DOG ON THE TRAIN. 



The hunting Season is now drawing to a 

 close, and it is a good time to have a word 

 with the passenger agents of the different 

 railroads throughout the country. Wherever 

 a road happens to have a sportsman for a 

 passenger agent there are good accommoda- 

 tions and conveniences prepared for the hunt- 

 ers' dogs, but it seems wherever the passen- 

 ger agent is not a sportsman the dog question 

 is utterly neglected. Recreation wants to 

 call the attention of the railroads to this fact 

 — that one and all of them are advertising 

 and resorting to all means in their povver to 

 attract sportsmen over their lines, and yet, 

 when a man starts out with his bird dogs 

 he complains that he is met on every side 

 with gruff remarks, uncivil language and de- 

 mands for graft, varying in amount accord- 

 ing to the conscience of the trainmen or the 

 apparent length of the pocket-book of the 

 sportsman. This is not as it should be. 



Although Recreation is constantly receiv- 

 ing complaints of this kind, there seems to be 

 an exception to this rule in the Southern 

 states. 



Quoting from a letter before me, it says : 

 "I think all sportsmen will bear me out that 

 traveling in the South with dogs there is no 

 fault to be found in the way they are handled 

 in the baggage department of the different 

 railroads." 



The same letter says : "In the West I 

 found it different. The first remark of the 

 baggage man is invariably, 'I can't check them 

 dogs.' This expression simply means that 

 you must put up the money to the baggage 

 man before you can have your dogs trans- 

 ported. On many of the steamers baggage- 

 masters are most courteous ; but they have 

 decidedly open palms." 



The truth of the matter is that a gentle- 

 man traveling with dogs seems to be consid- 

 ered an outlaw and subject, like all outlaws, 

 to blackmail at every turn. 



While traveling this season we made par- 

 ticular note of the care of the 'dog on various 

 roads, and found that the baggage masters 

 were, as a rule, kind-hearted to the dogs ; but 

 the men were all over-worked with the im- 

 mense amount of baggage belonging, to the 

 summer tourists, and the dogs had to be 

 chained to trunks and were often completely 

 hidden from sight by trunks bridged over 



them. In one instance a dog became over- 

 heated and would have died had it not been 

 for the kind-hearted Pullman conductor, who 

 took ice in the baggage car and restored the 

 suffering canine. 



Now, gentlemen of the railroad, it's up to 

 you. Must the sportsmen who patronize your 

 roads, and whose patronage you spend thou- 

 sands of dollars to secure, be subject to this 

 condition of affairs? Must they bribe their 

 way from one end of the continent to the 

 other whenever they take their dogs with 

 them on a shooting expedition? This seems 

 to be unreasonable. You can not have sports- 

 men without having dogs, and you make most 

 excellent arrangements to take care of the 

 sportsman himself, attend to his bodily wants 

 and comforts ; you take care of his baggage, 

 it is handled with care and safely delivered 

 to him at the end of the journey. Why can 

 not you make some arrangements by which 

 his dogs, which are as necessary to his sport 

 as his gun, shall be treated in the same busi- 

 nesslike way? 



Our many railroad friends will please un- 

 derstand that the above statement is made 

 merely to call their attention to the state of 

 affairs, the importance of which they have 

 failed to recognize simply because they are 

 not all sportsmen themselves and not through 

 any desire to inconvenience their passengers; 

 for it has been our experience in traveling — 

 and we have traversed pretty nearly all of 

 this continent — that the passenger agents and 

 those in charge of traffic are most genial gen- 

 tlemen, and seem to be selected by the com- 

 pany on account of their gentlemanly quali- 

 ties, so that the neglect of our canine friends 

 can not be attributed to any lack of desire to 

 please, and it is for this very reason that 

 we wish to call their attention to the hard- 

 ships of the hunting dog, knowing full well 

 that if their attention is once engaged the 

 remedv is sure to come. 



SIGNS OF DEGENERACY. 



From the weaklings and luxurious there 

 comes a demand for a trolley car line through 

 the Yellowstone Park ! Think of it, ye sturdy 

 sons of our pioneer ancestors ! 



The trouble is that all the little whipper- 

 snappers have heard so much of the glories of 

 this wild place that they are beginning to 

 think it must be the proper thing to visit it, 



450 



