Forest and Stream. 



A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 



Teems, $i a Ybak. 10 Cts. a Copt. 

 Sis. Months, $2. 



TWENTY YEARS. 



• • • • o • 



1873— 1893 



• • • • 



To Charles Hallock, summering in the grateful 

 shade of Hadley elms, the Forest and Stream on this 

 June day sends greeting. The issue of this week marks 

 the completion of the Fortieth Volume, the rounding out 

 of twenty years of sturdy and virile growth. In the be- 

 ginning the Forest and Stream was Hallock's happy 

 thought; the attainment of the new mile-stone is a fitting 

 moment for giving recognition anew of the original 

 enterprise to which the sportsmen of America owe their 

 favorite journal. 



The undertaking was fortunate in its parentage, for of 

 all men of his day Hallock was the one most generously 

 equipped to plan the new publication and successfully to 

 launch it. AH his life he had been an ardent sportsman; 

 he was a past-master in the art of angling, a genuine lover 

 of the woods and of wild life, a traveler of rich experience, 

 and an explorer who had seen many an arduous campaign. 

 He possessed an extensive knowledge of the sporting re- 

 sorts of the country, and enjoyed a wide acquaintance 

 with sportsmen, naturalists and public men. He was 

 gifted with a literary style of alluring grace and charm. 

 He brought to his chosen labor of love the prestige of suc- 

 cessful authorship so worthily won with his "Fishing 

 Tourist." He was fortified with long experience as a 

 trained newspaper man. He had in high degree the jour- 

 nalistic sense and was endowed with a nose for news. 

 Thus in every respect he was admirably fitted not only to 

 project the undertaking but to accomplish tlie self-im- 

 posed task. The successful realization of the ideal was no 

 insignificant achievement. Abundant reason for sincere 

 gratification, indeed, is there in this, to have established, in 

 an untried field, a special journal which has won the place 

 Forest and Stream holds in the periodical literature 

 of the day. His, to-day, may be honest pride in the 

 reflection that whatever has been the measure of 

 Forest and Stream's agency in the promotion of field 

 sports in America and of the sportsman's interests, credit 

 must first be given to that happy thought of twenty years 

 ago, which prompted the establishment of the paper, and 

 to the skill and wisdom and foresight which guided it in 

 its early years. To Charles Hallock, then, in his Massa- 

 chusetts home, a greeting to-day from Forest and 

 Stream, and from all the host of its readers and well- 

 wishers and faithful supporters. 



The special field, which the new journal was eventually 

 to occupy as its own, was not so clearly defined in 1873 as 

 it has become in the years that have intervened. Perhaps 

 it could not then have been defined; the time may have 

 been not yet ripe to cut loose once and for all from certain 

 features which in those days were so characteristic of con- 

 ventional sporting journals. And so in the first numbers 

 we find columns devoted to the horse, to croquet and 

 athletics and ornamental gardening; and in later years to 

 baseball, cricket, archery, lawn tennis and chess. But 

 the particular, unique, sin generis character of the Forest 

 AND Stream was as clearly pronounced in the very be- 

 ginning as it has been ever since and is to-day. The 

 flavor of the woods was there, the spirit of the free open 

 air and of the waters. This was the vital spark, the 

 breath, the life, the soul. It was the quality of the forest 

 and of the stream in very truth that assured for the new- 

 born journal life and growth and upbuilding and strength 

 and vigor, as Adirondack or Michigan or Colorado woods 

 and mountaias themselves give strength and vigor and life 

 to humanity. And in this quality, this peculiar charac- 

 teristic and pervading essence, is the secret of that sure 

 hold which the paper has always had upon a constituency 

 notable for its enthusiasm, constancy and fidelity. The 

 new journal was given a cordial, hearty, unreserved 

 welcome. In its plan and scope the field sportsman 

 recognized what he had been seeking. The Forest and 

 Stream was hailed as ' 'our paper. " That designation and 

 character it has maintained to this day. 



The cooperation of readers, correspondents and con- 

 tributors was spontaneous, and has ever since been con- 

 stant and remarkable. We like to think that in respect 

 of the close cordial relations existing between editors 

 and readers the Forest and Stream's constituency is 

 peculiar in journalism. Certainly there is in all the 



NEW YORK, JUNE 29, 1893. 



world no other journal which in like degree owes to its 

 voluntary contributors so much of the interest and worth 

 and vivacity and charm of its contents. What the Forest 

 AND Stream has been for twenty years and what it is 

 to-day is what its contributors have made it. From the 

 first the columns of the several departments have been 

 thrown open for all who would to enter and give their 

 relations of shooting and fishing and camp-life and 

 adventure; to record observations in natural history; to 

 exchange inquiry, hint and information; to tell dog and 

 fish and snake stories; to discuss Avays and means, and 

 rights and wrongs; to lecture, sermonize, argue, criticise, 

 appeal, denounce, exhort; express satisfaction, indigna- 

 tion, praise, reprobation; to teU a "Camp-Fire Flickering;" 

 to offer opinion, fact, theory, notion, hypothesis, vagary; 



CHARLES HALLOCK. 



Founder of Fore&t and Stream,. 



to exhibit good sense or foolishness — all in an infinite 

 variety which twenty years' custom cannot stale. The 

 Forest and Stream has been readable because it has 

 printed a wonderful variety of material from a wonder- 

 ful number of contributors who have had a wonderful 

 fund of good things to write. It has always been accepted 

 as the representative sportsmen's journal because it has 

 always represented sportsmen. Bat ever above and be- 

 yond all else, it has won its way becatise it has been per- 

 meated with the inspiration of the wild woods, and has 

 brought into home and ofiice and counting room and 

 workshop the breeziness and brightuess and freshness of 

 forest and stream. 



From the outlook of 1873 it was not given to the most 

 sanguine and optimistic sportsman to foresee with what 

 tremendous bounds the varied branches of the craft were 

 to advance in these twenty years. Almost equally as 

 difficult do we of to-day find it, looking backward from 

 the vantage of 1893, to realize how marvelous in their 

 growth have been the interests of rod and gun. In these 

 fin du sieele times we stand not long agog at anything. 

 If passage in a flying machine should be advertised for 

 to-morrow, the average citizen would drop his ticket into 

 the box, take his seat and speed away through the air, 

 reading his paper, imperturbed and nonchalant. We have 

 accepted breechloaders and factory ammunition along 

 with the electric light and the telephone quite as things 

 of couree; and we have actually forgotten how we used 

 to thump home the charge from the muzzle. The muzzle- 

 loading shotgun as a sportsman's weapon is now so anti- 

 quated that it is virtually regarded as prehistoric, and yet 

 it is a fact that the period of change from the old arm to 

 the new is practically covered by the twenty years of the 

 life of this journal and the few preceding years of the 

 American Sportsman, afterward as the JRod and Gun 

 absorbed into the Forest and Stream. In the fii-st of our 

 forty volumes may be found many a curious discussion of 

 the relative merits of muzzle and breech loaders, and the 

 most interesting trap reports of those days are the ones 

 designed to set forth the qualities of the two arms. Those 

 were primitive times indeed in shooting, and as for 

 angling, if one would know how remote was the year 

 1873 from the present in certain branches of fishing lore 

 now reckoned as rudimentary, let him turn back to the 



VOL. XL.— No. 26. 

 No. 318 Bboadway, Nbw York. 



pages where skeptical correspondents were given solemn 

 editorial assurance that the black bass would take a fly 



As with the gun, so with almost every appurtenance of 

 sport on the land and on the waters. Barely to catalogue 

 the thousand and one modifications and improvements 

 and inventions in the implements of shooting and fishing 

 and camp life and aquatic sports— which in variety and 

 aggregation have made noteworthy the period — would 

 fill columns. Sportsmen's supply manufacturers and 

 dealers have increased in like ratio; and arms and am- 

 munition, tackle and equipments have been simplified, 

 perfected and cheapened. 



More noteworthy yet has been the growth of the sports 

 of field and stream in popularity. In these days of game 

 and fish clubs galore, trap-shooting associations and 

 game protective bodies we lose sight of the fact that 

 at the time when the Forest and Stream was pro- 

 jected the sportsman was relatively a rare bird in 

 the land, for the most part flocking by himself be- 

 cause there were no others to flock with him. In 

 these later and better times, this Golden (spoon bait) Age 

 of angling, everybody goes fishing, and the first man on 

 the stream finds that some one has been there before him 

 gims are as common as jack-knives, until the man who 

 would make sure of his ducking point for the morning 

 flight must preempt it the day before and stand guard all 

 night. 



The half lias not been told, for space would not suffice 

 for the telling, of the changes which have come in the 

 twenty-years' lifetime of Forest and Stream— of how 

 one piece after another the game-haunted wildernesses 

 have been converted into pleasure resorts or settlements; 

 how from vast tracts '^f sporting country on sea coast and 

 lake shore and wide rolling prairie and rugged mountain 

 side, and from the coverts of farm and forest, the game 

 has been annihilated or driven out; how species once so 

 abundant that we were heedless of the cruel waste have 

 now almost disappeared while sportsman and market 

 hunter have been pointing at each other the finger of 

 blame; how the opportunities of the individual gunner 

 and angler have narrowed and are narrowing before the 

 aggrandizements of preserve associations. 



The half may not be told , though pleasing to tell, how the 

 influence of the sportsman, in those days slight because 

 only individual and personal, has come to be powerful 

 because exerted in the name of perfected and potent 

 organizations; how right public sentiment has grown in 

 support of wiser conduct and better laws; how State sys- 

 tems of game and fish protection have been devised and 

 put into practical and beneficent operation ; how fish culture, 

 from the groping, rudimentary, experimental stages re- 

 corded in 1873, has accomplished economic results of 

 transcendent importance in stocking and restocking the 

 waters. 



The story of all this has been written from week to week. 

 The Forest and Stream has been a faithful chronicler of 

 the times. To its files one must turn and beyond them 

 need hardly go for contemporaneous records on all sub- 

 jects properly within its scope, be the topic the eff acement 

 of the American buffalo, the rise and culmination and de- 

 cline of long-range rifle-shooting, the development of arti- 

 ficial target shooting from the days of the gyro, the im- 

 portation and fostering and condemnation of the English 

 sparrow, the profltless introduction of the German carp, 

 the successful stocking of rivers from the Atlantic west- 

 ward to the Pacific with valuable food fishes, the birth 

 and growth of canoeing, the establishment and develop- 

 ment of field trials and bench shows, the progress in game 

 and fish protection — in a word, the growth of sportsman- 

 ship. 



Is there necessity of saying that during these years this 

 journal has not been content merely to note current 

 events and record them? In the development of the 

 sports within its chosen field, in winnmg for them a 

 wider popularity, in contending for a more adequate 

 recognition of their inherent dignity, in maintaining and 

 holding up for emulation a higher ideal of sportsman's 

 conduct, the Forest and Stream has done its full part. 

 With unflagging zeal and courage and sanguine convic- 

 tion of ultimate success, it has year in and year out given 

 its influence and support and endeavor to the cause of 

 right protection and preservation of fish and game; to the 



