EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. 38 



hunters and trappers up to the date of his "Life in the Far West." Mountains, 

 lakes and buttes commemorate their names : Fremont's Peak, Lake Bonneville, 

 Williams Creek, and the rest. Capt. Jim Bridger wrote up the Yellowstone country 

 and was classed by incredulous readers with the father of liars. Jim Beckworth, 

 a mestizo, born in St. Louis, whose whole family had been massacred by Indians 

 on the plains, got someone to edit his remarkable experiences and put them into 

 book form. Lieuts. Emory and Geo. M. Wheeler, and Profs. Suckley and Bailey, 

 all government experts, had followed on the trail of Lewis and Clarke, Pike 

 Fremont and Marcus Whitman (a pupil of my grandfather), and laid open the 

 secrets of the Great Divide on both slopes. I suppose it was the perusal of these 

 books which drew me to the unexplored region west of the Mississippi, which was 

 marked "desert" on my school map. In 1840 there was not a modern hamlet west 

 of the Mississippi ; only remnants of the prehistoric civilization in the southwest 

 and northwest. The Mexican war opened up a part of the southwest and Santa Fe 

 traders and Forty-niners did the rest. Mormon emigration and the Oregon 

 colonists laid open the northwest, and the completion of the Union Pacific railroad, 

 in 1866, let in the riff-raff. After that existence was made uncomfortable for 

 buffaloes and Indians. My old Pennsylvania friend, Starkweather, had married 

 a Norwegian girl and moved out from Potter county to the Menominee district in 

 Wisconsin in 1857, and I fell in with him out there the next year. At the same 

 time I met up with Dr. W. Frank Powell ("White Beaver"), of the Buffalo Bill 

 type, at La Crosse, when it was only a steamboat landing and grain warehouse 

 under the bluff. I also made the acquaintance of Gen. La Due and Banker 

 Follett, both still living at great age in Minnesota. 



The renaissance of the gentleman angler had not yet revived in society. There 

 had been a hiatus of four centuries since Dame Juliana Berners was Priestess of 

 the high hook, which even Izaak Walton and Kit North could not awaken into a 

 furore. This interval was devoted to commercial fishing off the coasts of Green- 

 land, Labrador, Newfoundland and Sable Island. Nevertheless, there was dear old 

 William C. Prime, of "Lonesome Lake" in the White mountains, up back of the 

 Profile House, who wrote effusively of the "Old House by the River" and the 

 "Owl Creek Cabin Letters," in 1848; and there were others whose advent into the 

 province of fluvial sport helped to inaugurate a new era. Prime died at East 23d 

 street. New York, a year ago, at the age of 83, surrounded by his curios and 

 trophies. It was the last house retained for residence purposes in the block. But 

 before I go farther I will say that to cover the list of sportsmen whom I have met 

 during my travels through all the states, provinces and territories in the United 

 States and Canada, from the Arctic belt to the Caribbean sea, and mention them all, 

 would require perhaps 2,000 names. Of these I have filed autographs of one 

 thousand. Nevertheless I will begin to shuck out the pile in my next paper, which 

 I trust will have more red ears than this one. 



