EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. Ml 



mountaineers, but our Springfield carbines proved superior to their Kentucky rifles. 

 The record of this trip occupied a page -of the New York Herald soon after. 



Returning to the Nepigon, as before mv long digression: I was saying that 

 no fee was required from anglers. The monster trout and pik6 were as free to 

 our hand as if we owned the royal preserve ourselves. And when we arrived' at 

 Nepigon House on the Lake, factor Henri Le Ronde and his half-breed son 

 Charley, who had been educated at Toronto University, showed us a 16-lb. 

 speckled trout, which I believe is still the record fish of the species fontinalis. 

 On July 4 they put up a series of canoe races for Indians, both sexes, and for 

 twelve, fifteen and eighteen feet craft (one paddle, two paddles, four and eight 

 paddles), and Campbell and I won in the two-paddle class with a twelve- foot birch. 



But bless me ! how long I am getting to that aboriginal menu at Hamilton 

 Pool. Guests of the Canadian Camp Dinner at the Hotel Astor would become 

 impatient by this time, but hardly ravenous, I think, when they saw the viands. 

 The how of it was this way: Colin Campbell, my angling friend, and I were 

 enjoying the evening meal which the handy John Watt had put up for us, when 

 we heard a wrangle in the guide's quarter, and went out to ascertain the cause. 

 We found our three Indian paddlers seated around a blanket playing cards. The 

 stakes were on the middle of the blanket. It seems that they had trapped a gravid 

 hare that day, and opened out three immature young ones. These were the prizes 

 contested for, and each of the players was eager. When the case was decided the 

 winner raked in his plunder, and forthwith proceeded to spit each one, hair and 

 all, and toast them over the fire. When all were good and crisp he ate them as 

 one would bite case sausages, and he was that greedy that he never offered to 

 share with the others; but Campbell and I did not hasten to be invited. 



Ravenous ! I was on my way to the Red river portage, or rather to the 

 Culebra Cut of that day, which was to open navigation from Red river to the 

 Mississippi, when I wandered off to the Nepigon, and I only have now to add that 

 the seventy-foot steamboat, "Anson Northrup," which had been hauled over the 

 prairie in detail and put together at the entrance of the passage through the 

 marsh, ready to proceed, was never floated ! Her bones are there yet, and I 

 believe that Capt. Griggs, of Grand Forks, N. D., who was to take her through, is 

 also hung up somewhere twixt heaven and earth, if not still living at Grand Forks. 

 Yet I think that the real pioneer of Red river navigation was Capt. A. E. Maloney. 

 He brought the first steamboat up in 1872, continued freighting for four years, and 

 then became proprietor of the "Ingalls House" at Grand Forks. Old Charlie 

 Cavileer, for a long while in the Hudson 1 Bay Company at Fort Selkirk, and for 

 many years postmaster at Pembina, could tell us if he were living; but he died 

 five years ago at the age of 86 or so ; or Bill Moorhead might know, or Nelson E. 

 Nelson, the old customs officer there for a quarter of a century ; or ex-Repre- 

 sentative Jud La Moure, who started so many towns in the northwest corner of 

 Dakota Ter. in the 70's, and for whom la Moure county in N. Dakota is now 

 named. All the parties I have named were pioneer hunters and marksmen of 

 high order as long as forty-five years ago, or more, but the keenest of all cracka- 

 jacks in that region is old Cavileer' s son Ed, a younger man, who is now post- 

 master at Pembina, like his father before him. For ducks, chickens, geese and 

 all the game of the country he has no rival, and his gun or pistol are just as good 

 as a hammer to drive nails and plug swinging coins. I shot with him often. 



It was in August, 1880, that I completed the "Hotel Hallock," on the line of the 

 Minneapolis and Manitoba railroad, in Kittson county, and we had some marvelous 



