Forest and Stream. 



A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 



NEW YORK, JANUARY 24, 1884. 



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CONTENTS. 



Editorial 



The Kennel. 



Tin' City of Columbus Disaster. 



A. K.R. 



Feed the Birds. 



Duke. 



After Caribou. 



A Challenge to Large Pointers. 



Camp-Fire Flickering*. 



Cincinnati Dog Show. 



The Voting. 



St. John Dog Shou-. 



She has Voted. 



A Well Deserved Compliment. 



The Sportsman Tourist. 



Canadian Kennel (Tub. ' 



Life Anion? tin- Blnckieel. -IX. 



Kennel Management. 



Between the Lakes. -i. 



Kennel Notes. 



Down the Yukon on a Raft. — iv. 



Rifle and Trap Shootlnq. 



Natural History. 



Range and Gallery. 

 The Trap. 



Winter Tales. 



Bird migration. 



Riverton Gun Club Tournament. 



Names of Gams Birds. 



Canoeing. 



Game Bag and Gun. 



San Francisco C. C. 



Shooting in Cuba. 



Amateur Canoe Building;.— iv. 



A Texas Thanksgiving. 



Single vs. Double. 



The Choice of Hunting Rifles. 



Winter Camp-Fire. 



Cold Cars in Mississippi. 



Mohican C. C, Albany. 



Philadelphia Notes 



A Canoe Blanket. 



White-Breasted Bears. 



Yachtlng. 



The Performance of Shotguns. 



A Modern Yacht. 



Rebounding Locks. 



Cruise of the Mabel. 





Cruise of the S. S. Sunbeam. 



Trouting on the Bigosli. 



The Chesapeake Bug Eve. 



A Fishing t lutflt. 



Tke Small Sharpie. 



To Holeb Falls. 



Yachting in German v. 



Fishing near Baltimore. 



A Gal.vav Hooker. 



FlSHC'ULTlTRE. 



The Proposed Eastern Associ- 



The Menhaden Question. 



ation. 



European Salmon Trout. 



Answers to Correspondents. 



the DisAsrM^gf Tms CITY OF COLUMBUS. 



THE splendid sleuuisiii'i.i City of Columbus drove full 

 speed on the Devil's Back, a well-known danger to 

 navigation, off Gay Head, Martha's Vineyard, in the clear 

 night of Jan. 18. Of the inamediate cause of the disaster 

 we will not speak. Investigation may disclose upon whom 

 the blame is to be laid. But once more, for the thousandth 

 time, the world has again to contemplate the perfect futility 

 of expecting the saving of life through the means now pro- 

 vided by law. Over one hundred persons were drowned 

 because they could not Imte the ship. 



It is one thing that the steamer should have been wrecked. 

 It is another that those on board were compelled to die, with 

 the shore within a stone's cast, for the lack of effective 

 appliances of escape. 



To the seaman, the idea of lowering a cockleshell of a 

 yaw] boat in a tossing sea, and the safe, transfer of passen- 

 gers half crazed with fear, madly rushing to the side in 

 surging crowds, each one battling fiercely in the selfish 

 struggle for life, is an idea at once so absurd and palpably 

 impractical that all the intricate system of blundering super- 

 vision, established by the governmental authorities and en- 

 forced through the sinecurists and parasites of a vicious 

 political system with spasmodic whim, appears like a pomp- 

 ous farce, a colossal sham practiced upon the unsuspecting 

 that cormorants may feather their nests under the guise of 

 law. 



Who are these people upon whom the traveling public has 

 to depend? It is difficult to restrain indignation at the im- 

 practicable officials whose utter incompetence to their task 

 has been proven hundreds of times over and over again, but 

 who live, draw fat salaries, and never puzzle their brains to 

 the extent of a single thought of microscopic proportions. 

 We have- great men iu Washington charged with the super- 

 vision of our steamships and their equipments. We have 

 general boards of inspectors and local underlings by the 

 score. The whole company of lazy self-complacents are of 

 no more service to the people than so many dummies stuffed 

 with straw. The combined wisdom, experience and induc- 



tive faculties of the incapable crew to whom the public 

 vainly looks for protection from the ignorance and reckless- 

 ness of private people is unequal to grasp the simplest of 

 simple provisions for the saving of human life in the most 

 likely disasters to be expected in traveling by sea. 



A raflel collides, she drives ashore, she catches tire and is 

 consumed, she leaks, fills and sinks. What then? The 

 passengers must have some practicable method of escaping ! 



And how do the law makers and dabsters meet the propo- 

 sition? In making a tour about the vessel with mouth and 

 eyes wide open, they are instructed by authority to count 

 "four," "six," or "eight" on their fingers. So many boats 

 slung inboard in a way they cannot be got out. Thenheads 

 come together, and a much-thumbed table of multiplication 

 informs dull brains that ' 'if" each boat holds tweuty, then 

 twenty time four makes eighty, twenty times six make one 

 hundred and twenty, and so on. "Therefore" a lugubrious 

 document is issued and the steamship certified properly 

 equipped to safely carry so many innocents through all perils 

 of the sea, as long so she does not meet those perils. 



The instant the vessel is overtaken by misfortune the 

 whole inspection service and the law authorizing its exist- 

 ence rise before us as partners in the crime of manslaughter 

 through the gross, culpable incompetency, and mental debil- 

 ity which ordain such worthless, abortive and chimerical 

 instruments of escape as a string of contemptible little dug- 

 outs which can seldom be launched, never take their com- 

 plement, are always totally unfit iu every respect to perfoim 

 the duty expected should they succeed in leaving the ship's 

 side, and with rare exceptions only prolong and intensify 

 the agony and swell the list of the lost. And why do those 

 in power persist in figuring away on boats swung to davits, 

 when wreck upon wreck demonstrates to the most obtuse 

 wooden man the truths here stated? Because their salaries 

 go on just the same, and why should they bother their heads 

 any more than they can help? If laws and regulations and 

 customs, passed down from the time the ark drove into bad 

 weather, are at fault, surely no official can help it. It is 

 nobody's concern, So it goes, and if wholesale sacrifices 

 follow fast upon one another till doomsday, the owlish offi- 

 cial will continue to creep around decks, make a chalk mark 

 for every boat, multiply, and then go to bed to recuperate 

 his exhausted brains or the vacancy where brains ought 

 to be. 



The ship owner is not free from blame. If he knows 

 anything at all about the business of carrying passengers, 

 he knows well the futility of trusting to boats and a mob of 

 newly shipped steamship hands, firemen and cibiu waiters. 

 In furnishing his vessel with such humbugs he complies 

 with the statutes of this world perhaps, but morally he is 

 to a great degree responsible for not providing means of 

 escape which shall be more than a mockery and the laugh- 

 ing stock of every cabin boy with three weeks' experience at 

 sea. 



As a method of clearing out from a sinking ship, the 

 boats so ostentatiously paraded in certificates of inspection 

 might as well be replaced by old hats. 



Nothing short of rafts of large area, incorporated in the 

 superstructure of the vessel, indestructible, automatic in 

 their action, and provisioned and supplied with, directions to 

 proceed upon such rafts at once in an emergency, upon 

 which the passengers can be driven and herded like cattle, 

 can ever offer a fair chance of retreat to a large number of 

 people uneonversant with the sea. A fourth-class mechanic 

 can compose the arrangement required. 



How many hundreds of victims is the sea to swallow, and 

 how many families are to be bowed down in grief, before 

 arrant humbug gives way to a few common-sense devices 

 which ordinary experience dictates? 



In AKOTHRR Column we print a circular from the Migra- 

 tion Committee of the American Ornithologists' Union. The 

 need of extended observation on the migration of birds is so 

 pressing that it will he a satisfaction to all who are interested 

 in ornithology to learn of the energetic action that is being 

 taken by the Union. A glance at the names of those who 

 have been chosen as superintendents of the various districts, 

 shows that the selections have been made with care, and 

 thai these superintendends are competent as well as energetic 

 and enthusiastic ornithologists. We are satisfied from our 

 knowledge of those who have this matter in hand that the 

 work will be well done and hope that all collectors will do 

 what they can to aid the work. Full credit will be given to 

 those who are willing to help it along, aud if a large number 

 of workers shall be enlisted the results cannot fail to be of 

 value. 



FEED THE BIRDS. 

 TT^EED the game, now that the surface of the whole coun : 

 *- try is deeply covered with snow. Build little shelters 

 among the cedais in the old pastures, at the borders of the 

 swamp, and in the edges of the wood, beneath which the 

 birds may take refuge during the snowfall. Scatter, around 

 and beneath these, a little corn, oats, buckwheat or screen : 

 iugs. Carry out a bushel" of hayseed from the barn, and 

 make little trails from the shelter in different directions, so 

 that all the birds that pass near the place will be likely to 

 cross one or more of them. Food is so scarce now that they 

 will follow up these trails, picking among the stuff in their 

 search for the seeds of weeds, until they come to the place 

 where the food is. 



An easy method of making a shelter is by placing two old 

 logs six or eight feet apart and throwing a few fence rails 

 across them. Ou the rails lay some short brush. This will 

 furnish a warm, dry place for the birds to live, and if yotl 

 supply them with a little food at intervals they will stay 

 there all winter. Great, tender-hearted old "Nessmuk" 

 provides for the birds and the beasts about his home among 

 the Pennsylvania hills, and has told us how much delight 

 he takes in seeing his beneficiaries come by day and by 

 night to feed on the stores which he places about his house. 

 Let each one of our readers do something during this bitter 

 weather for the wild creatures about his home, and he will 

 find that the good that he does, even to the least of these, 

 will be a source of much pleasure to him. 



English vs. American.— Ultra-fashionable society is 

 often ridiculed because it apes the way of our cousins across 

 the water. The humorous papers are fond of holding up 

 for our amusement the American young and old folks who 

 devote their time to a self-transformation into something 

 outlandish and foreign. The tendency to imitate England 

 has invaded that vast and undefined sphere of activity de- 

 nominated the "sporting world." Old-fashioned American 

 "sports" are going out of favor. Turkey shooting matches, 

 once the pride and joy of the solid men in the community, 

 have lost favor, and in some States are under the ban of the 

 law. Side hunts are conspicuous for their rarity. Gander- 

 pulling is one of the lost arts. And what have we in their 

 place? The pursuit of the odorous anise-seed bag, or per- 

 haps the mad rush after the hobbled fox — a caiicature of 

 the English fox hunting. Out in Missouri they have intro* 

 ducid from Great Britain the "carted stag" sport. At 

 Kansas City the other day a captured deer was let out from 

 confinement, and a gang of forty dogs with a number of 

 horses and humans set out in pursuit, and in due time ran 

 the beast down. 



"Deadheads." — We are in receipt of frequent applica- 

 tions from individuals who wish to act as regular corre- 

 spondents. They request credentials, that they many obtain 

 free passes or reduced rates over the railroad Hues and may 

 "deadhead" at the hotels. Our uniform reply to nil applica- 

 tions of this kind is that we have no such accredited corre 

 spondeuls, and never give credentials. We used to furnish 

 such certificates, and oue man has been beating his way all 

 over the West and Northwest on credentials given from this 

 office nearly ten years ago. We now give certificates to no 

 one unless directly connected with this office. We cannot 

 afford to let deadhead advertisements of railroads and hotels 

 cumber our valuable advertising pages, and we don't pro- 

 pose to let every man who wants a free ride pay for it by 

 puffs iu our reading columns. Sportsmen tourists like to be 

 informed about routes and hotel accommodations. We are 

 always glad to have such particulars for publication, when 

 they are written to give information. 



The Clat Tournament. — Active preparations are made 

 for the clay-pigeon tournament which will be held in Chi- 

 cago next May. We understand from the managers that 

 much interest in the event has been manifested in different 

 sections of the country, and from all sides come reports of 

 teams in training. We take pleasure in noting the growing 

 favor of the clay -pigeon. Will correspondents who have 

 experimented with different sizes of shot in clay-pigeon 

 shooting give us the results of their tests'.' 



Mr. Rowland E. Robinson, whose cotes ou the snow- 

 walkers are printed in our Natural History columns, has a 

 readable paper ou "The Merino Sheep in America" in the 

 February Century, and one ou winter fishing in Lippimotf.t. 



