May ii, 1895.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
869 
personal motives, especially after niy relating the experi- 
ence with a club guide; but let me assure the reader that 
there are dozens of persons who have been treated almost 
as I was, not alone woodsmen, but people of eminent re- 
spectability outside of these clubs from the cities. 
I fear that I will see the day when deer will have ceased 
to exist in the Adirondacks because the State did not buy 
up a great tract of land, properly protect it from hunters, 
that the overflow of game might supply the surrounding 
woods, where rich and poor alike could enjoy a sport 
which makes rugged, honest men when properly fol- 
lowed. 
It may have been violent to have written the above 
against what is regarded as proper institutions by sports- 
men, but only those who have Jived among the woodsmen 
can or do understand how deeply this subject has stirred 
them. * Raymond S. Spears. 
CHICAGO AND THE WEST. 
Worse Than a Nullity. 
Chicago, III., May 4. — Minnesota reports a law showing 
a clause providing a $25 non-resident shooting license, and 
openly declares this to be in retaliation for the North Da- 
kota law establishing a similar license. North Dakota has 
already stated emphatically that her license clause was 
inserted in retaliation against Chicago's proposed Blow 
bill, which would have wiped out all Dakota game. Ne- 
braska has also said openly that her attempted license of 
$50 for non-resident shooters was a measure retaliatory 
against Chicago. Leaving out all question of the desira- 
bility of license provisions in tlie game laws, does it not 
appear to the friends of the man Blow, who devised the 
late iniquitous measure known as the Blow bill, that he 
has proved himself not only a, nullity but worse than a 
nullity in matters of game protection? All these little 
things coming from all over the great West, which is di- 
rectly affected by Chicago game laws, must surely furnish 
cheerful reading for the illustrious warden in question. 
Meantime there continues a very ominous silence at 
Springfield on game law matters. It is practically certain 
that there will be no improvement and no change in the 
Illinois game law. 
Trout. 
Rev. L. A. Crandall, of Chicago, with friends, departs 
this week for trouting waters in Wisconsin, probably 
Dudley, on the Prairie River. I wish him good luck. Mr. 
H. L. Morrill, of the 'Frisco Road, and several friends, of 
St. Louis, passed through Chicago early in the week in a 
private car, bound for upper Wisconsin after trout, of 
which may they take abundance. The streams around 
Waupaca are reporting good catches the past week. Mr. 
E. H. Holmes, of Milwaukee, and Mr. Nat. Cook, of Chi- 
cago, go next week to the Fence River in Michigan North 
Peninsula, on a trouting trip, and will no doubt do well, 
as that region is beginning to show a good spring run of 
trout. 
The Possum Club. 
In the past we heard more of the Possum Club than of 
late, but the Possum Club is by no means dead. Every 
once in a while a few members meet at the Possum 
caterer's, Bill Werner's, and revive the old practices — ex- 
cept that it is now close season on possum, and they have 
to eat something else. Last week a select assemblage of 
the members, including Messrs. Mussey, Dicks, Organ, 
Haskell, Place and Hamline met at Mr. Werner's, and 
surprised that affable provider of good things by present- 
ing him a fine painting by the well known sportsman 
artist, Prof. Edmund Osthaus. The latter has done few 
things more happily than this painting of two pointers at 
point in the field, and there ai-e few happier men than 
was Mr. Werner when the boys sprung this beautiful gift 
upon him. 
It was not long after his pleasant evening at the Possum 
reunion that Mr. L. M. Hamline had a very different sort 
of evening. His furniture factory in the West division 
was burned and much of his spring style furniture went 
off like hot cakes. Mr. Hamline is one of the best known 
of the Chicago shooters and is serving as member of 
the executive committee of the State Association this 
year. His friends sympathize with him in his business 
loss, which, owing to good insurance, might have been 
very much worse. 
Around Milwaukee. 
This week I spent over at Milwaukee, in and around 
one of the prettiest of the Lake cities, which is located 
right on the edge of one of the best sporting regions in 
Wisconsin. The Milwaukee man does not have to go far 
for duck shooting, or for snipe and woodcock snooting, 
or for the best of baes fishing, or for trout or 'lunge. In 
short, he is 85 miles nearer paradise than the Chicago 
confrere, who is forced to go through or beyond Milwau- 
kee to get at the best of his sporting grounds. 
Out at "Merrilland," in Merrill Park, the great old- 
homestead, whose broad acres still defy the encroaching 
streets of advancing city, is where Dick Merrill and his 
brother Fred keep a few of their many dogs of all sorts, 
notably the pack of beagles of which kennel readers hear 
sometimes. Thirteen miles further country-ward is their 
big farm, Brookfield, and here are the larger kennels, 
where these lovers of the dog, for the dog's sake, raise a 
lot of pointers and setters of a very good sort. Dick 
does not think that anything can ever replace Paul Bo in 
his regard, but old Paul Gladstone is trying to fill that 
vacancy the best he knows, though now thirteen years 
old, and very grave and dignified thereby. We turned 
out a lot of tUe youngsters for a run over the green fields, 
among them a nice Strideaway puppy and a very pretty 
young lady descendant of Paul Bo, rejoicing in the name 
of Pauline Bo. The dog* enjoyed the fun and so did the 
rest of us. It is a great misfortune of a city man that he 
rarely is situated so that he can keep a dog with any 
comfort to either himself or the dog, and I could appre- 
ciate the pleasure to the dogs and their owners, here in so 
happy a surrounding. 
Acclimatized Pheasants. 
Still out from Milwaukee, perhaps twenty-five miles 
further into the country, we came to the country place 
of Mr. Howard Bosworth, on the shores of Nagawicka 
Lake, some two or three miles from Nashota station. 
This is where one of the most interesting experiments in 
pheasant raising in the West is now in progress. Mr. 
Bosworth met Dick Merrill and myself and took us out 
to the place so that we could see the stranger birds at 
their home in the lake region of Wisconsin. 
Mr. Bosworth has entered his third year, I believe in 
pheasant farming, and now feels that he is well beyond 
the experimental stage. He has lost a number of young 
birds through mishandling when young, but is confident 
he will rear this year's crop in safety. At one fell stroke 
of misfortune he lost fifty birds last winter, all mature 
birds, one little mink doing all the damage in one night. 
In spite of this he now has sixty full-grown birds, mostly 
the Chinese pheasants, with a few English ring-necks, in 
his yards at the countr} place. We found these confined 
in pens 18 by 20ft. in size, all the pens surrounded and 
entirely covered with wire netting. There are ten of the 
pens, each containing one cock bird and five hens, the 
wings of all being clipped on one side each six weeks, so 
that they cannot fly against the wire and injure them- 
selves. Mr. Bosworth feeds a compound made of Spratts 
game meal, Spratts "crissel," a little bone meal, and 
crushed oyster shell. In the water he was using a touch 
of Venetian red, though this was only for temporary cor- 
rection of slight disorder. The birds have begun their 
laying, some dozens of eggs having been already collected. 
Mr. Bosworth expects about 1,500 or 2,000 eggs this 
season, and has already made plans to turn out some of 
the old birds next season at a certain place in Wisconsin. 
He is laboring to get the bird introduced permanently as 
one of the game birds of the State, and hopes others will 
aid to this end all possible. With the admirable facil- 
ities at his hand and the valuable experience he has ac- 
quired in handling the birds, his success seems assured for 
the future on a good big scale. It would be a grand thing 
if we could hope some day to see this bird native to the 
Wisconsin woods and fields. They are beau tif ul creatures, 
the hens especially presenting a decidedly game look as 
they scuttled rapidly around the yards in their swift and 
timid fashion. We thought the English bird rather hand- 
somer than the Chinese, but it is said to be not so hardy 
perhaps, and to be possessed of no special qualities of ex- 
cellence over its Mongolian neighbor. All the males of 
both sorts seemed too highly painted to fill the American 
eye for a game-looking bird; but that is habrb merely. 
Active, strong, alert and vigorous, these birdB would surely 
be all our shooters could ever ask for the field, and I hope 
we may some day see them all over the middle West. 
Wisconsin has passed a law protecting them. All Mr. 
Bosworth's birds appear at this writing in perfect health, 
and there is reason to believe that the good he has done 
his State in his plucky experiment (which has at date cost 
him over $3,0U0) will eventually come to be one generally 
known and recognized. . 
While our host was entertaining us at his place, Dick 
Merrill and I discovered that he had some perch fishing at 
his boat landing, and forthwith went angling for them, 
catching a dozen or so for breakfast. AH perch lovers 
should remember that it is the small perch, about as long 
as one's finger, which are the best to eat. The great 
ones, as long us one's hand, we put back into the water. 
Mahn-a-wauk. 
We had now had some diversity of pleasure, what with 
the dogs and the pheasants, but we were to see still 
another line of Milwaukee sport, to wit, the seemly art of 
canoeing, as practiced by that vigorous body of sailors, 
the Mahn-a-wauk Canoe Club. This body has a charming 
club house on the lovely shore line which lies at the foot 
of a sweet green park, and both without and within the 
house is one for emulative example to other clubs. The 
interior decorations, as shown in the great hall, I consider 
to be the best and most tasteful things of the kind I have 
ever seen in any men's assembling room. It is easy to be 
clumsy in trying to do something nautical, something 
horsey, something athletic in any way, but the Mahn-a- 
wauk artist has erred in no such way. His decorations, 
made of soars, oars, paddles, bits of rope ends, squares of 
brown packing paper, pieces of old carpet matting, odds 
and ends of all sorts, are in no wise lugged in by the ears, 
yet are just the things young men could wish about them 
in their unceremonious hall of meeting. It is well that 
there be boats and hints of boats in a canoe hall, but it is 
also well that lovely woman add grace and beauty now 
and then to a wall not too severely prim. If lovely 
woman be done in colors, as shown in the loving satires of 
the American pictorial press, and if lovely woman be 
framed by a scorched edge to the plate displaying her 
•loveliness, all this same being nailed upon the wall and 
surrounded by a coiled and knotted rope from some fel- 
low's old canoe gear, no man who is any man can object 
:to her presence— not even in two hundred different places, 
or as part of a score of different designs. You would not 
think, at first, since you have chances to buy picture 
frames at $20, $50, anything you like for pricej that if you 
thrust your fist through a piece of brown paper, turned 
back the edges of the rent and painted them green, you 
would have a frame good enough for your best girl's 
best photograph, would you? Yet this is true. More- 
over, a piece of carpet matting, torn through, with 
a smear of bronze on one corner and a daub of 
green on the other, might not appear the most suitable 
frame for a galaxy of beauties. Yet these canoe men, 
who certainly are the most delightful people on earth, 
know very well the value of such things in conjunction 
with masks and foils, and bats, and bows, and decoy 
ducks, and pennons, and burgees, and trophies, and all 
sorts of mannish things. And so do the ladies who come 
down and visit the Mahn-a-wauk house. The ladies 
always ask who did these decorations. It is all the work 
of Fred Dickens, the Western Canoe Association's secre- 
tary, a man who ought to be doing decorative things for 
a business, instead of about a million of unimaginative 
souls who are doing "art" work. I call Mr. Dickens's 
canoe notions artistic in every sense of the word as I un- 
derstand it, and congratulate the club which owns him. 
It is one of the pleasant Mahn-a-wauk customs for mem- 
bers to do their own cooking when they meet at the club 
house, and we had a little fete of that sort while I was 
over there — the party being made up of Messrs. Hunting- 
ton, Holmes, Dickens, Merrill, Friese, McWhorter, with 
Nat Cook of the Chicago Club, who happened to be in 
town at the time. We all helped get supper, which was 
a great and artistic success in a culinary way. We had 
perch, and we had the succulent sissinger from Vienna, 
and we had corn and potatoes and a great beefsteak, and 
a whole lot of other things, finishing with a truly artistic 
cup of coffee, the latter executed by Mr. Holmes. The 
dishwashing was a matter or great scientific precision. 
When most folks wash dishes they carry them with care 
to the resting place iu the cupboard; but when canoeists 
wash dishes, it is necessary to form a long line from the 
dish pan to the pantry, each article as washed and dried 
being tossed to the next man in waiting, he catching it in 
mid-air and so transferring it to his neighbor. This re- 
duces the ordinarily prosaic sport of dishwashing to an 
amusement fraught with a certain verve and excite- 
ment of its own. There are many hew ideas hid under 
canoeing roofs. Certainly one must say that under the 
Mahn-a-wauk roof rests all that needs to make a healthy 
and vigorous canoe club and all that evidences a healthy 
and vigorous lot of young men. 
The Shooters of Milwaukee. 
As a shooting town Milwaukee has always been strong, 
both as regards rifle and shotgun. It soon will hold one 
of the largest rifle tournaments of the season, and at the 
close of the month of May will offer no less than two good 
trap tournaments, those of the National and South Side 
gun clubs. The former is the younger and the latter the 
older of the Milwaukee gun clubs. There are many prom- 
inent handlers of both gun and rifle in Milwaukee. 
In short, our neighboring city of the inland sea, com- 
monly called the Cream City, holds indeed the cream of 
tho sportsmanship of a large and energetic State, full of 
good sportsmen and grand sporting opportunity. We do 
not always hear all we might like to hear from this big 
and clean and busy city, but that I suppose is because the 
Milwaukee sportsmen are too busy having a good time. 
There is plenty there to write about and plenty to do in 
the Cream City, and the only complaint to be made 
against it is that we of the other parts of the world get to 
hear so little about it all. 
Elk in Wisconsin. 
It was at Milwaukee, by the way, that I saw the most 
tangible evidence ever known by myself bearing on the 
former presence of the elk in the State of Wisconsin. I 
have earlier heard that the elk was once native over a 
great portion of the State, and have seen some men who 
could give facts about it, but I have never before seen 
any of the antlers or bones of that animal found in Wis- 
consin. Yet at the taxidermist studio of Mr. Carl E. 
Akeley I saw a fine pair of antlers found not long ago at 
Hale's Corners, about eighteen miles from the business 
part of Milwaukee. This specimen was found buried in 
the sand of a little marsh or lake and was in fine preser- 
vation, though it was destroyed through the eagerness 
and carelessness of the workmen. The antlers were 
taken out still attached to the skull. They are very large 
and even, with great beams and fine branches. The 
specimen is of great interest. 
In Mr. Akeley, by the way, if one may be permitted to 
institute any comparisons, one finds the artistic taxiderm- 
ist par excellence of the entire West. He is well known as 
the man who skinned the big elephant Jumbo when he 
was killed some years ago. Mr- Akeley is this summer to 
come to Chicago as taxidermist for the Field Columbian 
Museum, where his really artistic work will no doubt be 
admired by many. In his process of modeling all the art 
of the sculptor seems in evidence, and the skin of the fin- 
ished figure, instead of being tight and tense, shows every 
vein and every muscle worked out in perfect relief. The 
wooden look of the merely "'stuffed" 'animal is absent, and 
there is a new feature in taxidermy, that of a conception, 
a modeling, so that one must call the workman not merely 
a workman, but also an artist. When we called, Mr. Ake- 
ley was doing an African gazelle for the Field Museum, 
and I am free to confess it seemed something of a revela- 
tion to me. There was also a mounted head of a stag, 
with open mouth and drooping ears, which must recall 
crisp October to any man who ever hunted deer. This 
piece is called "The Challenge," and I labored with Mr. 
Akeley to get it for the Sportsmen's Exposition in New 
York, where perhaps it may yet appear. E. Hough. 
909 Security Building, Chicago. 
" BUCK FEVER" VS. "BUCK AGUE." 
Since you have invited all to take part in discussing 
which of the above expressions has the sanction of popu- 
lar usage, I ask the privilege of siding with "Kingfisher." 
My life has been largely spent among the backwoodsmen 
and "first settlers" of Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas and 
Texas, and I have heard the expression "buck ager" in 
nearly every locality visited; but with "buck fever" I am 
unacquainted, save through the writings of those who 
were presumably too choice in their language to say ' 'ager" 
and fancied that the term "buck ague," soimded less 
euphonious than the one chosen. 
My father was in his time pretty well known as a 
hunter in the forests of northern Pennsylvania, and years 
later, when I first commenced hunting large game, he 
cautioned me against "buck ague" and quoted cases 
wherein its victims had lapsed into temporary fits of ab- 
ject idiocy — absolutely forgetting to look through their 
rifle sights when taking short range shots at deer. I re- 
member I once thought such stories a trifle hard of belief, 
but in course of time my incredulity vanished. I had an 
attack myself, and it was "ager;" not a particle of fever 
about it. Speaking, as I do, from the vantage ground of 
personal experience, I think my evidence should have 
weight in this case — unless some one can be found who, 
under similar circumstances, had the fever without the 
"shakes." 
Throughout the malarial regions of the Southwest the 
term feve*r and ague, so commonly used elsewhere, has 
given place to another quite as expressive — namely, chills 
and fever. Shortening this, the natives speak familiarly 
of having the "chills," or by way of variety the "fever." 
In the vocabulary of the "swamper" these became syn- 
onymous terms, and it seems to be commonly understood 
that the word "fever" without a qualifying adjective in- 
variably means that intermittent disorder which gives the 
sufferer alternate touches of arctic and equatorial temper- 
atures every second or third day, as the case may be. 
There are many swamp dwellers who "chill" each autumn 
with delightful regularity, and would vehemently dis- 
claim any acquaintance with the ague; but put them on 
a deer stand with a greenhorn, and they would watch him 
with delightful eagerness to detect symptoms of that 
dreaded ailment, "buck ager." 
Let your readers decide this matter according to its 
merits, and without calling upon incompetent lexicog- 
raphers for assistance. I, for one, object to accepting 
Bartlett as an authority. No man can claim universal 
knowledge, and hence we find that his "Dictionary of 
