KARLY RECOLLECTIONS. 29 



Two more little items are worth noticing: One, in 1856, when I came up 

 from New York to New Haven with Prof. T. S. C. Lowe and his assistant, David 

 Main, of Calais, Me., in company with their balloon. The same old bag was used 

 most successfully afterwards in the Civil War. The same astronomer is now in 

 charge of the Lowe Observatory of California, and doing good service at the age 

 of 96. Second, it was the same year when my friend, A. B. Keeler, left his clerk- 

 ship in Wall street, New York, and went into business at Fort Ben'ton, Missouri 

 river, under charge of the Conrads, where the elk rubbed their velvet horns on 

 the lodge-pole pines in Judith Basin, and redskins laid low. 



In 1858, in July, while I was one of Geo. F. Brott's party of five, with C. C. 

 Andrews, Aleck Kincaid and others, driving a spike-tail horse team over the 

 "Red River Trail" from Minneapolis to Ft. Garry, we mt a string of 120 

 shrieking two-wheeled carts, nnironed, freighting furs from Selkirk to St. Paul, 

 and fighting mosquitoes across the prairie in the charge of half-breed Crees, one 

 to six carts drawn by oxen between the shafts. It was a tough chance in fly-time, 

 and we all suffered. The animals were rounded up at night and smudged, and 

 some of us had Bermuda tar ami oil for protection. There was no Winnipeg 

 then. That town was started in 1871. 



I spent the summer of 1859 among the lumber camps of the Aroostook and 

 Madawaska, in Maine, and the summer of 1860 in Labrador and Newfoundland, 

 bringing out the first photos of the interior ever taken, and the camera man, F. W. 

 Knowlton, is still at the same old stand at Northampton, Mass., at the age of 74. 

 I wrote up codfishing, cariboo hunting, gnat swarming, and the principal features 

 along shore and up the great Eskimo bay as far as the Hudson bay posts, Rigolet 

 and Northwest rivers. During the first part of the Civil War I ran the blockade 

 by land and water, taking in Nassau and Bermuda, and from 1863 to 1868 I 

 traveled over the Maritime provinces and lower Canada and their outlying islands, 

 Cape Breton, Anticosti and the Magdalens (Coffin island included), acting as 

 correspondent for the Halifax Citizen and St. John Telegraph. Joe Howe, the 

 "Blue nose" premier, then said that I knew the country better than he did. Much 

 of what I learned was printed in my "Fishing Tourist," which appeared in the 

 spring of 1873. 



I passed the winters of 1869-70 among the Sea Islands of Georgia and South 

 Carolina, and the five winters following in Florida, culminating with a book 

 entitled "Camp Life in Florida." During the ten following summers I was able to 

 do the Great Lakes, Georgian Bay, the back lakes of Ontario province, the St. 

 Lawrence river and many of its tributaries, Anticosti island, the north shore of 

 Lake Superior, the Nepigon, the Michigan peninsulas, Mackinac, the knobs of 

 Pennsylvania, covered by the Blooming Grove Park; the moonshine region of 

 western Virginia, North Carolina and East Tennessee, the coast highlands and 

 pine barrens of New Jersey, the interior of New York state and the tide water 

 regions of Delaware and Maryland. All interior excursions were made with 

 camping outfits by canoe, wagon and saddle. I used to travel light, excepting where 

 canoes were required, and never carried a lent until I was 54 years of age. It 

 was easy to make a camp or "lean-to" if the weather was bad, or to turn the canoe 

 over for a night's shelter and cover up under a rubber blanket. 



And that reminds me of a camp which Colin Campbell and I had at Hamilton 

 Pool on the Nepigon< fifteen years after. Campbell was a born Nova Scotian, and 

 is now a member of the Lawyers' Club in New York City. He has always been an 

 expert moose hunter, salmon fisher and mining prospector, and can "endure hard- 



