Jan 23 2024 42 mins
There lived in Chicago an Italian about 40 years of age in 1890, who kept a little fruit store on Wabash Avenue, and was known in the game market and among Chicago sportsmen by the sobriquet of “Plover Joe” or “Italian Joe” as he was interchangeably called. His real name was Joseph Paoli. He was considered the authority on one particular bird of passages, having hunted golden plovers since 1868, at age 18. He hunted for the market, and except for a rare outing at jacksnipe, woodcocks, and ducks, he never hunted anything but golden plovers.
In 1890, there were plenty of Chicago men who would wager that there was no man on this green earth who could compare with Plover Joe in the art of plover shooting. That was his business and had been for 22 years, ever since he was old enough to shoot. He sent to the Chicago market more plovers than all the other Illinois shooters. They did not know how to hunt them, and he did. He killed upwards of 1,500 plovers in a week, three hundred in a day, and 9,000 in the spring of 1891. A bag of 40, 50, or 60 per day did not satisfy him, even at $1.50 to $1.75 a dozen, which the big hotels and markets paid him for all he would bring.
He had many friends and no foes and lived by market-hunting birds. He was an authority on every game bird that flew and the only man in Chicago who seemed to thoroughly understand and love the work of plover shooting. Through the winter, Joe sold fruit, but he longed for the warm days and the green fields, and April saw him afield early. For 20 years, he had lived in a modest hut, built entirely of shingles, at the edge of a swamp near Summit, a favorite resort of plover shooters. He lived only with a beagle hound and the best double-barreled shotgun.