| After 40-years, Indiana fur trapper set to retire |
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| By NANCY VORIS
Indiana Correspondent
NINEVEH, Ind. – Bud Clark was only 10 years old when he started fur trapping. His father, Sherman Clark, was a seasoned trapper and let his son set 40 traps to try his luck.
“I didn’t know what I was doing, and I tied the traps to blackberry bushes and the animals just pulled them away,” Clark said.
He learned from his mistakes and went on to bag 30 muskrats his first season.
“There used to be thousands of muskrats around here,” he said.
It was 1941, and Clark’s hunting ground was the wilderness now home to Greenwood Park Mall. The family farm is now paved over for the parking lot of Toys ’R Us.
That same year he watched his four brothers walk up U.S. 31 to Indianapolis to join the Navy, and he also saw seven cars on the highway that day.
The family knew the value of furs and pelts in those days. Clark remembered his father working on bridges in Kentucky for $1 a day. One day he stumbled on a hole with 13 skunks in it.
“He got $5 a piece for the skunks, the same as two months of work,” Clark said.
Johnson County pioneers would not have made it through a winter without the food and warmth provided by wildlife, but fur trapping has gotten a bad rap from animal rights activists in the past 10 or 15 years, Clark said. Though buyers from Italy and Germany have come to his door, there are no local buyers and he usually ships his stock to Canada.
Clark’s lifelong work in the wild is taking center stage this month at the Nineveh Fiddlers and Fur Trappers Festival from Sept. 21-23. He will display a collection of furs, coats, pelts and stuffed mounts, and will sell earmuffs made out of “everything possible” including mink, red and gray fox, raccoon, opossum, deer, beaver and coyote.
Clark will set up his collection outside of Bud’s Bait and Tackle, a business he started with his wife, Janice, in 1967. An area landmark located at the crossroads of Nineveh, the shop sells fresh produce and flowers along with hunting and fishing supplies.
By coincidence, the festival will mark the end of the business as the Clarks settle into retirement. The property has been for sale for a few years and is still available, but Clark said he will lock up at the end of the season for good.
“It’s been 40 years and it’s time,” he said. “Janice has probably walked from the shop to the greenhouse a million times.”
They grow most of their produce and are best known for their good tomatoes. Clark supplements their produce with trips to markets in Indianapolis or Louisville.
The Clarks gain celebrity status every spring during mushroom season. Forty years of trips to Michigan, along with jaunts to Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and Canada, have provided the most productive hunting spots and yielded as much as 268 bushels of morels in one season. In 1995, the Clarks ventured to Alaska for a mushroom boom, only to learn that a lightning fire cleared 150 miles of forest around Anchorage. They came home almost empty handed.
When they return from their spring hunts, the news spreads like wildfire and customers line up for blocks to get their share of morels at $27 a pound.
“We’ve sold 200 tons through that door right there,” he said.
But that’s not the only time people have lined up at Bud’s. One year the couple hosted a customer appreciation night and 2,200 people showed up, lining up almost to the edge of Camp Atterbury. Clark remembers the menu like it was yesterday: beef and pork on the grill, 10 hams, 400 dozen ears of corn, 10 bushels of green beans and 400 melons. He bragged on Janice’s contribution. She made 120 pies and a helper made 40 cakes.
Sometimes Clark’s passions of reaping produce and trapping wildlife come together at Bud’s Bait and Tackle, but this event was not one of them. No raccoon or possum dishes were served.
This farm news was published in the Sept. 12, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
| 9/12/2007 |
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