Stuttgart: Where Mallard is King

Text by Wayne Capooth, MD - Audio Slideshow by Fred Greenslade

The Grand Prairie rice fields, on both sides of the road, take me past Mack’s Prairie Wings, which had its beginning in the 1930s when waterfowlers started coming in masses. Mack’s bills itself as “America’s Premier Waterfowl Outfitter.”

Next door to Mack’s is Rich-N-Tone. It all began with D.M. “Chick” Major, the winner of the 1945 World Duck Calling Championship, who was best known for making Dixie Mallard duck calls. It was under Major’s tutelage that “Butch” Richenback turned into a world champion caller and world-famous maker of Rich-N-Tone duck calls.

Traveling onward, the rice fields follow me to the outskirts of town. A sign proclaims it as “The Rice and Duck Capital of the World.” For as many centuries as there have been birds that fly south as winter closes in, here they stopped, fed and wintered, while preparing for their journey northward in the spring.

This is STUTTGART, where the MALLARD is king. To waterfowling aficionados here, ducks that don’t have green heads are classified as coots.

Rice was first grown on the Grand Prairie in 1904, ten acres in all. By 1906, rice acreage had greatly increased, having extended from Lonoke to Prairie, Arkansas, Lee and St. Francis counties, and the total area devoted to the crops was about 5,000 acres.

Until the coming of drying facilities, harvested rice was left to dry in the fields, attracting southward-bound ducks and geese in indescribable numbers to feed. In addition, dotting the prairies were numerous timbered depressions known as “islands” or “pin oak flats,” at least two dozen of which were used as rice reservoirs or as “green tree” reservoirs.

The first rice reservoir, built by Art and Verne Tindall, was completed in 1927 near Elm Prong Mill Bayou. Verne Tindall remarked to the Stuttgart Daily Leader, “The first few years, it seemed as if all the ducks in the country tried to get into it.”

By the mid-1940s, reservoirs were estimated to occupy about 10,000 acres, while the rice acreage of the Grand Prairie was about 175,000 acres. By 1950, about 200 had been built within the region and 50 were green-tree reservoirs.

These reservoirs, constructed for irrigation, provided an additional attraction, resulting in the Grand Prairie becoming a nationally known venue for waterfowling. Ralph Coghlan, outdoor columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote December 21, 1947: “Let me say that, over a hunting experience of many years, I have never seen more ducks than darkened the Arkansas skies this year. Not being a bookkeeper, an accountant, a human adding machine or a member of the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, I couldn’t come within 100,000 of figuring how many I saw.

“I watched mallards sitting in vast and solid rafts on the Arkansas reservoirs

quacking raucously and happily, and at dusk, saw them start for the rice fields. They took off in successive roars like fleets of miniature B-29s, and for half an hour or more, the whole sky was alive with ducks.

“For seven weeks in November 1949, wave after wave of mallards took off like scrambling fighter planes from their summer-breeding grounds in Canada. Fanning out over four major flyways, they headed south. It was the heaviest migration of waterfowl that the U.S. had seen in years.

“Southward along the Mississippi Flyway, which in 1949 was traveled by the thickest squadrons of ducks and gunned by almost half the nation’s 2 million waterfowlers, the shooting was the best in years. Hunters from all over the U.S. converged on Stuttgart, which, at that early date, declared that its flooded woodlands and rice fields made it the “Duck Capital of the World.”

Coghlan remarked that year, “If it is not too lyrical, I hope, to say that the Stuttgart region has become one of the wonders of the world.”

Few Grand Passages have occurred during my lifetime. The first was in 1955. It was then at the tender age of 10 that I shot my first greenhead, and it was at Stuttgart. The incident is still quite fresh in my memory for various and obvious reasons. I have fired many, many thousands of shots at various kinds of waterfowl since that time, but I cannot now recall one that made a more lasting impression.

My Dad and I stayed at the Riceland Hotel, home to all out-of-town waterfowlers, since time immemorial, in room 415. Several rooms down was room 410. Dad told me that 410 was always reserved for John Olin, of the Winchester-Western Company, during the opening weekend of duck season.

“Why,” I asked?

“Only 410’s are allowed at his favorite hole at his Greenbriar Club. The natives call it the Winchester Club.”

It was here on these famous grounds that King Buck retrieved his last greenhead. Double National Champion (1953 and 1954) King Buck was given his due when, in 1959, it was decided that the federal duck stamp for that year should commemorate the work of retrievers and their contribution to waterfowl conservation. This is the only time that the federal duck stamp has ever been other than a duck. So it is that Maynard Reece painted a portrait of perhaps the greatest duck dog of them all.

For the past 73 years, Thanksgiving has meant much more than turkey and dressing in Stuttgart. It is when the “Wings Over the Prairie Festival” makes this town the Mecca for waterfowlers.

Here, after numerous carnival rides, Dad introduced me to Miss Sophie, wife of Chick Major. From her, I bought one of her calls, a Dixie Mallard, which I still own and cherish. Chick and Sophie are local legends, whose Dixie Mallard duck call established a standard of call-making excellence.

It just so happened that their daughter, Pat, was a contestant in the World Championship Duck Calling Contest, which is held yearly in Stuttgart on the Saturday after Thanksgiving Day. Standing as close to the calling platform as I could, I saw Pat win the Arkansas title and, more importantly, the first of two straight World’s Championships.

In 1950, at age 12, Pat won the Junior World title. In 1951, she took the first of five straight Women’s World titles. Moreover, in 1960 she captured the coveted Champion of Champions crown. If that is not enough, in 1956 she won the first ever Queen Mallard beauty contest.

Pat Peacock went on to become the director of the Museum of the Arkansas Grand Prairie. It started out to preserve agriculture, but now it is the history of the Grand Prairie. A wing is devoted to waterfowl, whose highlights include the lights and sounds of an “Early Morning Duck Hunt on the Grand Prairie.” In addition, there are 500 award-winning game calls, a one-of-a-kind “Coat of Many Feathers,” antique decoy collection, market-hunter guns plus others, and waterfowl art and photographs.

Snuggling closer to the platform, I witnessed the first-ever Champion of Champions contest, won by Art Beauchamp of Flint, Michigan. Every five years since, the Champion of Champions Duck Calling Contest is held. The winner is considered the best of the best, the Champion of Champions. Those eligible to compete are former World’s Champions.

It has never been satisfactorily explained to me why it is that scenes and incidents transpiring in one’s youth remain fresh in the memory, indelibly impressed upon one’s brain for scores of years—yes, even until death—when incidents of greater importance transpiring quite recently vanish from memory as if they had never occurred at all. Possibly, it is because “the morning of life is like the dawn of day, full of purity, of imagery and harmony.”

At any rate, nearly all the scenes and incidents of me shooting my first greenhead are as fresh and well defined today as if they had occurred only yesterday.

At the Rice and Duck Capital of the World, waterfowling has taken on a legendary status that is hard to match anywhere else in the world. The market hunters of the last two centuries may be a thing of the past but the lifestyle that they created has endured. Many of today’s natives—guides, resort owners, boat builders and call makers—trace their lineage to these colorful characters of the Grand Prairie’s past.

It just doesn’t get any better than this.

To waterfowing aficionados here, ducks that don’t have green heads are classified as coots.