Forest and Stream 



A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 



Tebms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copt. ) 



Six Months, $2. f 



NEW YORK, OCTOBER 28, 1888. 



1 YOL. XXXL-No. 14. 



") No. 318 Broadway, New Vork, 





CORRESPONDENCE. 

 The Forest And Stream is the recognized medium of entertain- 

 ment, instruction and information between American sportsmen. 

 Communications on the subject to which its pages are devoted are 

 respectfully invited. Anonymous communications will not be re- 

 garded. No name will be published except with writer's consent. 

 The Editors are not responsible for the views of correspondents. 



AD VERTISEMENTS. 

 Only advertisements of an approved character inserted. Inside 

 pages, nonpareil type, 30 cents per line. Special rates for three, six, 

 and twelve months. Seven words to the line, twelve lines to one 

 Inch. Advertisements should be sent in by Saturday previous to 

 issue in which they are to be inserted. Transient advertisements 

 must invariably be accompanied by the money or they will not be 

 inserted. Reading notices $1.00 per line. 



SUBSCRIPTIONS 

 May begin at any time. Subscription price, S$4 per year; $2 for six 

 months; to a club of three annual subscribers, three copies for $10; 

 five copies for $16. Remit by express money-order, regi ered letter, 

 money-order, or draft, payable to the Forest and Stream Publishing 

 Company, The, paper may be obtained of newsdealers throughout 

 the United States, Canadas and Great Britain. For sale by Davies 

 & Co., No. 1 Finch Lane, Cornhill, London. General subscription 

 agents far Great Britain, Messrs. Davies & Co., and Messrs. Samp- 

 son Low, Marston, Searles and Rivington, 188 Fleet street, London, 

 Eng. Brentano's, 17 Avenue de l'Opera, Paris, France, sole Paris 

 agent for sales and subscriptions. Foreign subscription price. $5 

 per year; $2.50 for six months. 

 Address all communications 



No. 318 Broadway. 



Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 



New York City. 



CONTENTS. 



Editorial. 



A SDake River Incident. 



The Forests of the Rocky 

 Mountains. 



Snap Shots. 

 The Sportsman Tourist. 



Two Months a Cowbow. 

 Natural History. 



Gophers and Pouched Rats.— l 



Jelly Fish in Fresh Water. 



A Captive Grouse. 

 Game Bag and Gun. 



Notes from the Rockies. 



The Maine Deer Season. 



All-Around Rifles. 



A Day's Shooting in My Mary- 

 land. 



Ttie Camp Savor of Game. 



Game and Game Grounds. 



Shot and Powder Measures. 



Game Notes. 

 Sea and River Fishing. 



Gut Leaders. 



Potomac Fishing Notes. 



Trout at the Upper Dam. 



Pith and Brains. 



Angling Notes. 

 Fishculture. 



Fishculture in Canada. 



The Kennel. 

 American Coursing Club Meet 

 Shakespeare as a Breeder and 



Trainer. 

 That Mitchell Letter. 

 "Practical" Judging. 

 Richmond Dog Show. 

 The Sense of Smell in Dogs. 

 The American Pet Dog Club. 

 Dog Talk. 

 Distemper. 



American Kennel Register. 

 Kennel Notes. 

 Kennel Management. 

 Rifle and Trap Shooting. 

 Range and Gallery. 

 The Trap. 



The Middlesex Shoot. 

 The St. Louis Trap Season. 

 The California State Shoot. 

 The New York Suburban. 

 Match with Repeating Guns. 

 Yachting. 

 Clara. 



Keel Yachts and Centerboard 

 Canoes. 

 Canoeing, 



My Thunder Storm Cruise. 

 Answers to Correspondents. 



A SNAKE RIVER INCIDENT. 



TT has come to a pass nowadays that to chronicle all 

 events connected with shooting and fishing means to 

 devote space to reports which properly belong in the 

 criminal news of the daily press. It was only the other 

 day that we recorded the murder on the Tobique and the 

 gross miscarriage of justice by which the miscreants 

 escaped righteous punishment. But if murderers of women 

 go unhung in New Brunswick, they see to it that the 

 hemp has its own — and more too — out in Wyoming. 



That Territory has a law forbidding the killing of game 

 for market. In spite of this, skin hunters and meat hun- 

 ters have in years past invaded the Territory and plied 

 their trade. This can be done no longer with impunity. 

 Public feeling is on the side of the law. News has just 

 come of the fate that overtook two hunters in the Snake 

 River country who sought to combine skin hunting and 

 house burning. The combination would not work and 

 the consequences were exceedingly disastrous. The hun- 

 ters were F. W. Adams and one "Dutchy." They 

 were engaged in a wholesale slaughter of elk and 

 antelope, saving only the hides and horns, Avhen an ex- 

 ranchman, Tom Johnson, remonstrated w T ith them on the 

 ground that they were violating the law, and threatened 

 to have them arrested. The rest is quickly told. The 

 hunters fired Johnson's house at night. Johnson, his 

 wife and child-in-arms escaped from the flames, and from 

 the hunters' revolvers; the father made his way to the 

 settlement and gave the alarm; forty men turned out at 

 daylight, captured the hunters, carried them into the 

 settlement and jailed them in an adobe hut; in the night 

 a hundred men hustled them out, and the morning sun 

 revealed two human forms dangling from the limb of a 

 tree. 



There is no special moral to this perhaps, but it is worth 

 noting that while in New Brunswick one may follow up 

 unlawful salmon spearing with woman killing and get 

 off with, a fifteen years' term in jail, out in Wyoming 



skin-hunting and the firing of houses by night put one's 

 neck in the halter. 



In these repeated cases where interference with game 

 law breakers has resulted in personal violence and crime, 

 the fact has stood clearly revealed that the offenders 

 against the game laws are desperate characters, and 

 when their offenses are regarded with leniency the tone 

 of the community is debased. 



It was so with the Maine "Shacker" incendiaries, the 

 doggers who killed the Maine warden, the New Bruns- 

 wick salmon spearers and the Wyoming skin-hunters. 

 Lawlessness with respect to one class of statutes here 

 means rebellion against good order and the bonds of 

 society. Desperate miscreants who break the game laws 

 show themselves ready to stand at nothing, not even 

 murder. Sympathy for them, as poor creatures who 

 must live somehow and who have a God-given right to 

 support themselves by taking from Nature her salmon 

 and elk, is sympathy thrown away. 



SNAP SHOTS. 

 r pHERE is a terrific uproar in the American Pet Dog 

 *~ Club. The trouble all hinges on the incompatibility 

 of two of the leading spirits, and on the principle that 

 when a man and a woman cannot live together in peace 

 and harmony they had best separate, the club has re- 

 solved itself into two factions, one following the man 

 and the other the woman. Each faction has expelled the 

 chief movers in the other, and each one claiming itself to 

 be the club, the ins are casting about for injunctions and 

 other legal devices to get the better of the outs. The old 

 rhymes of the stormy days of George I. apply: 



God bless the King, our holy faith's defender; 

 God bless the King, and drive out the Pretender, 

 Which the Pretender is, and which the King, 

 God bless my soul, that's quite another thing! 



Mr. Linley, of Claverack, N. Y., is possessed of the true 

 spirit; he is a fisherman to the backbone. One day last 

 week Mr. Linley's little son was fishing in the Hudson, 

 when a huge pickerel seized his bait, pulled him over- 

 board into the water and was about to perform "the big 

 one's" act of getting away, when Mr. Linley hastened to 

 the rescue and saved— the fish, which proved to be a 801b. 

 pickerel. Incidentally the small boy was saved too. 



FORESTS OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 



. I - 3*. - 



HPHE Department of Agriculture in the Forestry Divis- 

 ion has issued its Bulletin No. 2, embodying its re- 

 port on the forest conditions of the Rocky Mountains. 

 This report, compiled by Dr. B. E. Fernow, Chief of the 

 Forestry Division, who contributes an introductory chap- 

 ter and a paper on Snow-slides or Avalanches, their Form- 

 ation and Prevention, consists of contributions from 

 various official and non-official sources. There are ex- 

 tracts from reports of the Commissioners of the Land 

 Office, a treatise on the Government in its Relation to 

 Forests, by Prof. G. J. James; a special and detailed re- 

 port on the Forest Conditions of the Rocky Mountains j 

 County by County, by.Col. Edgar T. Ensign; the Forest 

 Flora of the Rocky Mountains, by George B. Sudworth; 

 Report on the Forests of Los Angeles, San Bernardino 

 and San Diego Counties, Cal., by Albert Kinney; The 

 Needs of the Yellowstone National Park, by Arnold 

 Hague, geologist in charge; Summary of Legislation for 

 the Preservation of Timber or Forests on the Public 

 Domain, by N. A. Egleston; The Climate of Colorado 

 and its Effect upon Trees, by George H. Parsons — alto- 

 gether too varied and voluminous a mass of matter to do 

 justice to in the space of an article; and as the subject is 

 one of vital importance to the future well-being of the 

 country, and one on which we have always been ready 

 to lift our voice when the occasion demanded, we will 

 take the more important of these reports in serial order, 

 but to make the argument for a comprehensive and rigid 

 system of forest management more intelligible, and to 

 indicate the most formidable obstacles to the introduction 

 of such a system in this country, we propose to preface 

 our review of the report by a glance at the simple financial 

 aspect of the whole problem, for herein lies the chief 

 difficulty. 



Timber is one of those products of nature which, being 

 applicable to many economic purposes, constitutes wealth, 

 provided it can be applied. 



Wherever and to such extent as it is the product of 

 labor, its value is determined by the costs of production , 



but wherever it is the free gift of nature, its value is deter- 

 mined by the law of supply and demand, costs of trans - 

 port to market, etc. 



In the early days of settlement of this country, and 

 especially on the Atlantic seaboard, the forests were so 

 widely distributed that they were an obstacle to settle- 

 ment, and timber, instead of being a valuable crop, became 

 a burthen to the land owner. It cost say fifteen dollars 

 an acre to clear it, and its presence consequently detracted 

 fifteen dollars an acre from the value of the land. Stand- 

 ing timber being valued at a minus quantity, lumbermen 

 bought it from the State at a mere nominal price, and not 

 being burthened with the costs of production, have been 

 able to prosecute a very large foreign trade. 



The home consumption of timber, too, has grown with 

 the growth of the country. According to the census re- 

 port of 1880 the forest crop of that year was valued at 

 $700,000,000, and these figures, it must be remembered, 

 represent little more than the costs of felling, dressing 

 and transport to market, with the lumberman's profit on 

 these transactions. The lumberman gets his timber prac- 

 tically without consideration, and the costs of production 

 are consequently not an item of calculation. In this re- 

 port round timber is estimated in the market at eight 

 cents a cubic foot; in Germany the selling price of round 

 timber (pine) in the forest is about twenty cents a cubic 

 foot, and it is very questionable if we could produce it 

 for less than thirty to thirty- five cents per cubic foot in 

 this country. Add thirty cents per cubic foot of timber 

 or thirty dollars per thousand feet board measure to 

 present prices and it will afford an approximation to the 

 figure at which it could be produced for the market. 



The actual value of the present annual cut of timber, 

 instead of being as is estimated in the report, one-third 

 of the value of the farm crop, is nearly equal to it, but 

 unfortunately the timber brought to market during the 

 year is not the growth of one but of many years. Pine 

 takes from eighty to a hundred and twenty years to reach 

 what we may call a marketable maturity, and where it 

 can be conveniently worked on a rotation of area, the 

 forest block if divided into as many compartments as 

 there are years in the rotation, and the most advanced 

 of these compartments cut over annually, and restocked 

 with seedbngs, the standing crop which we may call the 

 capital stock would be always the same from year to 

 year, the one compartment cleared, yielding a product, 

 equal to the annual yield of the whole block; the forest 

 remains, the interest only is utilized. In this country we 

 have been trenching on the capital stock for many years 

 past, we have made no suitable provision for reproduc- 

 tion, the annual production of the forest area is very low 

 for want of proper method, large areas are destroyed by 

 fire, and everybody realizes that the capital stock of tim- 

 ber is being steadily exhausted, and that it must be still 

 further trenched on until it is all consumed, the size and 

 quality of the timber diminishing as we near the end. 



The bulk of the remaining timber lands of the country 

 is in private hands, but the United States Government 

 still holds considerable tracts in the Rocky Mountains. 

 Colonel Ensign estimates that 45,000.000 acres of so-called 

 forest in the State of Colorado and the Territories of New 

 Mexico, Montana, Idaho and Utah belong to the public 

 domain. This is a noble tract for a public timber 

 reserve, situated on the main watershed of the conti- 

 nent, where its existence is of the greatest importance to 

 the general well-being of the country, and capable, under 

 proper management, of yielding an annual product of 

 from 1,000,000,000 to 1,500,000,000 cubic feet of fuel and 

 timber, and under favorable conditions an annual net 

 revenue of from ten to twenty millions of dollars. 



Under the present loose system of administration, the 

 same authority tells us, "Forest fires have almost undis- 

 puted sway; railway corporations freely use and waste 

 the public timber, and unscrupulous lumbermen fell 

 more trees than they can use." 



In a tabular statement of this report there is a return 

 of 413,519 acres of standing forest as destroyed by fire in 

 the year 1880, and the value $6,705,375. From these fig- 

 ures it appears that an acre of timber is valued at a little 

 over sixteen dollars, although if it were a full stand of 

 good mature pine timber, carrying say two thousand 

 cubic feet to the acre, it would cost the country five hun- 

 dred dollars per acre to reproduce it, and probably fifteen 

 hundred dollars per acre to import it from Europe if we 

 had to resort to foreign markets for our needs. But when 

 we talk of a forest area as capable of yielding a given 

 quantity, let us say twenty cubic feet of fuel and timbe r 



