234 SEVENTH REPORT OF THE FOREST, FISH AND GAME COMMISSION. 



achievement. The higher the trophy ranks in size and symmetry, so much the 

 greater should be its value as an evidence of patient and persistent chase. To slay 

 a full grown bull moose or wapiti in fair hunt is an achievement, for there is no 

 royal road to success with the rifle, nor do the Happy Hunting Grounds exist 

 to-day ; but to kill them by proxy, or buy the mounted heads for decorative pur- 

 poses in a dining-room, in feeble imitation of the trophies of the baronial banquet 

 hall, is not only vulgar taste, but is helping along the extermination of these ancient 

 types. An animal like the moose or the prong-horn represents a line of unbroken 

 descent of vast antiquity, and the destruction of the finest members of the race to 

 decorate a hallway cannot be too strongly condemned. 



Adtrondacl^ Aoose. 



The history of the moose in the Adirondackn has a melancholy interest. They 

 were numerous in this State as late as the '40s. and the following notes are repub- 

 lished from an article on this subject by the writer, which appeared in the Century 

 Magazine of January, 1894. 



"John Constable, a well-known sportsman and hunter, killed two moose near 

 Independence Creek, Herkimer County, in 1851, and in the winter of 1852-53 shot 

 his last one west of Charley Pond. That same season Alonzo Wood and Edward 

 Arnold shot two moose, and found another dead, in the forest back of Seventh Lake 

 Mountain in Hamilton County. In the summer of 1855 the last moose captured 

 alive was taken by Charles L. Phelps, who killed a cow moose in Brown's Tract and 

 brought her calf out of the woods with him. It died the following year. A moose 

 was killed at Mud Lake in 1856, and Edward Arnold at Nick's Lake in the same 

 year killed anotlier. The next year a man named Baker shot one in the same 

 vicinity. 



" It was long thought that Governor Horatio Seymour had killed the last moose 

 in the Adirondacks, but several others have better claims to that honor, if honor it 

 be. Governor Seymour did shoot a fine bull in 1859, Just north of Jock's Lake, not 

 far from West Canada Creek, Herkimer County. The horns were kept for years at 

 his farm at Deerfield, near Utica. 



"In i860, however, Alva Dunning killed several on West Canada Creek, and 

 Reuben Howard, an old moose-hunter, killed his last the same year. Howard states 

 that he heard of two being shot a little later, which may refer to the two that 

 Chauncey Hawthorne claims to have killed about this time. The year 1861 saw at 

 Raquette Lake the destruction of the last family of moose, and, in all probability, 



