I04 



THE NIDIOLOGIST 



tried; then upon any official pretense many 

 canie, principally actuated by a long pent-up 

 curiosity. 



My two sons were a great comfort to me, and 

 together during my imprisonment we rambled 

 for months all over the country to which I was 

 restricted by virtue of my arrest. 



A place called " The Milk Ranch," about two 

 miles west of the fort, was a favorite resort of 

 ours. There was a superb canyon there; its 

 massive rocky sides were several hundred feet 

 in depth, and its gorge led far back into the 

 pine-clad mountains. A beautiful mountain 

 stream coursed through the entire length of this 

 canyon, and upon emerging near the ranch, 

 s])read out upon a lovely green prairie meadow 

 beyond as a glistening, though modest, river. 

 This stream was a playful forest child during 

 all fair weather, but let a New Mexican rain- 

 storm come up and it at once responded to the 

 temj)est, and up the canyon it became very 

 quickly a giant in its strength. My oldest boy 

 and myself nearly lost our lives in the canyon 

 on one occasion under such circumstances, 

 when the water rose from an average of a foot 

 or rather more in depth to a turbulent torrent 

 of five or six feet in about ten minutes. It 

 rolled me over once or twice, while I was handi- 

 cajjped by having my son round the waist with 

 one arm and holding my gun in my other 

 hand. 



The interesting White-throated Swifts nested 

 high up in the walls of that canyon, but in such 

 inaccessible places we could never secure their 

 eggs, and at that time they had never been 

 taken by the oologist. Of the birds themselves 

 we secured quite a number, and even they are 

 by no means common in ornithological collec- 

 tions. Every once in a while a small flock of 

 Ducks would be put up in the stream at the 

 entrance to this canyon. These were usually 

 either Mallards or Green-wing Teals, but one 

 time five or six of the lovely Cinnamon Teals 

 were flushed. We rarely got more than two 

 barrels into them, and then at too close ([uar- 

 ters, when they would wheel about and fly far 

 down stream out on the prairies. They were 

 not much to be blamed for their fright,* for the 

 echoes from the two shots in the canyon would 

 make noise enough for a battery of artillery to 

 have opened upon them — a perfect roar. 



We could always find splendid specimens of 

 the Arizona sfjuirrel in this locality, but our 

 favorite among the squirrels about Wingate was 

 Abert's, and those we only obtained in a wild, 

 rugged, mountainous country to the east of the 

 fort. There were bear over on that side, too, 

 with a few black -tailed deer. 



North of us it was treeless and barren, and 

 we rarely went far in that direction. In any 



event my arrest limited me to less than a mile 

 that way, and there was nothing else for it. 

 Often I was sorry for this, as at three or four 

 miles we came to great buttes cut out by 

 erosion, and very near there, in plain sight 

 from the fort, was the famous " Navajo 

 Church," one of nature's grandest sculptur- 

 ings. 



This last is well shown in the second plate 

 to this article, and were one of the train men 

 and his mule over at its base they would hardly 

 be discernible in the photograph from which 

 this jjlate was made. Formerly the Navajo 

 Indians used to bury their dead near there, and 

 it was still a good place to sometimes find a 

 skull of one of that tribe, or even a whole skele- 

 ton. Before leaving Wingate I got both. 



There was another reason why I was sorry 

 we could not get over on that side, and that 

 was because it was a grand place to find fossils. 

 Some splendid specimens have come from the 

 range over back of those buttes, and it will well 

 repay the visit of the palaeontologist some time 

 in the future. 



Most of the birds I collected at Wingate 

 were the smaller land varieties of that geograph- 

 ical area. Water birds \vere very scarce, as 

 there was nothing to induce them to either 

 come or tarry there. One winter there was an 

 extraordinary migration of those lovely birds, 

 the Evening Grosbeak, and I made up, with 

 the assistance of my sons, a fine series of skins 

 and skeletons of them. I brought a male and 

 female East with me alive, in a cage, and had 

 them for over two years. They were the first 

 recorded cases of the bird living in confine- 

 ment, but I never could get them to breed in 

 the big cage in which they were kept. 



But my story, I see, is getting long, and we 

 must put off the rest for another time. The 

 fact of the matter is, my Fort Wingate expe- 

 riences would make quite a book, and, although 

 we say it ourselves, not altogether an uninterest- 

 ing one. With trial and imprisonment thrown 

 in, the days spent there were by no means un- 

 happy ones. Even /W7i', as I look back on that 

 trial and imprisonment, they seem to me, as 

 they did very much at the time, merely a 

 chai)ter in the drama of one's life career, and 

 as in the case of all great experiences, of more 

 value by far to the one tried than to the govern- 

 ment that conducted the trial. 



/i 



Tmk Yorkshire IVeekly Post (Leeds, England) re- 

 produces, with a flattering notice of The Nidiologist, 

 our unique illustration, from photograph of a young 

 Cowbird in a Yellow Warbler's nest. 



