22 AN AXGLKR'S RKM IXLSCEXCES. 



very important part he occupied in the American anglers' guild during his life- 

 time, especially during the Civil War period, when the young men of the land, 

 and old ones, too, were too much engaged on the battle-fields to spare time for 

 sport, except it were to eke out an occasional deficient ration for the camps by 

 whatever game and fish could be caught during 'temporary cessation of hostilities. 

 Mr. Roosevelt, it seems to me, was the living intermediate who bridged the 

 interval between ''Frank Forester" and the writer (if you will allow my claim). 



It is worthy of note that the Indians were beginning to be troublesome 

 already, but were not bad. I had already bought a share of Beldon & Young's 

 addition to the city of Hastings, some twenty miles down the Mississippi 

 River below St. Paul, and they annoyed us by peering through the windows when 

 we were at meals. It was not much of a city, and St. Paul itself then had a 

 population of only 8,000. Only one railroad touched any part of the Mississippi 

 river, and everything west of it was hostile. 



Gen. Henry H. Sibley, who used to write frontier sketches in those days for 

 Porter's Spirit of the Times, over the signature of "Hal-a-Dakotah," was in com- 

 mand at Fort Snelling, and that military post and a hay meadow which was 

 mowed, the cavalry were the only signs of civilization on thai side, excepting the 

 Indian village of Mendota, where the general made his headquarters in two 

 stone buildings, which still stand. Franklin W. Steel, Tim Newson, Judge Isaac 

 Atwaster, tutor of my youth, who died in Minneapolis at eighty-nine years, and Gen. 

 C. C. Andrews, still living, and since then a general in the army and governor 

 of the state, were the principal pioneers, and of course, A-l sportsmen. 



There was no end to game in variety in those days, and fine fish, too, right 

 in the river and lakes all around. It was an ideal country for sportsmen; and 

 so, when our party of seven started up with a spike team in the direction of 

 Pembina, 400 miles away, we felt we were footloose and in tall grass. But there 

 was a good road all the way, beaten hard by the hundreds of carts which brought 

 down .furs every year from Fort Garry and the Selkirk settlement. But that 

 story was written up at the time for Harper's Magazine by myself, and I will 

 only add that when a small band of straggling Indians in the neighborhood of 

 Sauk River, a hundred miles up, commenced to help themselves freely out of 

 the cracker box in the tail of our wagon, when trotting along over the prairie. 

 Aleck Kinkaid, the old pioneer who plotted the town of Alexandria the year 

 before, crawled back from his seat in front and let the foremost redskin have 

 it under the jowl with his fist. The blow doubled him up, and he fell limp; 

 and all the other redskins, who were not used to that sort of tactics, cried 

 "hough !" and dropped back. It was late in the afternoon and they incontinently 

 went into camp half a mile down river. In the evening they came up and smoked 

 with us. It was midsummer and the days were warm, and they dressed scantily; 

 but every man had his clout and blanket only that and nothing more. As a rule, 

 the Sioux traveled mounted, but these were a scouting party, who wanted to 

 locate a band of Chippewas who were supposed to be in the vicinity of the Crow 

 Wing Agency. The hostiles got together not many weeks afterward, while I 

 was there at the Agency, and I saw the head chief, Hole-in-the-Day, drive out 

 in a buggy over the prairie to the battlefield, where the Sioux got the worst of it. 



I went through a good bit of experience that summer; struck a rainy spell 

 and a freshet in the Sauk River in July; lost all our provisions and part of our 

 camp stuff in attempting to cross a ford, swamped the wagon in eight feet of 

 water, half drowned the horses, lived five days on raw salt pork and water- 



