before reaching the depot. From there, the ducks still had about a mile and a half to go before reaching the French Market.
The next morning, horse-drawn wagons carried the barrels down Canal Street, then toward Decatur Street and into the market area near where Cafe Du Monde is today.
That image is almost cinematic: ducks shot in the Louisiana marsh, gutted by families, packed in ice, shipped by boat and rail, then hauled by wagon through the streets of New Orleans to be sold at game stalls.
A National Business Built On Ducks
Bordelon said the ducks from Dudley’s operation did not only go to the French Market.
Some were shipped to places such as St. Louis, Chicago, and Atlanta, along with other states beyond Louisiana. The barrels were tagged with the type and number of birds inside, such as braces of mallards, so market sellers did not have to open each barrel and dig through it.
When sellers wanted a certain kind of duck, they could read the tag, pull the barrel, and send it where it needed to go.
At the market, Bordelon said ducks were hung from S-hooks at game stalls. People could walk through and buy what they needed.
He said New Orleans had long been a trading place, even before the city was formally founded in 1718. Later, under Spanish control in the 1790s, the city built the French Market structure, and the trade kept growing.
That history is easy to overlook because modern hunting stories often focus on blinds, calls, dogs, limits, and weather. Bordelon’s account shows a much older and larger system, where hunting was tied to ports, railroads, restaurants, families, and city food supply.
The Laws Finally Changed
Bordelon said the market hunting world began to change as laws and sanitation rules developed.
By 1906, he said, new rules required more sanitary handling, including screened-in storage. Those codes came after problems with rotten ducks and foul conditions at markets.
Then, in 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act ended the commercial waterfowl market hunting era as it had existed.
“That quit the market hunting,” Bordelon said.
He explained that the whole system was a major business. When the train returned the next day to pick up another load of ducks, it also brought back supplies for Dudley’s operation, including food and, most importantly, shells.
Bordelon said there may have been around a thousand market hunters across Louisiana, though Dudley’s operation was the largest one he described.
For modern hunters, the 1918 law is one of the key dividing lines between the old world and the new one. Before it, waterfowl could be treated as a market product. After it, duck hunting moved toward the regulated conservation model known today.
Remembering A Forgotten Era
Bordelon said he later met Champagne’s grandchildren, who were in their 70s and 80s, and gathered stories from them about the old days.
He called Champagne a remarkable man and said he had been hired by Remington and Winchester, traveling and shooting across the country as one of the best shots of his generation.
“Read what I’m telling you,” Bordelon said, encouraging people to look up the history of Louisiana’s famous market hunters.
The story is not simply about killing huge numbers of ducks. It is about an era when the land, the market, and the people were connected in a way that seems almost impossible now.
There is also a reason that era ended. Market hunting on that scale could not last forever without rules, and today’s duck populations depend on conservation, habitat, and limits that earlier generations did not have.
Still, Bordelon’s account is valuable because it preserves a piece of Louisiana outdoor history that might otherwise fade away.
Before duck stamps, modern bag limits, and online migration reports, men in dugout boats hunted the marsh, families gutted birds at camp, trains hauled barrels of ducks through the night, and New Orleans woke up to fresh game at the French Market.
It was a hard life, a hungry business, and, as Bordelon made clear, a remarkable time.
Ed spent his childhood in the backwoods of Maine, where harsh winters taught him the value of survival skills. With a background in bushcraft and off-grid living, Ed has honed his expertise in fire-making, hunting, and wild foraging. He writes from personal experience, sharing practical tips and hands-on techniques to thrive in any outdoor environment. Whether it’s primitive camping or full-scale survival, Ed’s advice is grounded in real-life challenges.
