)40 



The Avicncaii Amr/c?'. 



silver which till the mountain crags. 

 He clothed him with silver armor- 

 plates, and made him ruler over all the 

 anadromous fishes which came up out 

 of the salt-water estuaries into the 

 limpid fresh-water mountain streams 

 to spawn. Once in every century the 

 Silver King- was permitted to bathe in 

 an electrothermal medicine-spring of 

 liquid silver, and thus preserved and 

 renewed the brightness of his armor. 

 The silver springs flowed from the 

 hidden ore-beds of the inner mountains. 

 "'Finally, the growth of the conti- 

 nent southward drove the ocean before 

 it, and thus the tarpon — the Silver 

 King — was forced gradually into the 

 Gulf of Mexico, where he now chiefly 

 inhabits. He has gone from his former 

 haunts, just like the buffalo, which 

 once covered the prairies; and the 

 great silver-mines, being thus left 

 unprotected and exposed, soon became 

 revealed to the knowledge and cupidity 

 of the men who are now swarming 

 more than ever into the cotmtry, 

 bringing their picks and crushers and 

 driving off the game. But the Great 

 Spirit took pity on the Silver King 

 because he was thus deprived of his 

 ward and heritage, and because he 

 could no more renew his armor by 

 bathing in the silver spring ; and so he 

 made him an everlasting coat of silver 

 mail, which never fades or wears off, 

 either in the water or out of it. It will 

 neither dim nor tarnish. Any Indian 

 brave who wears the scales of the 

 tarpon on his person will possess a 

 medicine which will ever be to him a 

 talisman of good fortune, both in this 

 world and in the spirit-land to come. 



Plenty will surround him long after 

 the buffalo have ceased to run.' " 



To the above Mr. Hallock adds a 

 postscript in which he says: "Now 

 this is certainly a very ingenious yarn, 

 but I am free to say that I take no 

 stock in it. I don't believe a word of 

 it. It looks very much as if somebody 

 had mining-claims to sell in the Indian 

 Reservation, and had set up the tarpon 

 to catch gudgeons. Some paleontolo- 

 gists may read it differently, and fancy 

 they discover a glimmer of the early 

 Christian light shining through the 

 darkness of barbarism. The legend 

 may seem to be symbolic of the armor 

 of faith which one must put on arid 

 keep bright in this life in order to 

 experience beatitude hereafter. It is 

 sad to destroy such an illusion by a 

 doubt, but the truth is, it is sometimes 

 ditficult to distinguish the true light 

 from the phosphorescence of decayed 

 fish." 



[After the above paper on the tarpon 

 was written, I visited Aransas Pass, 

 (Tarpon, Tex.) where this fish is caught 

 exclusively by trolling with a whole 

 mullet or shiner.- The only material 

 difference in the tackle used there con- 

 sists of a linked wire snell in lieu of 

 those described above. The tarpon 

 take the fish lure on or slightly below 

 the surface, and are usually hooked in 

 the jaw, only one in about ten fish thus 

 fastened being boated or beached. The 

 tarpon in his fierce leaps and shake of 

 the head frees himself from the steel. 

 So numerous, however, are these fish in 

 this locality that one fisherman beached, 

 when I was there, nine tarpon in one 

 day's fishing.— W. C. H.] 



[to be continued.] 



