r. 4, 1886.J 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



27 



KANSAS GAME BIRDS. 



Editor Forest and Stream: 



I give you a synopsis of a recent communication by the 

 Leavenworth Gun Club, addressed to Senator P. G. Lowe of 

 this place in relation to the destruction of our quail and 

 prairie chickens which are really our only game birds of 

 note. 



Our Kansas law is sufficiently strong and stringent sofar 

 as shooting seasons are concerned, and protects the birds 

 from unseasonable attacks; but no law as yet has been able 

 to prevent the wholesale slaughter of birds in the lawful 

 shooting season, hence our birds are becoming scarce. In 

 the prairie chicken and quail seasons, birds by the hundreds 

 and thousands are daily offered for sale, and there are many 

 men who make money by slaughtering our birds and send- 

 ing them to our river markets where previous arrangements 

 have been made with dealers to receive them. We submit 

 the following points for legislation i 



First— Make it a criminal offense for any person to kill 

 more than 25 quail or prairie chickens, or part of both, in 

 any one day from sunrise to sundown. This section puts an 

 end to matches as to which party or person shall kill most 

 ga me in any one day. No sportsman would care to kill and 

 carry more than 25 birds in one day. 



Second— Make it a criminal offense for any person to offer 

 for sale, barter or trade in Kansas, any prairie chicken or 

 quail killed in Kansas, and join with the seller any person 

 who shall offer to buy, trade or barter for any quail killled 

 in Kansas at any season of the year; and the possession of 

 such bi rds for ma rketable purposes shall be prima facie evidence 

 of any evasion of the law, and the burden of proof must rest 

 with the possessor. This section closes up the avenues of 

 sale and prevents pot-hunters from making the potting of 

 birds profitable. 



Third— Make it a criminal offense for any express company, 

 railway company, or any common carrier, to receive for 

 shipment and transportation at any point in Kansas, any 

 quail or prairie chicken. The above section does not pre- 

 vent any common carrier from shipping into Kansas any 

 game birds, and the second section would not prevent per- 

 sons from buying birds from outside of Kansas, only they 

 must have the bills, bills of sale, etc., properly authenti- 

 cated that such birds were not killed in Kansas. 



These look like extreme measures, but it requires ex- 

 tremes to reach a proper medium, ' and a little extreme legis- 

 lation would break up the pot-hunting business, just as 

 President Cleveland's extreme measures are breaking up the 

 cattle ring business. .Do you know, Mr. Editor, that during 

 the prairie chicken season, hundreds of men from Missouri 

 and other neighboring States, go on to the. prairies of Kansas, 

 and ship in thousands of chickens to the dealers on the Mis 

 souri River, and even to Chicago? The stopping of trans- 

 portation breaks up that kind of business. Will you please 

 give publication to this as I expect it will bring criticism, 

 and thus help to open the way to such state legislation as 

 shall be uniform, or as nearly so as possible, in protecting 

 our birds from pot-hunters who kill for the money the birds 

 will bring. Trios. Moonlight, President. 



Leavenworth, Kansas, Jan. 27, 1886. 



The third annual election of the Lavenworth Gun Club, 

 Jan. 4, was as follows: Thomas Moonlight, President; A. 

 C. Girard, Vice-President; Henry Laintz, Secretary; Geo. 

 W. Goff, Treasurer. Board of Managers, W. C. Hinman, 

 Prank C. Patton, Wesley C. Gordon, 



[Cut this out, put it on a blank, obtain signatures and send to your Member at Albany.] 



A PETITION 



For the Continued Protection of Adirondack Deer. 



To the Honorable, the Legislature of the State of New York: 



We, the undersigned, residents of County, respectfully petition that the 



law (Chap. 557, Laws of 1885) which makes it "unlawful to pursut any wild deer in this 

 State with any dog or bitch" may not be amended in any such way as to permit the use of 

 dogs for hunting deer at any time. 



(Signed) 



Mr. Allison would never have seen New York again. He 

 was kindly cared for at the cabin, and was soon in Bangor, 

 healthy and well, having, thanks to his snow baths, suffered 

 no serious injury from freezing. 



"Do you see that hat?" he asked, pointing to an old derby 

 on the table. "Well, I wore that hat in camp, and thought 

 it would hardly do to go home to New York in, but I took 

 a notion to bring it along as an old friend. Well, 1 probably 

 fell into the water fifty times, but every time 1 clung to the 

 old hat, and once in my despair found myself talking to it, 

 as a madman, and asking it not to desert me." 



The Godbout hunter, Napoleon Comeau, whose name is 

 familiar to our readers, had a hard experience last week. A 

 dispatch from Montreal, Jan. 30, reports: In the tempest 

 which prevailed some ten days ago all over the Gulf of St. 

 Lawrence, four hunters of Godbout had a miraculous escape 

 from death, having drifted for some ninety miles during 

 forty hours on a piece of floating ice. Napoleon Comeau, 

 his brother and two of his brothers-in-law, went out from 

 Godbout Kiver in two canoes to hunt seals and ducks. Two 

 of the men were engaged in killing a seal upon a field of ice, 

 when the animal fiercely turned upon them. Napoleon 

 Comeau, who is a telegraph operator at Godbout and one of 

 the best shots and most noted hunters in the country, went 

 to their assistance with his brother. After killing the seal 

 they were drifted so far out into the gulf that they were 

 unable to return. A merciless storm raged around them and 

 soon they were thirty miles from either shore. Three of the 

 men became badly frozen and would have perished but for 



MIDWINTER PERILS. 



THE following account, taken from the Sun of last Fri 

 day, has additional interest because Mr. Allison was 

 one of the two campers whose cesy winter camp was de- 

 scribed in these columns week before last, under the head- 

 ing "Notes from a Winter Camp": 



Bangor, Jan. 26.— Chas. A. Allison, the New York sports- 

 man who had such a terrible experience at Moosehead Lake 

 on Saturday last, was in Bangor to-day on his way home. 

 The Sun's representative found him in a comfortable room 

 at the Penobscot Exchange, seated before a blazing hearth, 

 and listened to some of the details of his perilous journey. 

 Mr. Allison is a young law student of New York city, where 

 he has also been connected with the press. Since last sum- 

 mer he has been camping out by himself at Brassva Lake, 

 near Moosehead, having a royal good time shooting and fish- 

 ing. He had sent his traps in advance to the Kineo House, 

 a great hotel on the shores of Moosehead, with the intent of 

 returning home, and on Saturday he started on snowshoes 

 to walk to the hotel, a distance of ten miles, there to take 

 the stage for the railroad at West Cove, at the foot of the 

 lake. He trudged along toward Moose Kiver for a while 

 all right, but the drifts became of such a nature that he cast 

 the snowshoes aside and started on moccasins. When he 

 reached the mouth of the river, where he intended to cross, 

 he found, to his dismay, that there was a stretch of open 

 water before him. He started to follow up the river for a 

 crossing, but had not gone far when the ice broke, and he 

 went into the water to his shoulders, barely saving himself 

 by stretching out his arms. He then kept along the shore 

 for a distance, but the snow was four feet deep, and he was 

 again obliged to take to the ice. 



Soon again he broke through, and this time went so deep 

 that he got a drink of water, which his parched mouth sadly 

 needed. By great exertions he managed to crawl out, and 

 then sat down on a spot of sound ice to rest and try to tie 

 on one of his moccasins, which had fallen off. So slow was 

 he tying the knot with his benumbed fingers that when the 

 operation was finished he found that the shoe had frozen to 

 the ice, and he was obliged to cut it off and proceed bare- 

 footed. He half walked, half crawled along the ice, break- 

 ing through every few rods, and getting out — how, he knew 

 not. His wet clothing had by this time frozen stiff, and he 

 ouly kept from freezing to death by rolling in the deep snow 

 on the banks. This gave him the appearance of a veritable 

 ghost of winter, the 'snow having clung like a feathery 

 mantle about his dripping, icy form. Once he was almost 

 buried by falling over the crest of a wing dam into a huge 

 drift. 



There is one habitation only on Moose River, the cabin of 

 Tom Wilier, and this Allison knew, but he did not know 

 how near he was to it. At length, wearied out, he was 

 about to lie down in a snowy grave, when, almost without 

 hope, he shouted for help. There was no answer. It seemed 

 like shouting to the winds. He called again, and there was 

 a faint echo. He was near Tom Willer's. Wilier came out 

 on the bank, but the ice between him and the freezing sports- 

 man was thin, and had not two Bangor woodsmen bravely 

 exposed their lives by going out through the thin ice to their 

 necks in water, pushing an old flatboat before them, young 



Napoleon Comeau. They had nothing to eat but two frozen i 



ducks and had frequently to take to their canoes as the ice ! have raised two broodsTand if the winter is a mild one there 



KrrvL-o onrar liemoath thpm A f tor rlriffincr fnr ninpt.v tnilps ^rill 1,« n.n^A ...mil otiAAtlnd r.n mn frionfl'o farm r\c\'t fall 



DAKOTA GAME. 



BUSINESS keeps many of the readers of Forest and 

 Stream, no doubt, from taking those long vacations and 

 outings that some of your correspondents enjoy; but it is the 

 next thing to being there ourselves to read the accounts they 

 write of trips by land and water, of game bagged and fish 

 caught, and all the incidents thereof. However, as far as I 

 am concerned, I manage to get one little vacation of ten days 

 every year. There is one week in October of each year 

 when my address is Dakota. Heretofore I have never been 

 able to get the use of a suitable hunting boat; so this year, 

 before I went, I sent out my little Powell & Douglas boat in 

 ample time, as was supposed, to arrive before she was wanted; 

 but when we arrived — for I took with me my neighbor, the 

 Doctor— the boat had not put in an appearance. We spent 

 our week very pleasantly and bagged as much game as we 

 needed for our own use and that of the neighborhood, 

 besides bringing back all we needed: but we came back con- 

 vinced of the truth of the statement made recently in these 

 columns, that "the Dakota of to-day was fast becoming the 

 Iowa of five years ago," for we encountered a number of 

 parties both going out and coming in, and no day that we 

 spent on the prairie or on the lake were we out of hearing of 

 the boom of guns. Four years ago, on my first trip, we 

 encountered very few shooters; but the country has been 

 pretty well advertised, and perhaps I have done some of it 

 myself. Probably there are nearly as many geese and ducks 

 as there were on my other trips, but the land is pretty well 

 broken up and there is more feeding ground for them, so 

 they are scattered more; but prairie chickens are increasing- 

 very fast, and the single pair of quail 1 noticed last year 



broke away beneath them. After drifting for ninety miles 

 during forty hours, they managed to land upon the south 

 shore 'of the gulf, near St. Annes des Monts. Then they 

 were driven to Metis, a distance of fifty-six miles, it being 

 impossible for them at this season of the year to cross the 

 gulf. From Metis they reached Quebec by rail. 



A FLORIDA YARN. 



Editor Forest and Stream: 



I send you a copy of a letter received by a little boy at the 

 North from a Florida darky with whom he struck up an 

 acquaintance last winter. The letter is dated at Mandarin, 

 Jan. 15, and reads as follows : 



Harry, you will remember I told you I would write you. 

 Well, I will fulfill my promise. I am down here among the 

 alligators — that is, in their home. When I first came down 

 last November I took a hunting excursion down in the 

 swamps. 1 was out two days and one night. I took a 

 fellow along who is a native, and two old army muskets, 

 and ammunition, and a bag of grub, which consisted of 

 cheese, crackers, cold tongue ond peanuts. We traveled 

 about ten miles. Night came on ; then came the tug of war. 

 Nowhere to sleep, no blankets, ten miles out in the woods. 

 We were close by a muddy stream or river. We stacked 

 our guns and hung our grub on the guns. So I climbed up 

 a big live oak. tree and got in the crotch for the night. It 

 was pretty warm and I felt comfortable, all things 

 considered, according to the situation. Just before daybreak 

 I heard a scrambling below. Looking down, there was a 

 big wild hog after our grub; he had knocked down the guns 

 and was cleaning us out. While so doing up comes an old 

 alligator out of the swamp and tackled the hog, and such 

 squealing that I thought the whole place alive. Two old 

 wild cats smelled blood and came on the spot. I tell you, 

 Harry, I felt shaky. I called to the fellow. He had gone 

 to the top of the tree. The wildcats, alligator, wild hog 

 fighting like Old Nick below and both of us up the tree, the 

 guns on the ground; what to do I could not tell. I can tell 

 one thing, my eyes were as large as moons — at least I thought 

 so 



The old alligator was boss of the fight. He ate up the 

 hog. The smell of blood kept the infernal old wildcats 

 around till sun up. Finally they left. I came down. The 

 guns and ammunition scattered over the ground, the grub 

 all gone. I got the fellow dowu and prepared to leave, but 

 to my surprise, about fifty feet, looking up a tree, was a 

 ■w ildcat licking his chops. I filled the old gun a quarter 

 full of buckshot, not so much powder, and brought him 

 down. In the meantime I sent the fellow down to the stream 

 to get a bottle of water. He did not see the cat. 1 was 

 afraid to tell him for fear he would run off and leave me 

 alone in the swamp. So while he was gone, as before stated, 

 I brought the old fellow down, cut off his head, threw it 

 away in the bushes. When tne fellow returned I told him I 

 had shot a raccoon ; I had him almost skinned. The fellow 

 looked at it with suspicion, as he knew more about a coon 

 than I did. He almost caught me in my little game. He 

 said to me, "Where is the tail? You see, all coons has long 

 tails and wildcats has short tails." "Confound it", I said, 

 "I shot it off." We struck up a fire and broiled that old 

 tomcat for breakfast. I tell you, Harry, he tasted equal to 

 venison. After breakfast we started to look for the old 

 alligator; found him on the bank of the stream asleep or 

 sunning himself. Put two full charges under his flank. He 

 keeled over. We cut him open. We found the hog, one of 

 the wildcats, the bag that contained our grub, all inside of 

 him, a bullhead and three ducks. I concluded to return 

 home. On our way back, succeeded in bagging two rab- 

 bits, four squirrels,, one opossum and some small birds. 

 Very well satisfied, but no more all night in the woods for 

 me, Robert Hazelton, 



will be good quail shooting on my friend's farm next fall. 

 We had a good time and arrived home safely, but they got a 

 pretty good joke on the old man. The little mother at home 

 wrote, "Do take care of yourself; that boat makes me 

 nervous," and got for reply that "no cause for "nervousness 

 existed," for "first, there was no water deep enough to 

 drown anyone," and "second, there was no boat," and 

 "third, I guessed I was old enough," etc., etc. Well, I 

 don't know how it came about, but the boat hadn't been in 

 the water ten minutes before out I went, gun and all, and as 

 I had to pole ashore to empty my boots, wring out my clothes 

 (jimenny, wasn't it cold !) and scoop the mud out of my ears, 

 of course the boys found out all about it; but how on earth 

 they found it out at Highland Park is more than I know, . 

 but all the same I'm hunting for the Doctor with a club. 

 Highland Park, 111. Harry Hunter. 



ERRATIC BULLET FLIGHTS. 



Editor Fm'est and Stream: 



Reading in your issue of Jan. 31 of the "Dido of a Spent 

 Bullet," it brought to mind several episodes which have 

 occurred in my own practice. One occurred about forty 

 years ago. From boyhood I was always tinkering witu 

 rifles whenever opportunity offered. I made very numerous 

 experiments with hunting sights. That which gave best 

 results for all work is well illustrated in the Whitney- 

 Kennedy rifle shown in the advertising columns of Forest 

 and Stream. My front or muzzle sight, which shows 

 white in the engraving referred to, was made of ivory. A 

 gentleman in our neighborhood employed me to mount such 

 a set of sights upon his hunting rifle. I had finished them 

 and loaded the rifle to see if they were properly centered. 

 Our folks had just moved the old house from over the cellar, 

 preparatory to building a new one on the site. Picking up 

 a half -brick of bright red color, I blackened with powder a 

 spot in its center about the size of a twenty five cent piece 

 and placed it in an indentation of the lumber pile, about 

 thirty yards distant. Stepping down into the old cellar, 

 then half filled, I rested the rifle upon the embankment and 

 fired. In an instant there was a sharp whizz by my left ear 

 and a slight disturbance of my hair just over the ear, and at 

 the same time a sharp thud in the old chimney stack a few 

 steps to the rear. In one second my eyes were in that 

 direction, where I saw a little puff of brick and mortar dust 

 rising from a crevice. Stepping to the spot, I found the 

 larger portion of the bullet I had just fired. It was a narrow 

 escape. Had it gone an inch above it would have damaged 

 my old hat. 



The hard-wood lumber was simply sawed "through and 

 through" but not "edged," the one-inch boards being left 

 full width for roof purposes, to lay shingles upon. The 

 boards were piled in same order as sawed, in what sawyers 

 call "stocks." It was what was termed a three-stock pile. 

 In "sticking up, "long, narrow strips bound the piles together. 

 Upon one of these strips, at an indentation of the pile, I 

 placed the brick. I fired at this, striking the upper part of 

 it, cleaving off about one-third of the brickbat and deflect- 

 ing the bullet directly upward, it striking the wane edge of 

 the board above and giving the bullet a return motion. It 

 next struck the projecting stick above, giving it the direc- 

 tion back again, as I have related. Mlltok P. Peerce. 



Philadelphia, Pa., Jan. 26. 



The Mutual Life Insurance Statement.— Tbe statement of 

 Mutual Life Insurance Company, published in another column, shows 

 a remarkably prosperous condition of affairs. The amount received 

 tor policies in force or terminated amounts to $103,84 6,252, and the. 

 surplus to $5,012,633.78. Tbe assets include $-t9,228,S)30.16 i red ' t 

 mortgages on real estate, $39,806,104 TJ. S. and other bo*- 1 .piO ' -,- 

 720.45 of real estate, $2,619,643,21 in cash in bank, and $3 <56,50u ^ans 

 on collateral, the total assets footing uptothetrer -cidous sum of 

 8108,908,967 51. The Mutual Life is one of our oldcm, and best com- 

 panies, and its continually increasing prosperity and ever-widening 

 1 influence tells a story of yrise and conservative management, 



