Forest and Stream. 



A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 



Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. I 

 Six Months, $2. J 



NEW YORK, JUNE 12, 1884. 



VOL. XXlI.-No. 20. 

 9 & 40 Park Row, New York. 



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CONTENTS. 



Editorial. 



First Rifle theu'Shotgun. 



Intel-changeability of Firearms. 

 The Sportsman Tourist. 



Uncle Lisha's Shop.— n. 



Lassoing a Man-Eater. 



How Old Mistis Kilt er Bar. 



Schools of Forestry. 

 Natural History. 



The Red-Headed Duck. 



The Oouesian Period ': 



Bird Notes. 

 Game Bag and Gun. 



Deer Driving. 



The Performance of Shotguns. 



The Choice of Hunting Rifles. 



Texas Game Prospects. 



Amateur Deer Shooting. 



The Snipe Hunting Trick. 



Two-Eyed Shooting-. 

 Ska and River Fishing. 



Rhyme of a Bass. 



Rainbow Trout and Steelhead. 



Camps of the Kingfishers.— v. 



The Color of Leaders. 



Fishing at Buzzard Bay. 



New Jersey Pike Fishing. 

 Fishculture. 



Destruction of Oysters by Nat- 

 ural Means. 



The Kennel. 



"American Kennel Register." 



The Chicago Dog Show. 



The Non-Sporting Dog Show. 



Pointers at New York. 



The Proper Size for Beagles. 



The Bench Show Meeting. 



Kennel Notes. 

 Rifle and Trap Shooting. 



Army Rifle Practice. 



4{ange and Gallery. 



The Trap. 



A Clay-Pigeon Puzzle. 



Reception of the Exeter Team. 

 Canoeing. 



Harvard C. C. 



Royal C. C. 



The Newburgh Meet. 



A New Boating Club. 



An Improved Lateen Sail. 



The Galley Fire. 

 Rice, Cornstarch and Cereals 

 Yachting. 



Newark Bay Y. C. 



Eastern Y. C. Annual Matches. 



Larchmont Y. C. 



A Candid Admission. 



Steel for Shipbuilding. 



A Tell-Tale. 

 Answers to Correspondents. 



With its compact type and in its permanently enlarged form 

 of tvienty-eight pages this journal furnishes each week a larger 

 amount of first-class matter relating tb angling, shooting, the 

 kennel, yachting, canoeing, and kindred subjects, than is con- 

 tained in all other American publications put together. 



We have seen with our own eyes the expulsion of the 

 rifle by the shotgun from more than one section of this 

 country. Time was— and not so very long ago either— when 

 the shotgun was scarcely known in Central Nebraska. Then, 

 the Sioux or Cheyennes or Arapahoes had to be fought off; 

 and the buffalo, the elk, the deer and antelope were needed 

 for food. Years rolled by, and now the rifle has disappeared. 

 Either it has gone westward to the mountains with its owner, 

 or rusty and dirty it stands neglected in a corner of the gar- 

 ret. But all the men and small boys have shotguns, and- 

 the geese in the river bottoms, the ducks in the sloughs and 

 the quail in the towheads have a hard time of it. 



There are many localities where, in the space of a single 

 lifetime, the Indians and the large game have both been ex- 

 terminated. The men, who in early years learned to use the 

 rifle with deadly effect, find it difficult when middle life is 

 past to adapt themselves to the handling of the shotgun. 

 Such oldsters still carry the rifle, and, although the game for 

 which the single ball is required has passed away, they are 

 still able to do deadly execution on the tiny mammals that 

 remain. Such men feel the mortification of a failure when 

 they do net strike the head of a squirrel among the topmost 

 boughs of a tall forest tree. This animal and the little gray 

 hare now constitute the objects of their pursuit. 



There is a wide difference between rifle shooting at game 

 and at the target, and the weapons used for these two pur- 

 poses are not less diverse. There appears recently to be a 

 demand for rifles which may be used on the small mam- 

 mals, and such an arm is really needed. Some rifle of very 

 small caliber and carying a proportionately small charge of 

 powder, would be welcomed by many of our readers in the 

 South and Southwest, and might be air extremely useful arm. 



We hear too little in the columns of Forest and Stream 

 of the sport of squirrel shooting in old-time fashion, and yet 

 there are hundreds of riflemen to whom it is the most de- 

 lightful form of sport. 



In British North America the shotgun has always been the 

 arm of the Indians of both coasts and a considerable part of 

 the interior, hut that is because the smoothbored musket was 

 first introduced and the rifle is not to be had. The old- 

 fashioned trade musket or the cheap double-barreled shotgun, 

 loaded with a round ball and a few buckshot, is the deadli- 

 est weapon known to these Indians. 



In the settling up of a country the weapon adapts itself to 

 the game to be killed. So long as large mammals are abund- 

 ant, the rifle will hold its own; but when these are gone, it 

 must give place to the "scatter gun." 



What shall we use when the birds too shall have disap- 

 peared? 



FIRST RIFLE, THEN SHOTGUN. 



r T , HE rifle goes first into a new country, then follows the 

 -•- shotgun. The former is a necessity, the latter a luxury. 

 The rifle protects life and property from the marauder, sav- 

 age or civilized. It supplies food for the family. It destroys 

 the wild beasts 'that would prey upon the settler's stock. 

 The shotgun is used in the hours of leisure and recreation. 

 Food captured by its aid is a delicacy. It is the implement 

 of sport. Such has been the course of the two weapons in 

 North America. 



The hardy pioneer disdained to kill his game with more 

 than the single ball, which it was his boast that he could 

 plant wherever he chose, and in his expert hands the old 

 crooked stocked pea rifle became the terror of the savage 

 tribes into whose territory he pushed his fearless way. 

 Many years later, when the land had been cleared and wav- 

 ing fields of corn and wheat had taken the place of the wild 

 grasses that once grew rank and thick over the prairies and 

 along the valleys, when the larger game had almost entirely 

 disappeared, the children or the grandchildren of the rifle 

 man began to use the shotgun. Then the geese and ducks, 

 the noisy grouse and the brown quail, the whistling wood- 

 cock and the twisting snipe became the objects of pursuit to 

 those whose fathers had killed the moose, the buffalo and 

 the elk. 



The fathers hunted for meat. With them it was a fight 

 for life, and each ball and each charge of powder was to be 

 accounted for, and must do its work. The sons have in- 

 herited the hunting spirit from their sires, but no press- 

 ing need now drives them to the field. They shoot for 

 pleasure— wildfowl and game birds when they can; but 

 where these are not to be had, too often the tiny song birds 

 become their prey. 



INTERCHANGEABIL1TY IN FIREARMS. 



AN interesting article in the current number of the Maga. 

 zine of American, History throws some light upon the 

 origin and growth of the interchangeable system in the mak- 

 ing of small machines, more particularly in connection with 

 the manufacture of small arms. The system of course is 

 applicable to many branches of mechanical art, but it is 

 specially adapted to firearms produced in large quantities, 

 and where cheapness and uniformity are a matter of such 

 great consequence. There were in the development of the 

 idea a series of men engaged, and the present system of turn- 

 ing out parts, which need only assembling to make the per- 

 fect arm, was not brought about without much opposition 

 and prophecies of failure. Eli Whitney stands out promi- 

 nently as having had a clear idea of the interchangeable 

 system, and as having introduced some of its features in the 

 Whitney ville Armory even before the close of the last century. 

 A Yankee school teacher in the South, he saw the need of a 

 machine to do the work which his cotton gin now so well 

 performs. His ingenuity was turned toward firearms, and 

 he found abundant room for improvement in the old flint- 

 locks of the period. 



The first breechloader invented by Hall was designed with 

 particular reference to the use of a modified system of inter- 

 changeable parts, but it was a long time before the United 

 States muskets could really be classed in the category of in- 

 terchangeable arms. When in 1838 the new model musket 

 was made by Benjamin Moore, the master mechanic at the 

 Harper's Ferry Arsenal, model arms were made and sent out 

 with sets of gauges. All these efforts were, however, rather in 

 the direction of getting uniformity, than in securing what we 

 now know as the interchangeable system. 



The superior facilities of the Springfield Armory enabled 

 it to outstrip the Harper's Ferry establishment, and it was 

 there that the system under discussion was most vigorously 

 pushed. Thomas Warner, now in his ninetieth year, de- 



serves most of the credit for bringing about the changes from 

 the old hand method to the new machine modes in the Spring- 

 field works, and the making of interchangeable breech 

 screws by Cyrus Buckland, in 1852, completed the first 

 chapter in the story. These pioneers may see the results of 

 their effort in the great Yankee workshops of to-day, in the 

 watch factories and the sewing machine works, where the 

 turning out of single parts by machine tools, swiftly and 

 accurately, has completely revolutionized important branches 

 of industry. 



The first step attempted in firearm making was uniformity, 

 and the French mechanics in the National armories were 

 very ingenious in this direction. The London Exhibition of 

 1852 brought revelations to the European workmen, how- 

 ever, in the exhibits of Robbins & Lawrence, of Windsor, 

 Vt., and the revolvers of Colt. These showed that the 

 American mechanics had far surpassed their transatlantic 

 fellows in the direction of uniformity of parts, and that ad- 

 vantage then gained has not yet been relinquished. 



A history of the manufacture of United States muskets, 

 since the establishment of the Springfield Armory in 1795 

 and the Harper's Ferry shops in 1801, would include, if fully 

 told, the story of the growth of the interchangeable system. 

 Looking back from this date, it would seem almost as 

 though the change was inevitable, but to many of those in 

 authority from time to time there was a tendency to sharply 

 snub the enthusiasm of mechanics who insisted that there 

 was room for improvement in the methods then in vogue. 

 There were notable exceptions, and in the long line of super- 

 intendents and inspectors of the National armories have been 

 many officers who brought encouragement to those men 

 having the ability to devise and the skill to construct the 

 needed machinery. Hand-filing gave way to machine cuts 

 of the greatest accuracy, until now the most complicated 

 parts of the too complex arms of to-day are cut quickly, 

 automatically and exactly. Difficulty in getting skillful 

 mechanics had much to do with forcing this use of machinery • 

 to the front. Sharp competition, demanding cheapness- of 

 production, had much more to do with bringing about the 

 advance, but its importance can scarcely be overrated. Com- 

 pared with other outcomes of the original idea, firearms 

 have taken a comparatively retrograde moverneut. There 

 are many points of real crudity about them, and it is time 

 for the sister art of chemistry to come to the aid of the 

 armorer and offer a substitute for the gunpowder of former 

 days. 



It is no wonder that the writer, who, having watched the 

 progress of this wonderful mechanical growth, should say: 

 "Witnessing the results of the development of this mechani- 

 cal idea, seeing them in the swelling tide of statistics, 

 realizing them in their vast influences upon the conditions of 

 human life, and dwelling with anxious concern upon their 

 probable consequences on future culture and character, 1 

 plead no apology for ranking the mechanics among the 

 great idealists in other fields of thought, while I reckon that 

 the rise of many an empire is already dwarfed in historic 

 moment by the rise of this mechanical ideal." 



A Sort of Wild Contentment. —Mr. Julian Hawthorne 

 is a son of the man who wrote "The Scarlet Letter," and 

 the Century magazine is a publication which claims to repre- 

 sent the better class of the periodical literature of the day. 

 When the Century prints an article by Julian Hawthorne it 

 is not asking too much to demand that it be free fiom twad- 

 dle. Here is an extract from an article contributed by Mr. 

 Hawthorne to the June number of that magazine : 



The hunter and the sportsman are two very different persons. The 

 hunter pursues animals because he loves them and sympathizes with 

 them, as the champions of chivalry used to slay one another— courte- 

 ously, fairly, and with admiration and respect. To stalk and snoot 

 the elk and the grizzly bear is to him what wooing and winning a be- 

 loved maiden would be to another man. Far from being the foe or 

 exterminator of the game he follows, he more than any one else is 

 their friend, vindicator, and confidant. A strange mutual ardor and 

 understanding unites him with his quarry. He loves the mountain 

 sheep and the antelope, because they can escape him ; the panther 

 and the bear, because they can destroy him. His relations with them 

 are clean, generous, manly. And on the other hand, the wild ani- 

 mals, whose wildness can never be tamed, whose inmost principle of 

 existence it is to be apart and unapproachable— those creatures who 

 may be said to cease to be when they cease to be intractable— seem , 

 after they have eluded their pursuer to* the utmost, or fought him to 

 the death, to yield themselves to him with a sort of wild contentment 

 —as if they were glad to admit the sovereignty of man though death 

 come with the admission. The hunter, in short, asks for his happi- 

 ness only to be let alone with what he hunts; the sportsman, after his 

 day's sport, must needs hasten home to publish the size of the "bag." 

 and to wring from his fellow men the glory and applause which he 

 has not the strength and simplicity to find in the game itself. 



We advise Mr. Hawthorne to stick to his novel writing. 



