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As It Was: Deer Seeks Ill-Fated Shelter Inside Hollow Tree

The Klamath County Museum’s latest e-mail newsletter contains a 130-year-old clipping from the Daily Astorian newspaper about a man who treed a buck deer.  The story goes like this:

“We have all heard of hunters treeing panthers and “holeing” foxes, but the latest in southern Oregon is treeing deer.

“R.K. Sutton reports that squire Parker of the station on Linkville road came in from a hunt the other day … (looking for) … axes and help, stating that he had treed a big buck and wanted to cut him out.

“He had shot the buck when, to his surprise, it took shelter inside of an immense fir log, which had been burned inside until there was nothing left of it but a shell.

“Two men with axes succeeded in cutting a hole in the tree so that they could kill the buck …

“This may sound like a good sized yarn, but it is true.”

The story was featured as a “History Snapshot” in the museum’s e-mail newsletter, “The Midge,” named after Klamath midges, bugs resembling big, biteless mosquitoes that swarm in a mating frenzy from Upper Klamath Lake each summer.
 

Source: "HISTORY SNAPSHOT 130 YEARS AGO Treeing Deer." The Midge: Cultural Newsletter for the Klamath Basin, 8 Aug. 2018.

Kernan Turner is the Southern Oregon Historical Society’s volunteer editor and coordinator of the As It Was series broadcast daily by Jefferson Public Radio. A University of Oregon journalism graduate, Turner was a reporter for the Coos Bay World and managing editor of the Democrat-Herald in Albany before joining the Associated Press in Portland in 1967. Turner spent 35 years with the AP before retiring in Ashland.