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EDITORIAL 165 
fired from a shotgun. Apparently the body had 
been in the water for about two weeks. In the 
pockets of the dead man’s clothes were found 
a gold watch, pair of binoculars that he always 
carried on his trips, a pair of eyeglasses, a 
memorandum book, containing letters be- 
smeared and blotted by the water, a pair of hand- 
cuffs, a bunch of keys and two hundred and 
eight dollars and eighty-five cents in money. 
His revolver was gone. 
Houk was too good a warden. 
When the reader reflects that there are just 
as desperate men in almost every community 
as the murderer or murderers of poor Houk, he 
must surely feel it his duty to discourage any 
criticism of the local game warden or his work. 
If the warden neglects his duty or if, on the 
other hand, he exceeds his authority so as to 
make himself obnoxious even to good sports- 
men, there is a way of having him removed that 
is more sane, more humane, than the holding of 
him up to public scorn in the daily newspapers, 
and thus inciting the more brutal of his enemies 
to take his life. 
Why kill the game warden? 

To Sportsmen of Oklahoma 
It is but sixteen years since white men, other 
than an occasional trapper, have had oppor- 
tunity to shoot game in Oklahoma, and their 
advent in any considerable numbers to the 
Indian Territory is still more recent. Even so 
late as five years ago prominent sportsmen of 
the East, returning, declared the Twin Terri- 
tories ‘‘God’s country,” and vowed if they were 
young men they’d go there to settle down. 
Some of them went there to live, anyway, and 
since all sportsmen are not too old to emigrate, 
they found they had company. Company and 
visitors—that’s the story. The voices of the 
shotgun and the rifle were heard in the land, 
louder and more insistent than that of the mule 
whip, and it has now come to pass that the 
fruit growers of Oklahoma are asking for pro- 
tection of the insectivorous birds of the Terri- 
tory. 
As fruit growers are commonly dull persons 
who set up scarecrows and take pot-shots at 
the robins, it would seem that there has been 
an awakening in the country just east of the 
Texas Pan Handle, an awakening not unlike 
_ that which the past winter brought to Texas, 
and Tennessee, and Alabama and Georgia. 
Too many crates of live bob-white quail being 
shipped East “‘for scientific purposes,” too 
many Saratoga trunks and like innocent recep- 
tacles packed with the dead birds being 
expressed to St. Louis and Chicago. The fruit- 
growers and the sportsmen, and everybody else 
but the hirelings of the thieving commission 
houses, have suddenly come to realize the 
economic value of the bobwhite, and are one 
and all individually deploring the lack of public 
sentiment for the enforcement of the game laws. 
Game is still fairly abundant in the Twin 
Territories—soon to be the State of Oklahoma, if 
you please—and if the people of the sister com- 
monwealths will act now that they are awake, 
they can save their shooting—from themselves 
and from their friends who come via the Pull- 
man route. Every sportsman in Oklahoma or 
the Indian Territory has in himself a good, 
healthy chunk of public sentiment, and it but 
requires that enough get together—instead of 
continuing to individually deplore— and make a 
pool of their chunks, demanding the enforce- 
ment of the game laws in the statutes of the 
respective Territories, to insure for themselves 
good shooting for a long time to come. 
There is nothing in the deploring business, if 
conducted on a small scale. The way to stop 
illegal shooting and trapping of quail is to stop 
_it. We would respectfully suggest to the 
sportsmen of Oklahoma that they turn in and 
organize a game protective association, the 
first intent of which shall be to arouse public 
sentiment against the illegal shooting and trap- 
ping of the Territories’ vanishing supply of 
quail. We believe that Gen. J. C. Jamison, of 
Guthrie, formerly Adjutant-General of Mis- 
souri, could successfully launch such an organi- 
zation, and we call upon him and urge the sports- 
men of Oklahoma to write to him in the matter. 

The Eternal Wilderness 
Yes, that is true. We still have our ‘‘unman- 
stifled” places. And there shall come to us a 
wilderness here and another there, where now 
there isnone. For everything moves in circles— 
which is not at all a new discovery—and the 
man who to-day laments a dearth of the wilder- 
ness may live long enough to find himself one 
day wielding an axe as dull as the pen he now 
bewails with—and forty miles from a grind- 
stone. 
We shall not remonstrate with the writers 
who are picturing us going to eternal smash 
for want of tall timber. Their work is not 
without its good effect in staying the denudation 
of our near-by recreation grounds, and we are 
content to watch the wily old wilderness 
creeping up in the rear of the advancing army 
of invasion, reaching out with sure, silent 
fingers and reclaiming her own, building anew 
her razed stockades and unfurling to the winds 
her defiant bannerets. 
