CHAPTER III. 



FISIIINi; JAI'XTS AND AMil.IXG ASSOCIATES. 



My preceding chapter, opening this memoir, is not so much a record of my 

 personal rambles about wild regions and unsettled tracts during the middle of 

 the past century, as a recollection of sportsmen of an older generation than I 

 whom I chanced to meet up with from year to year. Reminiscences tossed out 

 at random bring me up to 1859, when I cast my first salmon fly in the deep pool 

 below Aroostook Falls, in Maine ; and the rod and reel I used there is now 

 among the relics of the "Tuna Club" at Catalina Island, in California, where the 

 chief of all live sea anglers, Prof. Charles F. Holder, is its president. It was 

 bought at Conroy's, in New York, opposite the Pritchard Brothers tackle shop, 

 in Fulton street, in 1858. That summer I took in the Grand Stream Lakes, where 

 Dr. George W. Bethune had his camp at the outlet, with a big party from Houlton, 

 and afterwards fished at St. Croix River and Sebago Lake for landlocked salmon; 

 visited Fort Fairfield, of the historic Aroostook War, Fort Kent, and the French 

 settlement along the Madawaska for sixty miles to St. John River. In 1860 I 

 went to Labrador with Prof. Elliott Coues, F. S. Knowlton and George Lunt, of 

 Washington Smithsonian ; caught sea trout and river trout all the way up the 

 coast from Belle Isle Strait to the Eskimo Bay, latitude 55, and to the Rigolet 

 Post, where salmon were plenty and were netted by the Eskimos for the Hudson 

 Bay Company. 



A broad vista opens wide during the lull before the war, about the year 

 1860, fairly crowded with the names of great men who fished (not great because 

 they fished!) ; and their deeds are they not written in many books of chronicles? 



During the Civil War rifles took the place of shotguns, and slaughter in the 

 field at large was done to order. Meanwhile sporting papers of the day were 

 suspended, with the single exception of Porter's (Wilkes') Spirit of the Times. 

 After reserving the first three years to the struggle for the Union, I applied the 

 next three years to a complete tour of the Maritime Provinces of Canada, Prince 

 Edward Island, Cape Breton and Quebec to a collection of trophies of all varieties 

 of fauna for the museums from numerous wilds and streams, the results df 

 which endeavor appeared duly in my "Fishing Tourist," which was printed by 

 Robert Rutter in 1872 and issued in the following spring. This diligent old gentle- 

 man is alive still, and working uptown in New York at the age of eighty 

 years plus. 



The dilettante gunning class, with their hunting dogs, had not yet come into 

 view, because the era of deadly machine guns had not arrived, and gentlemen 

 who hunted them were just anglers, who went to secluded waters, and shot birds 

 and animals only for the camp. Had I the gifted pen of Levant F. Brown, who 

 finds beauty in every wild, and makes the woods and waters fairly gleam in his 

 descriptions, eloquent with poetry and song, so that even the birds break out 

 responsively to his call, I would braid laurels and eglantine for the heroes whom 

 it is my privilege to name as sportsmen, and whom I have personally known 

 during that period of my lifetime which I am about to survey. Men like Lanman, 

 Thoreau, Burroughs, Yenning, W. M. Brackett, E. A. Samuels, William C. Prime, 



(IV) 



