PARK REGION OF MINNESOTA. 55 



healthy women, and hearty children, who, thank goodness, live to leaven the soggy, 

 half-baked sodality of jeunesse doree who would incontinently frown them out. 

 Therefore let the true disciples of the rod and gun, and the women with the sun 

 hats and bloomers go up and possess the land forthwith. All the lakes are filled 

 with fish in variety astonishing. There are pike, pickerel, pike-perch muscallonge, 

 black bass, silver bass, rock bass, calico bass, striped bass, white and yellow perch, 

 croppies, sheeps heads, suckers, red horse, sunfish, stem-winders, bullheads, white- 

 fish, sturgeon, and that rare variety of coregonus termed tullibee. And, blessed 

 be the fact ! the domain is free, not hedged in like most of the rugged wilderness 

 regions of the west and east. Ah, my comrades with the blanching hair ! where 

 are the haunts of our youth? What pleasures of angling we have had in the 

 preterit ! and w r hither shall we look in the future unless it be to the Land o' Lakes ! 

 An echo comes out from the glens of the Adirondacks : "Are they not all pre- 

 served f" and iteration booms forth from the Laurentian watershed : "Are we not 

 preserved?" Well, yes ; quite so. So are finnan haddies and salt mackerel. Along 

 the high crags and in the deep glens I read everywhere the posted notices : "No 

 trespassing." "No fishing here," and I find that vast areas have been made exclusive 

 by law, and that the rich have forged the flat. All along the pathless woods where 

 moccasin tread scarce disturbs the deer, I see the placards as flamboyant as the 

 signs of Mandrake Pills and Schenck's Bitters in New Jersey, proclaiming that 

 only the lord of the manor is entitled to fish or hunt on the forty-mile tract which 

 he has sequestrated, and that this gilt-edged club of ten has vast territorial rights 

 which are beyond encroachment; and I see no open vista through which a hopeful 

 ray of light protrudes for impecunious toilers, who anticipate for eleven weary- 

 months the fruitless outing assigned to the twelfth. And all the Populist legisla- 

 tures, which form like fungi on the body politic, can bring no remedy, or do more 

 than voice the popular discontent. So I reflect and ask : "What is the perhaps 

 vulgar but very numerous public eventually to do for its fishing?" Must it forego 

 its inherent birthright as a community and crush out its instinct? Where are the 

 ninety and nine to go when every known place is pre-empted by the rich? 



* Last fall I was up on the White Earth Indian Reservation, twenty-five miles 

 north of Detroit. Twenty-five hundred red men domiciliate there, where they 

 cultivate small farms and the rudimental amenities of civilization. It is a regal 

 domain, heavily timbered, with much morass and tangle interspersed. Like the 

 "Black Forest" of Germany, it is sequestrated to the lords regnant and harbors 

 many deer and bear, with millions of wild fowl and small game. Mallards, wood 

 ducks, and some other varieties breed abundantly. Otters, minks, muskrats, cranes, 

 herons, buzzards, hawks, ospreys, squirrels, timber-grouse, hedgehogs and gray 

 rabbits are there and propagate. By invitation of a resident, the visitor may hunt, 

 but not otherwise, unless he marries into the tribe and becomes a squaw man ; so 

 that the game is hardly worth the candle. Taking a redskin from this section, who 

 had wandered down to Detroit with some roots, skins and small wares to sell, we 

 paddled down the chain of lakes to Fergus Falls, fishing the outlets for black bass, 

 and took the Great Northern Railroad at that point for return. One day the 

 ^camp served a bold osprey a shabby trick by transfixing a fish with a spike to a 

 square board and setting it adrift. Then the osprey dropped down on the bait 

 with a whack, and immolated himself on the point of the spike. Injun big medi- 

 cine wagh ! 



* The foregoing chapter was written sixteen years ago, by Mr. Charles Hallock, and is as 

 interesting now as then. EDITOR. 



