62 AN ANGLER'S REMINISCENCES. 



and in some localities are vulgarly yclept "grunts" by those who call themselves 

 good judges of music. 



I notice by the Bismarck Journal that a man named Harmonic has started out 

 alone from Livingston, on the Yellowstone, to make a canoe voyage to New 

 Orleans. It is easy enough to start, but not so easy to get through. The Yellow- 

 stone above Glendive is filled with wicked rapids and is the most dangerous part of 

 the cruise. Men often run the Yellowstone in suitable boats, and many are drowned 

 every year, notwithstanding. There is a gentleman here at Lake Minnetonka, a 

 professional oarsman and boat-builder, named Capt. John B. Brooks, formerly of 

 New Haven, Conn., who ran from Livingston to a point in Iowa, but his name 

 would carry him through where others would fail. He came down in a fifteen-foot 

 boat, the latter part of the- way through running ice in November, and suffered a 

 great deal of hardship. He passed the worst rapids by keeping the head of the 

 boat up stream and plying the oars to guide and steady her, dropping astern as 

 rapidly as good judgment and circumstances permitted. 



By and by you will hear from me in Alaska, and I hope to add something novel 

 to the contributed matter of the Angler. 



* Written in 1885. 



REMINISCENCES OF BIG LAKE. 



TWENTY-FIVE years ago this month of *June I started from St. Paul with a 

 prospecting party for the Red River Valley, from whose distant but now easily 

 accessible precincts I am at present writing. In those days there were no stage 

 coaches. There were very few houses a hundred miles north or west of the 

 embryo capital of Minnesota. The Red River Trail drew out its sinuous length 

 over an unexplored prairie to Pembina on the Canadian boundary, 400 miles away, 

 and over this route we made our tedious and lonely journey, not without danger of 

 molestation from marauding bands of Indians. Camping the first night at Big 

 Lake, some twenty miles from St. Anthony Falls, we found a single settler located 

 near the shore. He was sole monarch of the solitude. The lake was nearly circu- 

 lar one of those beautiful gems for which Minnesota is so famous and its pebbly 

 shores were encircled with a belt of lily pads, whose pure white blossoms breathed 

 fragrance into the atmosphere like the floral wreath of a rural bride. While hunting 

 for agates among the rounded stones on the margin a crank and dilapidated dugout 

 was discovered among the alders, and simultaneously the plash of some sort of 

 large fish on the outer rim of the pads suggested sport and its most favorable 

 opportunity. 



If a person could have walked with an elfin tread over the green enamelled 

 platform of those broad floating pads, he would have speedily discovered their 

 glossy surfaces to be populous with the lower orders of animal creation ; slippery 

 green batrachians, filmy spiders, wrigglers, caddis flies, beetles, ephemerae, and a 

 whole menagerie of creeping and winged insects. He would have soon learned why 

 the big fish were thus patroling the outer rim of the circle and foraging along the 

 border. A little scrutiny would have shown him that the lesser world of inferior 

 things is like the higher realm of human existence ; that there are reckless, careless 

 and self-opinionated among all classes; that many are self-willed and venturesome; 

 that often, when we are in the midst of fullest enjoyment and the confidence of 

 apparent security, danger lurks ; that death is hidden among the flowers and beneath 

 the cloth of gold. Unwary frogs would leap from the pads into the pellucid 

 depths, and awkward bugs tumble over the edges into the brink, hardly touching the 

 surface of the water ere they were swallowed into the capacious maw of a gigantic 



