418 THE CORBIN GAME PARK. 
Mr. Corbin had lived in Iowa when a young man, and in the days 
when the herds of buffalo on the plains of Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas 
numbered untold thousands. It was a great pity that such noble ani- 
mals were likely to become extinct, and the Corbins determined to join 
in the effort to perpetuate the species. They had begun with a few 
deer, and they added the elk, the antelope, and the buffalo, and then 
it became apparent that the Long Island estate was too small for the 
proper care of these animals, or at least for the care which the owners 
desired to give them. 
It is to be particularly noticed that the Long Island estate was not 
suited to the sort of care that the Corbins wished the animals to have. 
From caring for the few pets had grown the desire to rear herds of 
these animals under such conditions of freedom as would leave them 
with all their natural characteristics. A pet deer was beautiful, but 
it was not the deer of the wild woods after all. A pure bred buffalo 
in a barn-yard was in fact a buffalo, but he was too much like a Dur- 
ham bull to be perfectly satisfactory. On the Long Island farm the 
animals could scarcely become anything more than pets. 
So the thoughts of the elder Corbin went back to the days of his 
youth and the foothills of the White Mountains. As most of our read- 
ers know, there is plenty of land in New Hampshire that is just as 
wild now as it was when Hudson first looked on the ground where the 
statue of liberty now stands. There was a deal of it in Sullivan County, 
perhaps not the wildest in the State, but certainly a plenty of unbroken 
forest that covered hills and valleys and surrounded little lakes, for- 
ests of birch and beech, and maple and pine, and spruce and hemlock, 
and balsam,—forests beautiful and fragrant enough to give a city man 
the heartache when he thinks of them. 
Mr. Corbin determined to buy from 20,000 to 30,000 acres of these 
hills and valleys and there establish a park for his new-found four- 
footed friends in which they would find the conditions as near those as 
possible to which they were best suited. Mr. Corbin eventually got 
22,000 acres in one tract. 
The next thing was to fence it, and only those who have tried build- 
ing elk-tight fences can appreciate the job. Here was a tract of over 
35 square miles of land to inclose. They started out with a wire net 6 
feet high, secured to stout posts 10 feet apart. Above the net they 
strung ten lines of barbed wire, and that made a right good fence, 
But when 18 miles had been erected they abandoned the wire net and 
used barbed wire only for the rest of the way. That was cheaper and 
just as good. It is not uninteresting to note that the fencing cost 
$74,000. 
In all, nine gates are to be placed in this fence, with a keeper’s lodge 
at each gate, something made necessary by the presence in every com- . 
munity of the skulking lout who will steal or destroy the property of 
the well-to-do, and especially such property as this fence will inclose. 
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