North Carolina Wildlife Officer Lee Boone with some of the does checked in on one of the first public-land doe hunts in North Carolina. Photo courtesy of John C. Oberheu.

(Editor's Note: Author John C. Oberheu was present at some of the first modern-era doe hunts on public land in North Carolina. The recovery of the deer on these public lands and the need for new management practices with respect to that recovery marked the beginning of a sea-change in hunting big game in America. Even today, the recovery of the whitetail is one of the great success stories in big-game management and demonstrated the integral part that hunting would come to play in maintaining healthy big-game populations.)

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In the late 1800s, North Carolina's white-tailed deer had been hunted almost to extinction. Most of the few that still remained were in the coastal wetlands where the dense pocosin thickets gave them natural protection.

"When I was growing up, the only deer anywhere in these mountains were on the Biltmore Estate," refuge manager Wayne Wiggins said, explaining how much things had changed during his lifetime. We were sipping coffee around the stove of the North Mills River check station in Pisgah National Forest. It was December 1958, and we had just finished checking in about 600 hunters taking part in North Carolina's first legal hunts for antlerless deer in over 30 years.

Wayne was the state's senior manager assigned to the 100,000-acre Pisgah Management Area. He and his four assistant managers protected its fish and wildlife and administered its hunting and fishing programs. He had lived and worked on Pisgah for so many years that he knew its mountains as well as his back yard. I was a young wildlife biologist assigned to examine the deer kills that hunters would soon be bringing to the check station.

"Biltmore had its own wardens who kept after the dogs and poachers," Wayne continued. "That's the only reason there were any left at all, and any deer that strayed off their land didn't last long. I was 25 years old before I saw my first wild deer."

Aside from isolated populations like that at the Biltmore Estate, most of the few deer that still remained survived because of the combination of dense cover, swamps, insects, snakes and other features of the coastal wetlands that gave the deer populations natural protection. Deer were also scarce in most of the other states. The total number in the entire nation had been reduced to less than 500,000.

With today's thriving deer herds, it's hard to imagine a time when it was rare to see a wild deer. Nowadays they are hunted in every county of the state, and there are so many that they often damage crops or the ornamental shrubs around our homes. It's quite common to see road-killed deer on the sides of our highways, and they are the cause of many auto accidents, including some fatalities. Hunter surveys show that over 200,000 are harvested each year in our state alone. How could things have changed so much from when settlers first came to America?

Deer were very important to both Native Americans and the early settlers who hunted them for their meat and hides. There were no laws for seasons, bag limits or methods of hunting. Deer could be taken by any means, year 'round, day or night. As cities grew, the value of deer meat and hides increased, and market hunting became common. Much of the deer's natural habitat was cleared for agriculture or for spreading cities. Deer were wiped out in some places and their numbers were severely reduced in the rest.

Around the turn of the 20th century, states began passing laws to protect deer. Citizens who were alarmed by the widespread market hunting convinced Congress something had to be done. Though regulating hunting of resident wildlife was reserved to state governments, the federal government had authority to control interstate commerce. The Lacey Act was passed in 1900, making it a federal crime to take illegal wild game across state boundaries to be sold.