FOREST AND STREAM 
890, 
A WEEKLY JOURNAL, 
Devoted to Ftbi.d and Aquatic Sports, Practical Natural 
History, Fish Culture, the Protection op Game, Preserva¬ 
tion op Forests, and the Inculcation in Men and Women op 
a Healthy Interest in Out-Door Beobeation and Study : 
PUBLISHED BY 
FOREST AND STREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY. 
—AT— 
No. Ill FULTON STREET, NEW YORK. 
[Post Oppice Box 2832.1 
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NEW YORK, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1S79. 
To Correspondents. 
All communications whatever, intended for publication, must be 
accompanied with real name of tho writer as aguaranty of good 
faith and he addressed to Forest and Stream Publishing Com¬ 
pany. NameswUlnotbepublishedif objection be made. Anony¬ 
mous communications will not be regarded. 
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brief notes of their movements and transactions. 
Nothing will be admitted to any department of the paper that 
umv not. he read with propriety in the home circle. 
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remited to us is lost. 
E3T' Trade supplied by American News Company. 
To the Ladies, Greeting ! —When woman comes of 
her own accord and without any coaxing, she comes to 
stay. A Woman’8 Department in the Forest and 
Stream may therefore be considered a permanent feature 
of the paper. We did not invite this, we simply accepted 
it when thrust upon us. And we must confess to very 
great satisfaction at this turn of affairs. 
The Forest and Stream is a man’s paper; conducted 
by men, for men, about men. It is not, however, nor 
has it ever been, a journal without interest to the fairer 
part of the human race. Sportsmen read it,, and so do 
sportsmen’s mothers and sisters and wives and daughters. 
We have always tried to make a clean paper of it, and 
we may point with pride to our success. Now that 
woman has expressed her approval of us by asking for a 
comer to be devoted to herself, what can we do but grant 
her request, partition off a space, and so odd to our 
strength as a family paper? 
This journal goes into thousands of homes, where its 
fair readers will welcome such an innovation designed 
for their benefit. Let us define just what we propose to 
do, or rather have them do. The Woman's Department 
is to be practical. To make it such we invite from our 
lady readers recipes for cooking the game brought home 
by their husbands and sons ; methods of household home¬ 
made decoration and adornment; discoveries in botany 
and care of house plants ; indoor family recreation for 
winter evenings; out-of-door study and recreation in 
summer ; gardening ; housekeeping, and a. thousand and 
one other topics. 
Contributors to this department are requested to ob¬ 
serve the following suggestions in sending in their 
matter: 
1. Say all possible in the least number of words. This 
will make your own communication readable, and 
give some one else a chance to say something too. Twelve 
short papers are better than six long ones. Skip the in¬ 
troduction. Come right to the point. 
2. Don’t attempt fine writing and highfalutin, but 
write plain prose. 
3. Write only on one side of the sheet. 
4. Don’t abbreviate. 
5. When you are through, stop ! 
The Pabmachene Lake Country.—T he paper pub¬ 
lished elsewhere, descriptive of a trip to Parmachene 
Lake, contains very much, most valuable information 
about that wilderness country. We call attention to it as 
a well written article. 
THE TROUT OF THE PAST. 
W HEN we had occasion, last September, to make 
the sweeping assertion that “ all the combined sci¬ 
ence of fish culture seems to have been unable to rehabil¬ 
itate fresh waters which have passed within the precincts 
of civilization, or to produce by artificial propagation, 
more than a flabby and insipid counterfeit of their natu¬ 
ral denizens,” we at once provoked a disclaimer from gen¬ 
tlemen who had not seriously enough contemplated how 
very nearly the wild mountain trout of our primitive for¬ 
ests (not to mention other species) have become extinct. 
That such is the lamentable fact, however, is readily at¬ 
tested by the spread of human population and the occu¬ 
pation by settlements and farms of nearly the whole of 
what was a wilderness domain two hundred years ago. 
Even within the memory of men not old, nearly all the 
brooks of New England teemed with speckled trout, and 
a hundred fish could easily be caught in a single day in 
streams which do not now contain a solitary survivor, 
and so also of the Middle States. In far-off Michigan 
and Wisconsin, once famed for their abundant trout 
streams, and in the remoter regions of Canada, there are 
waters almost barren, which but Jive years since readily 
yielded an overflowing creel. It is only in the almost 
inaccessible seclusion of a few isolated regions that these 
beautiful representative of a once universal family are 
now found in any abundance. Even the Yellowstone 
does not insure the same return to the adventurer as it 
did years ago. If the angler would be sure of his quest 
he must go to the far-off streams of Idaho and of Utah, 
to Coeur d’Alene Lake, and the noble mountain streams 
which are traversed by the covert trail which the steal¬ 
thy Indian seeks to hide from the search of the intruding 
white man. Thirty years ago the Mormon immigration 
was flowing in full tide into the recesses of the uttermost 
western -wilderness, where greattroutin liveries unknown 
to eastern eyes sported everywhere in countless myriads. 
At present the angler who debarks at Ogden, or other 
central points, must needs drive twenty miles before he 
can find unalloyed sport with rod and line. 
Where in the valleys of the San Joachin and the Sacra¬ 
mento, in California, are the quiet places which we used 
to fish in younger days ? Where are the great salmon of 
the Russian River? The salmon trout of Kings River 
and the Fresno? There are champagne corks and empty 
peach-cans strewn along every accessible channel-way 
throughout the State, and although at Merced and Pilar- 
citos we can still get good fishing, with good cheer and a 
welcome hand from brother anglers who minister there, 
the localities lack the primitive wildness which once 
made them charming and enchanting. In the Big Woods 
of Wisconsin the steam tramways of-the loggers have 
driven the game into densest cover, and the autumn 
drives have scraped the river bottoms of every trout. 
Where are the barrels of fish which.used to lie in rafts on 
the bottom of the Kinnikinnik and the Rush River? 
Where are the trout of the cold and pellucid Jordan, in 
Micliigan, which only five years ago seemed to swarm in 
exhaustless hosts? Where in the mountains of Pennsyl¬ 
vania and Virginia shall we look for those choice places 
where the hunter built his solitary cabin when we were 
boys, and the sight of five fresh cat skins pinned to the 
axe-hewn walls greeted our wondering eyes as we 
emerged from the forest into the little clearing ? Where 
are the speckled denizens of the pastoral streams of New 
Jersey? where are the wild trout of the Racquette and 
the pre-empted pools of the Adirondacks ? where, indeed, 
are the big trout of Maine ? the four-pound fish of the 
Tabusintac, in New Brunswick, where fifteen years ago 
450 trout fell to two rods in a single day’s fishing ? the 
glancing fins of the upper Jacques Cartier? thebig strings 
of Muskoka ? and the great yields of the hundred lakes 
and streams of Nova Scotia? Where, indeed, are the 
trout of our own silvery Bronx, flowing at our very doors, 
whose bucolic charms were extolled in verse by the la¬ 
mented poet whose contemporaries still enjoy a vigorous 
old age? Let those of us who have passed the age of 
forty-five search the whole country through and see how 
many of their favorite boyhood haunts remain intact or 
undepleted; then let them challenge our initial posi¬ 
tion and answer if the trout of America is not essentially 
“ A Thing of the Past.” There are others beside ourselves 
who sensibly appreciate these truths. Quite recently 
there fell under our notice a letter written from the pin¬ 
eries of Wisconsin by the Rev. Myron H. Reed, of Indi¬ 
anapolis, whose pen catches tho inspiration of the foam¬ 
ing brooks; and it repeats to the eoho our own convic¬ 
tions on this subject, when it says:— 
This is probably the last generation of trout fishers. The 
children will notbe able to find any. Already there are 
well-trodden paths by every stream in Maine, in New 
York and in Michigan. I know of but one river in North 
America by the side of winch you will find no paper 
collar or other evidences of civilization ; it is the Name¬ 
less River. Not that trout will cease to be. They will 
be hatched by machinery, and raised in ponds, and fat¬ 
tened on chopped liver, and grow flabby and lose their 
spots. The trout of the restaurant will not cease to be. 
He is no more like the trout of the wild liver than tho 
fat and songless reed bird is like the bobolink. Gross 
feeding and easy pond-life enervate and deprave him . 
The trout that the children will know only by legend 
is the gold-sprinkled, living arrow of the Whitewater— 
able to zig-zag up the cataract, able to loiter in the rapids 
—whose dainty meat is the glancing butterfly. 
This apostrophe of our sympathetic friend is uttered 
with the spirit of the last red man, in whose veins flows 
the full, untainted blood of his race, and who overlooks, 
from a commanding cliff, the squalid camps of his half- 
breed followers pitched in the suburbs of a border town. 
We do not declare that the finny representatives of the 
ancient family of Salmo fontinalis will speedily become 
extinct in America. No doubt, when every one of the 
older States shall become as densely settled as Great 
Britain itself, and all the rural aspects of the crowded 
domain resemble the suburban surroundings of our Bos¬ 
ton ; when every feature of the pastoral landscape shall 
wear the fi n ished appearance of European lands; and 
every verdant field be closely cropped by lawn mowers 
and guarded by hedges ; and every purling stream which 
meanders through it has its water-bailiff, we shall stall 
have speckled trout from which the radiant spots have 
faded, and tasteless fish, to catch at a dollar per pound 
(as we already have on Long Island), and all the appur¬ 
tenances and appointments of a genuine English trouting 
privilege and a genuine English “outing.” In those 
future days, not long hence to come, some venerable 
piscator, in whose memory still lingers the joy of fishing, 
the brawling stream which tumbled over the locks in 
the tangled wild wood, and moistened the arbutus and the 
bunchberries which garnished its banks, will totter forth 
to the velvety edge of some peacefully-flowing stream, 
and having seated himself on a convenient point in a re¬ 
volving easy chair, placed there by his careful attend¬ 
ant, cast right and left for the semblance of sport long 
dead. Hosts of liver-fed fish will rush to the signal for 
their early morning meal, and from the centre of the boil 
which follows the fall of the handsful thrown in, my pis¬ 
cator of the ancient days will hook a two-pound trout, 
and play him hither and yon, from surface to bottom, 
without disturbing the pampered gormands which are 
gorging themselves upon the disgusting viands ; and 
when he has leisurely brought him to hand at last, and 
the gillie has scooped him with his landing net, he will 
feel in his capacious pocket for Ins last trade dollar, and 
giving his friend the tip, shuffle back to his house, and 
lay aside his rod forever. 
Fish such as these will ever reward, pecuniarly and in¬ 
dustrially, the labors of the fish culturist; they will amuse 
the rising angler, who has read the legendary accounts of 
old-time trout fishing, and titillate the uneducated palates 
of young men in whom the instinct of angling is inherited 
and ineradicable ; but he who would indulge the ecstatip 
pastime of which great pens have written and noble 
poets sung, must fish now. Those to be bom here¬ 
after will never have tho privilege of fishing for the trout 
as it was—the “ trout of the past.” It may be, possibly, 
that in some favored Caledonia creek, where the descend¬ 
ants of a master hand like Seth Green’s hold perpetual 
watch and ward—whose waters have never been wholly 
depleted of their native stock since the beginning, and 
whose natural food both gods and men have permitted to 
grow upon its banks for their constant supply—it may be 
that some remnants of the ancient family will 
long he found in days to come, but they will be regard¬ 
ed as ttie relics of a Pompeii exhumdfi, or the strange 
golden creatures dug up from the ruins of the Aztec. 
race. 
Let us not be supposed to discourage even the feeblest 
effort to cultivate fish-food; we have assiduously en¬ 
couraged this industry from the beginning. But we may 
be pardoned for the tears we shed over the coming doom 
of a glorious race of aborigines, as graceful and wild as 
the native Indians themselves. 
Two Interesting Exhibitions. —The International 
Dairy Fair, which was so remarkably successful last 
year, is repeated this season. The Exhibition was opened 
last Monday night, with a large display of domestic and 
foreign products, methods, and machinery. 
Madison Square Garden has a show of prize American 
birds, Durham cattle, and sheep. The herd are from the 
farm of R. W, Gillett, near Springfield, HI., and have al¬ 
ready made their fame in the live-stock world. Among 
the sheep will be some of the celebrated Southdown 
breed, the Leicester and Cotswold breeds, and some extra- 
fed Canadian sheep. The Garden will be open every day 
from 9 a. M. till 10 f. m., under the management of John 
AV. Hamilton. 
Resignation. —We regret to inform our readers that 
Mr. Wm. M. Tileston, who for the past five years, with 
the exception of a short interval, has been connected 
with this paper, has resigned his position as asso¬ 
ciate editor. The cause of our loss is, that Mr. Tileston 
has other interests which require his undivided atten¬ 
tion, although we hope that the work of his pen, which 
produced such pleasant sketches as “Santa Monica," 
“Safety Valve,” and others, depicting life and sport in 
California and the antipodes, may still be seen in our 
columns. Mr. Tileston leaves us with the very best 
wishes of all our Company for his future success. 
