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FOREST AND STREAM. 



[Mat 19, 1894. 



"Forest and Stream's " Yellowstone 

 Park Game Exploration. 



No. 2. 



ACTUAL INTERVIEWS ON SEGREGATION. 



All About Calmness. 

 Chicago, 111., May 5.— In many past issues of Forest 

 and Stream there haveappeared editorial articles handling 

 the question of the proposed division of the Park by a 

 railroad from Cinnabar to Cooke City. Forest and 

 Stream has opposed that railroad and all other railroads 

 through the Park, and has made the one consistent and 

 unfaltering newspaper fight to keep the Park as it is — 

 unhurt, untouched, as the people of America have by 

 tbeir representatives declared it should be kept. In doing 

 this Forest and Stream has acted in the name of honor, 

 of sportsmanship and of public decency. It has kept 

 faith with its constituency and its principles. In doing 

 this it must needs have given the subject of the proposed 

 segregation the most thorough and careful attention, and 

 have acquired a most intimate knowledge of the matter 

 in all its bearings, not only from extended reading, but 

 from a various familiarity with the entire region in 

 question. 



I recall that a Chicago paper, which claims to be pub- 

 lished in the interest of sportsmanship but is really open 

 to the use of any man or men with an axe or axes to 

 grind, once published an article by W. S. Brackett, who 

 held forth that the occupant of a "far-off Eastern sanc- 

 tum" could not possibly be so well posted on Park matters 

 as those living near the Park. This is a trifle amusing, 

 when one comes to it. "Col." Brackett has lately bought 

 a little ranch on the Yellowstone, between Livingston and 

 Cinnabar, where he and his family pass a part of the sum- 

 mer. I don't know where he spends the rest of the year, 

 but it is my opinion that he is not very closely identified 

 with property interests about the Park. (If he is, then he 

 is taking an unfair advantage of the so-called Sportsman's 

 Journal and Miner's Friend which he favors with his 

 stories on segregation.) Yet I happen to know— what no 

 one else would ever know through the editorial page of 

 Forest and Stream — that the gentleman who has written 

 the Forest and Stream editorials is a ranchman owning 

 property in Wyoming, who is in cattle and horses for 

 revenue and not for summer resort purposes; that he has 

 spent years in all the phases of Western life, and that he 

 knows not only all of the Park and its environs but most 

 of the Montana mountains as well, no doubt a good deal 

 better, if I could commit the impoliteness of so direct a 

 comparison, than Mr. Brackett or many of his neighbors 

 do. I do not doubt that Mr. Brackett feels himself a 

 Montana citizen when he is in Montana, and that he says 

 he has "come to stay," and that moreover he catches a 

 warm flush of generous sympathy from the talk of the 

 interested men about him; but he is unjust to himself 

 when in ignorance he accuses a courteous opponent of an 

 igaorance that does not exist. One must not accuse Mr. 

 Brackett of demagoguery in this, but only of bad general- 

 ship in not learning the enemy's forces. This lack of 

 forethought leaves Forest and Stream quite in position 

 to say, suavely and calmly — if it ever could be so impolite 

 as to do such a thing — that probably it is Mr. Brackett 

 who doesn't know such a frightful lot more about this 

 subject than he ought to, himself. 



It all comes of not being calm. With calmness, I 

 should think Mr. Brackett would make a very good advo- 

 cate of just the doctrine Forest and Stream maintains, 

 and not the fire and sword tenets under which the local 

 Cooke City and Livingston contingent propose to wipe 

 the Park and the military off from the face of the earth, 

 to mutilate Capt. Anderson and even burn up the geysers, 

 the falls and the Yellowstone Lake. I wish Mr. Brackett 

 would be calm, because I saw him on the Cinnabar train 

 one day, going up to visit his ranch (he didn't know any 

 Forest and Stream man was there) and he is a mighty 

 nice looking man and appeared intelligent looking, too. 

 I should think a great deal could be made out of him with 

 care. If he will only be calm and think this thing over 

 as a man and as a sportsman he will come out of this 

 epoch of fire and blood pretty near to the Forest and 

 Stream position in belief. He will be welcome. Forest 

 and Stream will be in just about the same position, or 

 maybe a little further ahead. It is a great deal nicer to 

 be on the side of good judgment, good sportsmanship and 

 good citizenship than to be a left-handed Marco Bozzaris 

 or Toussaint L'Ouverture, or One-eyed Riley, or any of 

 those martyr fellows. I wouldn't be any martyr if I 

 were Mr. Brackett. I wouldn't burn up the geysers or 

 disfigure Capt. Anderson if I were Mr. Brackett, as in his 

 article he suggests will be done. I wouldn't do that. I 

 would be calm. 



Forest and Stream being therefore in full possession of 

 the facts in this case, as it is in most cases which it under- 

 takes to handle, it would ill become me to attempt to add 

 any weight to what has already been better said, and I 

 should not touch on this matter at all did I not hope that 

 some of the actual little interviews I had with segregation- 

 ists and others might prove at least amusing if not in- 

 structive. 



J. G. Sax, of Livingston. 



Mr. Sax keeps a fruit store and newstand. He does not 

 keep Forest and Stream for sale. I asked him why not 

 "I've got no use for that paper," he said. 

 "Why not?" said I. 



"It's all the time fighting us," he replied. "If it hadn't 

 been for that dash-hinged paper we'd have had a railroad 

 to Cooke before this through the Park. The fellows here 

 are all down on Forest and Stream, and won't have it 

 I see you are at it again this fall." 



"How do they know we are fighting you if they don't 

 read the paper?" I asked him. 



"I carry what there is a demand for," said Mr. Sax, 

 stiffly, ignoring the conundrum. 



W. F. Sheard, of Livingston. 



Mr. Sheard is a taxidermist, and no doubt buys more 

 furs and trophies at all sorts of seasons than any other 

 man in that part of the country. He is the man who 

 wrote to one of the winter keepers in the Park, asking him 



to poison animals in the Park and send out the small skins 

 by mail to him. This letter, which was written on Mr. 

 Sheard's own letterhead, was, I believe, published by 

 Forest and Stream, which has often spoken very frankly 

 and understandingly about Mr. Sheard and his practices. 

 Of course, I was innocent and ignorant of all that when I 

 called on Mr. Sheard, and Mr. Sheard, thinking, no doubt, 

 that I had never been west of the River before, gradually 

 thawed out and after a while became positively entertain- 

 ing. He introduced me to several friends, showed me 

 around, and took me through his really magnificent 

 collection of furs and trophies. He showed me a little bit 

 of timber up on the mountain side above town, and said 

 he never had to go further than that to kill deer. "I 

 killed six up there one day," said he, "I got the whole 

 band." (I think he said he killed them all at one shot, but 

 a little thing like that should not matter.) 

 *Mr. Sheard disclaimed that he had ever bought a Park 

 buffalo head. He thought, perhaps, some of the other 

 taxidermists had done such a thing. They were wicked 

 men. He wouldn't buy such a head. Dear me, no. 



Mr. Sheard told me confidentially that "the military up 

 at the Park was all a fake — didn't amount to anything; 

 that it didn't protect the Park and was no good; that the 

 Park would have to be opened some day." Mr. Sheard 

 also assured me that the road to Cooke City should be 

 built through the Park; that all it could cut off would be 

 a little bit of rocky hills of no value whatever and a 

 region where the game never came at all. He said that 

 if this road were built Livingston would blossom like the 

 rose and every citizen would have a smelter running on 

 the Cooke City ores. I told him I thought it more likely 

 that Livingston would get up in the night and go to Cooke, 

 or that the smelters would go up near Cinnabar, or at 

 Horr, where plenty of coal was at hand. Mr. Sheard 

 couldn't think so. He pictured to me the wrong done 

 by Congress to the Cooke City mine owners, who had 

 waited twenty years without having the way to fortune 

 opened to them by act of Congress. I told him that I 

 had been waiting twenty years to get rich too, but Con- 

 gress hadn't done anything for me and I didn't believe it 

 was going to. Mr. Sheard couldn't see the parallel. No 

 man in Livingston or Cooke City can see the parallel. 

 Yet it is a perfectly just and fair one. The disappointed 

 Cooke City men are just the same as those disappointed 

 in any other line of life and the world is open for them 

 to go into something else if they are not satisfied where 

 they are. 



Mr. Sheard took me to a map, and explained to me that 

 only by one route under the shining canopy of heaven 

 could a road be built to Cooke City, and that was through 

 the Park. "But all we want," said he, drawing a nice 

 mark with his pencil, ' 'is to go into the Park for about a 

 half mile south of the Yellowstone, for just a little way, 

 then right out along the hills just above the north fine. 

 There is no game in there, not a geyser and not a single 

 object of natural interest." Yet later I found that even 

 this statement would cut off forever the entire band of 

 antelope in the Park, which has only a little winter range 

 right along the Yellowstone Vglley. I knew the state- 

 ment was inaccurate by about fifty miles in length and by 

 some thousands of feet of rocky, vertical walls in height, 

 and later I learned by my own eyes that there are more 

 elk in winter time in just the part of the Park proposed to 

 be cut off than in any one section of it whatever. 



I don't remember any specific statement to that effect 

 by Mr. Sheard, but I gathered the impression that he was 

 going to burn the Park up next week, and I presume that 

 he has done it. I don't see why he did it, because the 

 Park must have been a source of revenue to him especi- 

 ally. 



The Press of Livingston, 



I met the editors of the leading Livingston paper, a 

 prominent and radical advocate of segregation and the 

 Cooke City road, and as members of the "perfesh" we 

 had a pleasant talk. Mr. Wright unrolled a map, and I 

 must say that I listened to a very fair statement of the 

 local side of the case. I am able to see how personal 

 interest can blind a man to national interests, though un- 

 consciously, and I told my newspaper friends that had 

 my lot fallen in Livingston, and had I never known the 

 doctrines of Forest and Stream, I would no doubt have 

 done as they did. On the other hand, I asked them to be 

 equally fair, and to realize the folly of Forest and 

 Stream, by profession devoted to the preservation of the 

 forests and the game, leaving its own field to go into a 

 field of an absolutely foreign interest. I told them that 

 Forest and Stream did not claim to be a mining journal, 

 but a sportsman's journal, and that as such the only course 

 was to do what it thought was right, and so try to pre- 

 serve the Park and the Park game. Mr. Wright thought 

 perhaps Forest and Stream did not know all the facts — 

 that it did not know how little the Park would be dam- 

 aged, etc., and that really there was little game in the 

 country proposed to be cut off. In this I personally 

 learned later that Mr. Wright was misinformed, and that 

 Capt. Anderson's report (which the Livingston Herald 

 ridiculed), was correct when it stated that large herds of 

 game wintered in that very part of the Park. Neverthe- 

 less, I am obliged to my friends of the Livingston news- 

 paper fraternity for a statement of the case, wnich I think 

 was meant to be fair, and we are all obliged for the later 

 editorial in the Enterprise, on the poacher, Howell, in 

 which it was said that "Howell's act will find few apolo- 

 gists in this section." 



Mr. Wittich, of Livingston. 



The Wittichs are taxidermists, two sons and their father. 

 Only one of the sons was in the business when I was there, 

 and I think the firm was Wittich & Son. Here I received 

 very nice attention. Young Wittich has Cooke City 

 property, and is a very ardent segregationist. He has 

 often had occasion to go through the Park on the trail to 

 Cooke City, and rebelled against the regulations. He told 

 me how he compelled Capt. Anderson and the Secretary 

 of the Interior to yield to his imperious demands for the 

 privilege of bearing arms in the Park and going where he 

 pleased. (Capt. Anderson's account of this is a shade 

 different. I haven't heard from the Secretary of the In- 

 terior.) Young Wittich was hotter-headed than his 

 father, who held the same beliefs, but was temperate in 

 them. Young Wittich said the soldiers ought to be abol- 

 ished and was of the belief that the Cooke City road must 

 be built through the Park peaceably if it could, by force 

 if it must. He pitied the poor Cooke City miners, who 

 had been developing their propositions for twenty years 

 and were still broke because they couldn't get their ore 



out of the camp. He couldn't see the sense of my renewed 

 remark to the effect that I also was mostly broke in 

 Chicago, and that Congress wasn't going to build any rail- 

 road for me. 



"The men of this country will burn the whole Park up, 

 if something isn't done," said young Mr. Wittich, im- 

 pressively. 



"Oh, no they won't," I said, "you don't really mean 

 that, now do you?" 



"Well," said he, cooling down a trifle, "it ought to be 

 burned." 



Old Mr. Wittich was not so radical. We all three chat- 

 ted pleasantly for a while, and the old gentleman invited 

 me to go fishing with him when I came out from the 

 Park. I am sorry time was too short for me to do so, for 

 I know we should have had a good time. 



Young Mr. Wittich said that everybody knew that 

 heads of Park buffalo, thirty or forty of them, had been 

 offered at the taxidermist shops around the Park, at Liv- 

 ingston and elsewhere, "within the last two or three 

 years." Other taxidermists of Livingston had maybe 

 taken some of these heads. He wouldn't dream of doing 

 such a thing. 



F. B. Tolhurst, of Livingston. 



Mr. Tolhurst is another Livingston taxidermist, and is 

 an honest workman in my belief. Mr. Tolhurst was busy 

 and I could not talk with him much. Mr. Tolhurst 

 thought maybe the Other Livingston taxidermists might 

 buy a Park buffalo head once in a while, but as for him, 

 he wouldn't dream of it. 



Matt. Black, of Bozeman. 



Mr. Black is a newsdealer at Bozeman. He doesn't 

 handle Forest and Stream. Says he hasn't any use for 

 it. (The other Bozeman dealer doesn't have any Cooke 

 City mining property, so he handles Forest and Stream). 

 Mr. Black was. the most rabid segregationist I met in my 

 entire trip, and was more violent in his expressions of 

 hatred for Forest and Stream than any one I talked 

 with. He allowed the Forest and Stream man was a 

 tenderfoot. We will let it go at that. Evidently I got 

 myself disliked by Mr. Black by venturing to work for a 

 paper which doesn't run a mining department or a free- 

 for-all editorial page. "It's a blanked noble mission For- 

 est and Stream has in life, ain't it!" said Mr. Black, 

 "trying to stop the development of the resources of this 

 country! Here's men who have been holding valuable 

 claims over at Cooke for 20 years, before the Park was 

 ever heard of, and you fellows want them to waste their 

 entire lives!" 



"No, we don't," I ventured to say, "but if they don't 

 like it at Cooke, why didn't they go somewhere else?" 



This made Mr. Black jump up and down, and this was 

 where he allowed I was a tenderfoot (I lived in a min- 

 ing camp before I ever saw a copy of Forest and Stream 

 and we wanted a railroad in our camp and never got it. 

 Congress never did anything forme.) 



"There'll be some killing done up around that Park 

 some day," said Mr. Black with an awful impressive air, 

 which should probably have curdled my blood, "and if it 

 happens, Forest and Stream can just blame itself for it. 

 What business is it of yours, meddling in the affairs of 

 this country and trying to stop the growth of one of the 

 richest camps on the range?" 



(This, however, Forest and Stream has not done, but 

 has editorially shown that a road could much better be 

 built in from the east. I cited the letter of Mr. P. M. 

 Gallaher). 



"There's only one way to get into Cooke," said Mr. 

 Black, in a tone as of one who intended to settle the 

 question forever, "and that's through the Park. That's 

 the only route we can raise capital for. We could once 

 have got capital for that, but I don't believe we could get 

 capital to build, the road now if we had the right of way. 

 You fellows in the East are a blanked nice set of men, 

 ain't you. You've raised such a hurrah over this that I 

 don't believe we'll ever be able to do anything now." 



In this latter statement I believe Mr. Black is practically 

 correct, but I can not avoid the belief that the now dead 

 segregation scheme had no enemies more deadly than its 

 own friends, who too often have indulged in just such 

 wild talk as the above. Such talk displeases the American 

 people, which after all is practical and fair. 



Mr. Black claimed that the poacher Howell did not 

 belong at Cooke City. He disapproved of Howell's action 

 in killing the Park buffalo, and said Howell ought to be 

 hung, and that he would like to help hang him, as he had 

 injured the spotless record of Cooke City. I recommend 

 this to Mr. Howell's attention. 



They Should All Be Careful. 



They should all be more careful how they talk, all these 

 rabid segregationists who have been making utterances 

 like the above. I have quoted them all fairly and with- 

 out garbling, to the best of my knowledge and belief, and 

 have given the statements because I believe the cause of 

 segregation is most hurt by telling the truth about it, and 

 by making public the ill-tempered and unreasonable 

 methods by which these men seek to gain their purely 

 personal ends. 



There is no call for a road through the Park to Cooke 

 City but a personal call. There is no public demand for 

 it. There is on the contrary a public demand for this 

 great national preserve, a heritage to be kept unchanged 

 and inalienable. The Government can not give each 

 child what it wants, but it can give all its children a great 

 gift that will be good for all of them. 



By no means should it be understood that the above 

 utterances represent the feeling of the great State of Mon- 

 tana. On the other hand, they come from but a very 

 small section and from only a few men in that section. 

 To build this road through the Park would be the death 

 blow to Livingston. It would benefit Cooke City alone. 

 It would be also a death blow to the Park. Is the benefit 

 to the few greater than the benefit to the many? There- 

 fore, is the position of Forest and Stream on this matter 

 selfish, illiberal or unfair? Who is there who can think so? 



It will be a great pleasure in a later article to give the 

 reverse of this sordid and distempered view, and to show 

 the other side of the picture, and I shall then quote engi- 

 neers and railroad men of authority in support of the 

 Forest and Stream belief that the Cooke City men are 

 subserving their own best interests in insisting on this 

 road through the Park. If Forest and Stream held it in 

 its hand to forever seal the fate of a prosperous commu- 

 nity, to kill its future, to prevent the happiness and sue- 



