By Dunn’s telling of the tale, he did so with a golf shot heard round the rich man’s world:

It was in France that three American sportsmen, W.K. Vanderbilt, Edward S. Meade, and Duncan Cryder, first became interested in the game and got the idea of building a course in the States. In 1889 I was engaged in laying out an 18-hole course at Biarritz, France. Biarritz at that time was a small village, and there were few tourists from America. I had nearly completed the Biarritz  links when I met Vanderbilt, Meade and Cryder. They showed real interest in the game from the beginning; I remember the first demonstration I gave them. We chose the famous Chasm hole – about 225 yards and featuring a deep canyon which has to be cleared with the tee shot; I teed up several balls and laid them all on the green, close to the flag. Vanderbilt turned to his friends and said, “Gentlemen, this beats rifle shooting for distance and accuracy.” Soon afterwards these men asked me to come to  America and build a golf course there. (“Early Courses of the United States,” Golf Illustrated, vol 41 no 6 [September 1934], p. 24)

By Dunn’s telling of the tale, he did so with a golf shot heard round the rich man’s world:

It was in France that three American sportsmen, W.K. Vanderbilt, Edward S. Meade, and Duncan Cryder, first became interested in the game and got the idea of building a course in the States. In 1889 I was engaged in laying out an 18-hole course at Biarritz, France. Biarritz at that time was a small village, and there were few tourists from America. I had nearly completed the Biarritz links when I met Vanderbilt, Meade and Cryder. They showed real interest in the game from the beginning; I remember the first demonstration I gave them. We chose the famous Chasm hole – about 225 yards and featuring a deep canyon which has to be cleared with the tee shot; I teed up several balls and laid them all on the green, close to the flag. Vanderbilt turned to his friends and said, “Gentlemen, this beats rifle shooting for distance and accuracy.” Soon afterwards these men asked me to come to America and build a golf course there. (“Early Courses of the United States,” Golf Illustrated, vol 41 no 6 [September 1934], p. 24)

Note, however, that when Dunn, in his older years, recounted self-aggrandizing stories of his contributions to golf history in the 1890s (as he does in this 1934 Golf Illustrated article), he was often inaccurate regarding details of dates, places, and people. In the case of the article quoted above, he gets many things wrong as he goes on to explain his role in the early development of the Shinnecock Hills golf course, but his anecdote about Vanderbilt and friends is accurate in marking the general trend in the 1890s of the shifting preference of America’s millionaire sportsman away from the fishing rod and the gun clubs to the golf club – a trend that is certainly observable in the history of the Jekyll Island Sportsmen’s Club.

And not coincidentally, Dunn and Vanderbilt are part of the story of the earliest development of golf at Jekyll Island, for the latter was among the founding members of the Jekyll Island Sportsmen’s Club in 1886 and the former was the designer of the club’s first nine-hole golf course in 1897.

Although Dunn’s claim that Vanderbilt brought him to Shinnecock Hills to design its original golf course is inaccurate, his claim to have enjoyed the friendship and patronage of Vanderbilt during his first years in America is accurate enough. Similarly, Dunn is inaccurate in suggesting that he built the first golf course at Jekyll Island “at the instance of Stanford White,” for White – the architect of the famous clubhouse at Shinnecock Hills – was never a Jekyll Island Club member (“Early Courses of the United States,” 25).

But Dunn also wrote that in addition to White, “several other New Yorkers, who owned hunting lodges on this Island,” invited him to design a golf course for the Club (“Early Courses of the United States,” 25). This claim is probably true. Dunn mixed up his millionaires – true to his working-class caddie roots in Scotland, he may have found it hard to tell one rich American from another – but he liked millionaires well enough and could easily tell them apart from non-millionaires. 

Yet among the Jekyll Island millionaires, it is likely that Dunn’s commission to design and build a golf course at Jekyll Island arose from his connections not just with “New Yorkers” who were Club members, but also with those who were also members of the earliest golf clubs established in the American Northeast – and not just casual or social members of these clubs, but also owners, builders, presidents, golf captains, and committee chairmen.

At a high percentage of the early New York and New Jersey golf clubs in question, the designer of their golf courses had been Willie Dunn. As such, he was known by reputation to millionaire members of these clubs’ boards of directors, and yet he was also known to many of them personally through his work as the head professional at a number of these top golf clubs, ranging from Shinnecock Hills in 1893 to the Ardsley Casino Club in 1897. It was in 1897 that Dunn received the call from the Jekyll Island Sportsmen’s Club to lay out its first proper golf course. But the beginning of golf on Jekyll Island actually predates by at least a year the construction of the Dunn course in question.