332 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



settlers who won our land; the bridge-builders, the road- 

 makers, the forest-fellers, the explorers, the land-tillers, 

 the mighty men of their hands, who laid the foundations 

 of this great commonwealth. 



There are good descriptions of big game hunting in 

 the books of writers like Catlin, but they come in inci- 

 dentally. Elliott's " South Carolina Field Sports " is a 

 very interesting and entirely trustworthy record of the 

 sporting side of existence on the old Southern plantations, 

 and not only commemorates how the planters hunted 

 bear, deer, fox, and wildcat on the uplands and in the 

 cane-brakes, but also gives a unique description of har- 

 pooning the great devil-fish in the warm Southern waters. 

 John Palliser, an Englishman, in his " Solitary Hunter," 

 has given us the best descriptions of hunting in the far 

 West, when it was still an untrodden wilderness. An- 

 other Englishman, Ruxton, in two volumes, has left us a 

 most vivid picture of the old hunters and trappers them- 

 selves. Unfortunately, these old hunters and trappers, 

 the men who had most experience in the life of the wil- 

 derness, were utterly unable to write about it; they could 

 not tell what they had seen or done. Occasional attempts 

 have been made to get noted hunters to write books, either 

 personally or by proxy, but these attempts have not as 

 a rule been successful. Perhaps the best of the books 

 thus produced is Hittell's " Adventures of James Capen 

 Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter." 



The first effort to get men of means and cultivation 

 in the Northern and Eastern States of the Union to look 

 at field sports in the right light was made by an English- 



