THE BLACK BEAR OF PENNSYLVANIA 35 



time, was shot by Edgar Austin Schwenk, of East- 

 ville, Clinton County, on the old Buffalo Path, Union 

 County, November 29, 1912. The animal which 

 weighed dressed 250 pounds, was in its prime coat 

 and in color resembled a fine Canadian Red Fox. The 

 various shades of lemon, tan and fulvous, shining like, 

 burnished gold in the sunlight, make it a trophy well 

 worth possessing. It is now in the collection of the 

 writer of this article. Nnmrod Schwenk, when inter- 

 viewed in the Spring of 1915, stated that he believed 

 that there was another bear of the same coloring in the 

 White Deer Creek forests, as .he had come upon its 

 bed several times, finding hairs which the monster 

 had rubbed off in his slumbers. The White Deer 

 Creek region was a famous County for bear hunting. 

 Reuben McCormick. born in 1828, says that the 

 hillsides were lined with stone bear pits, resembling 

 coke ovens, where the brutes by stepping on a re- 

 volving door on the top of 'these tumuli, on the under 

 side of which a piece of meat was fa'stened, would 

 be dropped into the barrows helpless captives. The 

 range of the bears in Pennsylvania is gradually becom- 

 ing more circumscribed. In colonial times, they came 

 as near to Philadelphia as Germantown, as told in 

 Watson's "Annals," now they are gone from the Blue 

 mountains along the Western and Northern bound- 

 aries of Berks and Lehigh Counties, although they 

 were noticed there not infrequently until after the 

 Civil war. C. H. McNeely, a retired "Pennsy" rail- 

 roader, born in 1838, says that during the Civil war, 



