Forest and Stream: 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Tsbms, f4 a Ykar. 10 Cts. a Copy. 
Six Months, $3. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JUNE 6, 1896. 
No. 
VOL. XLVL— No. 83 
346 Broadway, Nbw Yobx. 
For Prospectus and Advertising Rates see Page viii. 
POLICE REVOLVER PRACTICE. 
In view of an approaching parade of the police depart- 
ment of New York city, the Board of Police Commis- 
sioners about two months ago ordered the discontinuance 
of pistol practice by the force. This practice, which had 
been taken up some months before in response to a sug- 
gestion by the Forest and Stream, had been carried on 
far enough to permit each man on the force to shoot the 
fifteen shots of a first series at the target, and a second 
series had been begun and carried on through one-third 
of the force. The results of this pistol practice were pub- 
lished in Forest and Stream and were very interesting. 
They showed very clearly that when the practice began 
the New York police force knew little or nothing about 
shooting the revolver. But during the progress of the 
practice it was made very evident that the men of the 
force could readily learn how to use the arm, for the pla- 
toons which shot last in the public practice all did vastly 
better work than those which had shot first, and some of 
them showed a degree of improvement approximating 
100 per cent., a result due, no doubt, to private practice as 
well as to the efficient coaching they had received. 
Now that the parade is over it is greatly to be desired 
that the pistol practice should be resumed without loss of 
time. We understand that there is more or less oppo- 
sition to this among the uniformed force, and especially 
by some of the sergeants, who take the ground that the 
men will soon be away on their vacations, and thus in 
part be absent when the practice is being carried on, 
while at the same time the force will be weakened by 
such absences. These reasons are not valid ones for the 
postponing of the revolver practice. The men who will 
be absent will never be more than two or three to a 
platoon, and they can be assigned to shoot with some 
other platoon before or after their vacations. 
If pistol practice be postponed until the autumn, another 
cause will come up to put it off still further. The elec- 
tions which will come in November will be preceded by 
several weeks during which the police force will be busily 
employed in overseeing the proper registration of voters 
in this city, and at that time pistol practice will be impos- 
sible. If, therefore, the months of June, July, August 
and September are not utilized for a continuance of this 
instruction, it must go over to the winter, and that means 
that nearly a year will have intervened between the effort 
to find out what the men can do and the commencement 
of their practical instruction in the use of their firearms. 
In the months that will have elapsed all the good done by 
the preliminary practice will have been lost, and much of 
the interest now felt by the men in revolver shooting will 
have died away. The work will have to be begun anew 
from the foundation. 
The New York police force has for many years been 
called the "finest," and this term has sometimes been 
used in jest, but as a matter of fact it is the finest force 
of police in the world. Its members are intelligent and 
quick to take instruction, and there is no reason why, 
if this matter of pistol practice be properly followed up, 
they should not become a body of picked marksmen, 
who will far excel any like force of men anywhere. It 
is greatly to be hoped that the Police Commissioners will 
follow this matter up. Few things that they can do will 
have a greater tendency to foster that esprit de corps 
which is so important a factor in the improvement of the 
uniformed f orce. 
INDIAN HUNTING RIGHTS. 
South of the Yellowstone Park, near the border line 
between Wyoming and Idaho, lies the valley which is 
known as Jackson's Hole. It is a valley walled in on the 
east by hills rising to high mountains, which separate the 
waters flowing into Snake River from those flowing into 
Wind River and so into the .Missouri. At the head of the 
Hole is Jackson's Lake, a broad and beautiful sheet of 
water, surrounded by wide hay meadows, and shadowed 
on the west by the towering summits of the Teton Range. 
From here southward the Suake River flows down the 
valley between the sage brush covered flood plains, above 
which rise the rolling pine-clad foothills toward the tow- 
ering peaks above. A few miles below the lake the Gros 
Ventre fork flows into Snake River, which soon after 
turns west, and flowing through the mountains that have 
shut it in leaves the Hole. 
Twenty years ago Jackson's Hole was a mysterious 
hunting ground, where game and fur were reputed to be 
more abundant than anywhere else on this continent. 
On three sides walled in by stupendous mountains and on 
the fourth protected by a country that had then been 
visited by very few people, there was about this valley 
that flavor of fable and romance which always attaches 
to regions distant, difficult of access, little known. And 
indeed the Hole deserved its reputation. There, when 
first we saw it, roamed deer, elk, antelope and moose, if 
not in countless herds, at least in such numbers that a 
very ordinary hunter might kill all he wished to; in the 
hills were found buffalo, and not far off sheep, while dams 
of the beaver blocked every stream. 
All this was long ago, but there are still elk and deer in 
these hills, and they are the attraction which each year 
call to Jackson's Hole and the mountains about it people 
from far and from near, men with red skins and white. 
In Idaho, southwest of Jackson's Hole, lies the Fort 
Hall Indian Reservation, where the Bannocks, a tribe of 
Indians belonging to the Shoshone family, have their 
reservation. When in 1868 these Indians made a treaty 
with the United States Government ceding the territory 
which they had always claimed and retaining only the 
small reservations at Fort Hall and at Lemhi, it was 
solemnly covenanted and agreed between the Bannocks 
and the Government that the Indians should have the 
right to hunt upon the ceded territory so long as these re- 
mained unoccupied lands of the United States, and there 
was peace between the tribe and the Government. This 
right the Indians have enjoyed for nearly thirty years. 
Gradually, however, settlers began to come into the 
country, and as it was still a good game country they 
hunted there, killing the elk and deer for their 
hides, running down elk in the winter snows, 
and capturing them alive to sell to owners 
of preserves, and above all, getting parties of Eastern 
tourists to come out and hunt them. All this was more 
or less profitable, and to these settlers it seemed a very 
bitter thing that the Indians should visit this country 
in accordance with their claimed treaty rights and butcher 
— as they did — this game. So the settlers were oppressed 
with a great fear lest our noble big game should be de- 
stroyed, and the Indian became an abomination in their 
eyes; and the State of Wyoming having enacted game 
laws, which the Indians did not know, and regarded no 
more than the white settlers, these settlers last summer 
set upon a hunting party of Bannocks and first captured 
it, and then killed a woman and two or three babies and 
wounded an old blind man. 
Subsequently the authorities of the State prepared a 
case for testing in the courts the question of Indian hunt- 
ing rights. This was taken to the Supreme Court of the 
United States, where the whole subject has been reviewed 
and a decision has just been returned, written by Justice 
White, denying the claims of the Bannocks under their 
treaty to the possession of hunting privileges in contraven- 
tion of State statutes. 
This finding is of such importance that through our 
special representative in Washington we have secured an 
advance copy of the full text, which here follows: 
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES. 
John H. Ward, Sheriff of the") 
County of Uinta, . in the State | Appeal from the Circuit Court of 
of Wyoming, Appellant, 
vs. 
Race Horse. 
the United States for the Dis- 
trict of Wyoming. 
[May 25, 1S96.] 
This appeal was taken from an order of the court below, 
rendered in a habeas corpus proceeding, discharging the 
appellee from custody. (70 Fed. Rep. 598.) The petition 
for the writ based the right to the relief, which it prayed 
and which the court below granted, on the ground that 
the detention complained of was in violation of the Con- 
stitution and laws of the United States, and in disregard 
of a right arising from and guaranteed by a treaty made 
by the United States with the Bannock Indians. Because 
of these grounds the jurisdiction below existed, and the 
right to review here obtains. (Revised Statutes, § 753; 
Act of March 3, 1891, 36 Stat. 826.) The record shows the 
following material facts: The appellee, the plaintiff be- 
low, was a member of the Bannock tribe of Indians, re- 
taining his tribal relations and residing with it in the 
Fort Hall Indian reservation. This reservation was cre- 
ated by the United States in compliance with a treaty 
entered into between the United States and the Eastern 
band of Shoshonees and the Bannock tribe of Indians, 
which took effect Feb. 24, 1869. (15 Stat. 673.) Article 2 
of this treaty, besides setting apart a reservation for the 
use of the Shoshonees, provided: 
"It is agreed that whenever the Bannocks desire a reservation to be 
set apart for their use, or whenever the President of the United 
States shall deem it advisable for them to be put upon a reservation, 
he shall cause a suitable one to be selected for them in their present 
country, which shall embrace reasonable portions of the 'Port Neuf 
and 'Kansas^ Prairie' countries." 
In pursuance of the foregoing stipulation, the Fort Hall 
Indian reservation was set apart for the use of the Ban- 
nock tribe. Article 4 of the treaty provides as follows: 
"The Indians herein named agree, when the agency house and 
other buildings shall be constructed on their reservations named, they 
will make said reservations their permanent home, and they will make 
no permanent settlement elsewhere; but they shall have the right to 
hunt upon the unoccupied lands of the United States so long as 
game may be found thereon, and so long as peace subsists among the 
whites and Indians on the borders of the hunting districts." 
In July, 1868, an act had been passed erecting a tern. 
porary government for the Territory of Wyoming (15 
Stat. 178), and in this act it was provided as follows: 
"That nothing in this act shall be construed to impair the rights of 
persons or property now pertaining to the Indians in said Territory, so 
long as such rights shall remain unextinguished by treaty between the 
United States and such Indians." 
Wyoming was admitted into the Union on July 10, 
1890. (26 Stat. 222.) Section 1 of that act provides as fol- 
lows: 
"That the State of Wyoming is hereby declared to be a State of the 
United States of America, and is hereby declared admitted into the 
Union on an equal footing with the original States in all respects what- 
ever; and that the constitution which the people of Wyoming have 
formed for themselves be, and the same is hereby, accepted, ratified 
and confirmed." 
The act contains no exception or reservation in favor of 
or for the benefit of Indians. 
The Legislature of Wyoming on July 20, 1895 (Laws of 
Wyoming, 1895, c. 98, p. 225), passed an act regulating 
the killing of game within the State. In October, 1895, 
the district attorney of Uinta county, State of Wyoming, 
filed an information against the appellee (Race Horse) for 
having killed in that county seven elk in violation of the 
law of the State. He was taken into custody by the 
sheriff, and it was to obtain a release from imprisonment 
authorized by a commitment issued under these proceed- 
ings that the writ of habeas corpus was sued out. The 
following facts are unquestioned: 1st. That the elk 
were killed in Uinta county, Wyoming, at a point about 
100 miles from the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, which is 
situated in the State of Idaho; 2d, that the killing was in 
violation of the laws of the State of Wyoming; 3d, that 
the place where the killing took place was unoccupied 
public land of the United States, in the sense that the 
United States was the owner in fee of the land; 4th, that 
the place where the elk were killed was in a mountainous 
region some distance removed from settlements, but was 
used by the settlers as a range for cattle, and was within 
election and school districts of the State of Wyoming. 
Mr. Justice White, after stating the case, delivered the 
opinion of the Court. 
It is wholly immaterial, for the purpose of the legal 
issue here presented, to consider whether the place where 
the elk was killed is in the vicinage of white settlements. 
It is also equally irrelevant to ascertain how far the land 
was used for a cattle range, since the sole question which 
the case presents is whether the treaty made by the 
United States with the Bannock Indians gave them the 
right to exercise the hunting privilege therein referred to, 
within the limits of the State of Wyoming, in violation 
of its laws. If it gave such right, the mere fact that the 
State had created school districts, or election districts, 
and had provided for pasturage on the lands, could no 
more efficaciously operate to destroy the right of the In- 
dian to hunt on the lands than could the passage of the 
game law. If, on the other hand, the terms of the treaty 
did not refer to lands within a State which were subject 
to the legislative power of the State, then it is equally 
clear that, although the lands were not in school or elec- 
tion districts and were not near settlements, the right 
conferred on the Indians by the treaty would be of no 
avail to justify a violation of the State law. 
The power of a State to control and regulate the taking 
of game cannot be questioned. (Geer vs. Connecticut, 
161 U. S. 519.) The text of article 4 of the treaty, relied 
on as giving the right to kill game within the State of 
Wyoming, in violation of its laws, is as follows : 
* But they shall have the right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of 
the United States so long as game may be found thereon, and so long 
