Oot. 10, 1896.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
287 
he required the boat to go. Soon he aaid, "Steady, le£t, 
hold up," and then after a pause, "Gro on slow, there's a 
big pike about here, but he was shy and I couldn't get a 
crack at him. Hold on, right a little," and he poised his 
gig and sent it buzzing into the water. "A clean miss. I 
didn't strike low enough. Go toward that tree top out 
there, there may be some buffalo near it." 
Surely I must have misunderstood; he could not mean 
that buffalo might be grazing in that tree top, but I was 
in a strange land, and my new friend might be having a 
little fim at my expense, so I kept still. Soon the orders 
came, and as the spear left his hand it struck and gave a 
little tremble, and my companion yelled out: "I got 
himl" and taking hold of the string which was tied to 
the gunwale he pulled the gig staff to him and then 
landed in the boat a huge fish of about SOlbs.— huge to 
me. "There's your buffalo," said he, 
I looked at the great ungainly fish, with a hump on its 
back and a mouth like a sucker, and asked if it was good 
to eat. 
"Oh, yes, it's better than red- horse, but not as good as 
baes and pike. Here, you take the gig and I'll paddle. 
Now you've got to put the gig into the fish and not in 
the place he looks to be at. If he's nearly under you 
throw right at him, always with the gig across his body 
and not in line with him. The further he is away the 
more you must throw under him, because he's deeper 
than he looks to be. You know how a board appears to 
be bent when half of it is in the water, the lower end 
seems to be higher than it is. Well, it's just so with a 
fish; unless he's right under you he's deeper than he 
looks, and the further off he is the deeper under him you 
must strike." 
I took the gig, with some doubt of my ability to gauge 
the depth of a fish and judge his true position, for I 
knew what Guyon said was true, only I had never 
thought of it before. I did think of his names of fishes; 
we had a buffalo and he spoke of red-horse. I had seen 
dogfish and catfish, but where was this kind of nomen- 
clature to end? Soon I saw several large fish. There had 
been plenty of small ones seen, but with a 201b. fish in 
the boat as a pattern my ideas were no doubt enlarged. 
Soon I said: "Steady, stop!" and plunge went the gig and 
missed, 
"I knew you wouldn't touch that fish," said Guyon; 
"you threw too far from the boat, and it went clean over 
him by two feet. Next time aim two feet below where 
he looks to be at and you may get him. It's very seldom 
that a man throws the gig under a fish that lies ten feet 
away from the boat. Try it again," 
At the next chance I was bound to miss the fish by 
throwing under it, if I missed it at all, and I plunged the 
gig in the water at what seemed an absurd low point and 
struck a pike of some 51bs. 
"There," said the man at the paddle, "I knew you could 
do it if you could only believe the fish was a foot or two 
below where he looked to be at." This use of the word 
"at" was new to me then, but I found it common in the 
West and South. Lately it has had attention called to it 
by its use in Congress. It sounds odd to those who hear 
it for the first time. 
And so we passed the first half of the night, and re- 
turned to the warehouse and slept in it, for Charley had 
the key; but we took the precaution to take our fish in- 
side too, for he said: "The moon will be up in an hour 
and she'll spoil the fish, and then we don't want minks 
and wildcats carryin' 'em off or chewing them up. We'll 
get a ride up in the morning, for Joe Hall's going to bring 
down some potatoes and there'll be teams down with 
lead." 
Morning came and we went back with the first empty 
wagon, taking over 2001bs. of fish — bass, pike, buffalo and 
big red-finned suckers, which proved to be the "red- 
horse;" and I had been initiated into the mysteries of 
jacking for fish, handling a gig, had received a lesson in 
practical optics, and knew positively that a fish in the 
water was not always in the place which it appeared to 
be "at." 
Somewhere in an omnivorous course of reading I re- 
member a statement that "Man shall not live by bread 
alone," and in the practical every-day life it began to be 
painfully evident that no matter how desirable it might 
be to hunt and fish forever, there were needs other than 
what the chase afforded. There was a man who really 
demanded pay for letting me live in his house. Of course 
the house was built, and I did not hurt it by living in it; 
but he had put a man out because he did not pay. Then 
there came a day when a really serious bit of thinking 
over the sordid spirit of man had been indulged in for 
.fully ten minutes, when Charley Guyon came along. 
"Say," he began, "you ain't doin' anything, an' I want 
a pardner to sink a shaft. I think I know where we can 
make a strike, an' I've got all tha tools. What d'ye say, 
will you jine me?" 
"Well, Charley, I was just thinking that it was about 
time that I went at something; but I don't know the first 
thing about lead mining. Tell me all about it; how do 
you do it?" 
"It's just like this: A man owns a piece of land and he 
throws it open for mining or he keeps it for other pur- 
poses. Suppose he throws it open; then any one can dig and 
he takes one-tenth Of the mineral forrent. A windlass, rope, 
bucket, pick and spade are all the tools we use. Mineral 
may be struck at ten feet, or it may be at sixty, but we 
go down untU we come to hard pan; it never lies below 
that. You may get some "drift" that will pay or may 
not; it's all chance. You may work a week and not get 
a dollar, and you may strike a lead*, and then you drift 
in and follow it. You see there are lots of abandoned 
shafts which were sunk ten years ago, when mineral was 
worth only ten dollars per thousand. Now it is worth 
thirty dollars and two men can make wages if they get a 
thousand pounds per week." 
"And a fellow has to work down there under ground 
like a mole to do this?" 
"Yes, but pardners take turns, one in the shaft and one 
at the windlass, and of a hot day you'll prefer to be be- 
low. There's men here who hire other men to 'tend 
windlass, and they take the chances — make it all if they 
strike it big, or lose their time and the man's wages. It's 
all chance, just the same as when you go into Coons's 
and sit in a keno game; you may win or you may not. 
But all business is chance anyway, just like gambling; 
the only man who's got a sure thing is the man who 
works for wages, and he gets left sometimes." 
* Ttiis is pronounced leed in the miaes, and is a corruption of lode. 
. Behold the mighty hunter, with a band and candle 
socket on his hat, grubbing away like a well-digger, and 
assorting an occasional lump of "drift," with its white 
coating, from the earth and clay, and depositing it in a 
"hen's nest" until there was a buck'^tful— always hoping 
that the next stroke of the pick would cut into a bright 
bit of galena; or at the windlass waiting for the word 
"up," and dumping the earth on t\>o down-hill side and 
keeping an eye out for stray bits which had escaped the 
eyes below. So passed the summer, with occasional fish- 
ing trips with Henry Neaville and his brother Frank, for 
Guyon cared little for the sportsmanlike methods of fish- 
ing, gigging and netting them in quantities was his delight, 
yet the fun of it was ever uppermost in his mind. He 
thought fishing with a hook and line was too slow work; 
his mind was active and required more exciting sport. 
In considering what constitutes sport, a question on 
which the doctors disagree, it might be well to allow a 
little latitude for individual notions; I was about to say 
idiosyncrasies, but if Guyon was living he would ask: 
"What's them?" and so we will let it go at "notions." 
Please remember that this was forty years ago, and none 
of us had given thought to the possible exhaustion of a 
source of fish supply which seemed only to invite the 
slayer by appearing next year in undiminished numbers. 
This is the only excuse I have to offer for our destruction 
of life in those days of its plenty, and an excuse seems 
necessary to-day. If it is sufficient, well and good; it is 
all I have, a,nd I throw myself on the mercy of the court. 
We all needed education in the matter of fish and game 
preservation in those days, and I hope that I have atoned 
for the misdeeds of my youth by both precept and ex- 
ample in later years. 
In sketching Charles Guyon, who was an honest, 
sturdy fellow, not averse to a fight if it was forced upon 
him, but not a quarrelsome man, it is only fair to him to 
say that, having been reared in a mining town, gambling 
came as a natural thing, just as luck in mining did, and 
if his week had been successful Saturday night found 
him at the keno table staking the last sovereign that he 
had earned. The smelters sent wagons to weigh and 
gather the mineral every Saturday afternoon, and the pay 
was in British sovereigns, which passed for $5, for no miner 
would accept paper money for his mineral, although he 
sometimes did in exchange for his gold. 
Saturday nights the gambling places and the drunkeries 
kept open until morning, and the Cornish miners from 
British Hollow rested from their labors by drinking, gam- 
bling and fighting. These were the highest forms of sport 
known to them, and in fact to the majority of men who 
work underground all the week in all pairts of the world. 
One night I dropped into Sam Coons's to look on. Here 
I want to say that I have never won or lost $1 in any 
form of gambling except at the house of a gentleman in 
Germany, where a small stake was the custom, and there 
was no escape. I don't claim any special credit for this 
because I never had a desire to gamble — was too cowardly 
to risk my wealth, if you wish to put it in that way. 
Plenty of good men gamble, and I have other faults, but 
am not one of those of whom Byron says they 
"Compound for eins they're not inclined to 
By damning those they have no mind to." 
I have occasionally played cards in a perfunctory way, 
without caring for them, and have engaged in games to 
decide who should pay for oysters, cigars and such other 
goods as an army sutler possessed, but a book always 
suited me better. Speaking of games in connection with 
Potosi wakes me up. In the sketch of Gen. Martin Mil- 
ler, No. XI., the fact was recorded that Herr Driesbach, 
the great lion tamer, used to come to my father's house to 
play chess, and to my great surprise Bill Patterson pointed 
out a finely-built, powerful man whom we had just passed 
and said: "That's Driesbach, the lion tamer." I hurried 
after him and the result was that I often went out to his 
farm of an evening and had a game of chess, the only 
game that I ever thought worth the candle. Chess players 
were very scarce in Potosi, and Driesbach and I were out 
of practice, but if I won one game out of five it was suf- 
ficient. 
One evening he said: "You aren't one-half the man 
your father was, he must have been over 6ft." 
"Yes, 6ft. Sin. and no spare meat." 
"Well, I remember once when we crossed the river to 
Albany in a small boat and a 'longshoreman was smoking 
a pipe in the faces of two ladies who sat in the stem. 
Your father spoke to him about it and got an impudent 
reply, and he then jerked the pipe from the fellow's 
mouth and threw it overboard. Then threats of vengeance 
came when we should get on shore. Your father hurried 
up and ran up the steps to the dock and waited. Then he 
said: *My friend, you were going to lick me when you 
got on shore, I'm in a hurry to go to business and have 
only got a few minutes to spare, and I would like you to 
do it now?' The man looked him over and said: 'Be jabers, 
it isn't worth while for the likes of us to be f oighten' about 
an ould poipe.' Now, Fred, that 'longshoreman wovdd 
have cleaned you up in about two seconds. Why, you 
ain't a bit like the old man." I learn from my old friend, 
Hon. J. W. Seaton, who still lives in Potosi, that Dries- 
bach died something like fifteen years ago, and the vest 
made from a pet leopard skin was given by Driesbach to 
Judge Seaton, who has it now. 
There was a feeble game law in Wisconsin at this time, 
and once when Guyon and I had been up the Grant River 
looking for a place to sink a shaft where there was a pros- 
pect of several lodes, meeting and forming a mine of 
wealth, we met a party who had killed a deer out of sea- 
son. It was Sam Coons and a professional gambler called 
Coachee. "Now, boys," said Coachee, "we killed this 
over in Iowa, where there is no law against it, but we 
don't want to have any talk about it. We ain't goin' to 
sell it; just brought it over for our friends, and if you'll 
take a quarter home, here it is. We took the quarter, 
Guyon and I. We knew that the deer was killed in 
Wisconsin, but — we let it go at that. We would only 
have made fools of ourselves if we had been Quixotic 
enough to have complained, and there would have been 
no venison for us. Put yourself in his place. These 
things, no doubt, are different in Grant county to-day, 
but I have not been there since 1857— time enough to 
bring all the changes in game protection which have been 
wrought in other parts of the country. 
When we went to work in the woods near the river I 
took my rifle as soon as Sept. 1 came around and it was 
lawful to use it. This was the one that father gave me. 
I only remember that the barrel was half round and half 
octagon, an unusual departure from the general make of 
rifles, which were generally all octagon, and were stocked 
to the muzzle, although short stocks were coming into 
fashion. Caliber was a word little used in connection 
with hunting rifles, but we reckoned them by the num- 
ber of round bullets to the pound. Squirrel rifles ran as 
small as 120 to the pound; mine was thirty to the pound, 
and that was considered very large. I never used any 
large bullets in it — "slugs" we called them — for the 
theory was that they were only good in the open country, 
and that contact with a twig would deflect them more 
than it would round bullets. A modern rifleman woiild 
not know how to tell the caliber of a rifle by our measure, 
and I can't inform him. I only know that with such 
guns, and many smaller, the old-time hunters killed the 
biggest animals on the continent, often when the first 
shot must disable a grizzly or a panther, for it took time 
to measure powder and reload. 
I had to go to the village for something, and left the 
rifle loaded, also the powder horn and box of caps. The 
bullets and patches were in a leather box on my belt, 
which I wore. On returning I heard several shots some ^ 
distance from our shaft. Guyon and the rifle were gone. 
The shots kept up, and I started at a lively gait until I 
came in view of the shooting match. There was Guyon 
in among the branches of a fallen beech tree, crack went 
the rifle, and a big buck charged into the branches, but 
could not reach him. His back was toward me and I 
hailed: "Hello, Charley! What are you doin' to that 
deer?" 
He turned and said: "You are a great fellow to go off 
with all the bullets. Got any with you? If you have, 
throw me one. Don't come in here too close or that deer 
will kill you; he's fightin' mad now." 
I did go in on a run and got into the tree top just in 
time to avoid the charge of the buck, and handed Guyon 
a bullet, which he rammed down without a patch, and 
planted it in the deer's frontal bone and dropped him. 
Such a looking deer I never did see. Guyon's only bul- 
let had broken one antler clos^ to the head and angered 
him. The treetop was fortunately at hand and made a 
natural abattis, behind which the man could carry on the 
offensive and shift to avoid the enemy as occasion re- 
quired. But the deer! His head was literally skinned all 
around his eyes and from his forehead to his nose. 
Charles said: "When he came for me and I was safe 
in this treetop I whittled green beech plugs for bullets, 
and thought if one took him in the eye it would drop him. 
Every time a plug hit him he would snort, shake his head 
and come at me. See how he has wet me. I think I 
shot more than twenty plugs at him, and I don't know 
how I would have got out of this brush if you hadn't 
come." 
The story was too good to keep. He didn't hear the 
last of it for some time. 
Bill Patterson said: "Charley, that venison was very 
good, but there was a taste of beechnuts about it. It 
isn't late enough for the nuts to drop; how do you suppose 
it got that flavor?" 
Joe Hall bailed him with: "Hey, Charley! That ven- 
ison tasted as if he had broken into Darcy's shop and had 
eaten his shoe pegs. What d' ye s'pose he'd been feedin' 
on?" 
The multitude of islands between Wisconsin and Iowa 
at this point renders it difficult to tell where Grant River 
ends or loses itself in the Father of Waters, It is several 
miles from shore to shore, and cbanneis of many depths 
and widths separate the islands. These waterways, the 
"kills" of New York and the "bayous" of the lower Mis- 
sissippi, are here called sloughs, pronounced sloo. One 
of the beauties of our language is that this word may be 
pronounced sluff, slouw or sloo, each having a different 
meaning. In a recent letter from Mr. Seaton he says, in 
reply to a question, "The inland island waters, most of 
which go dry in summer, I think, are properly called 
sloughs, and the name is not a provincialism pecu- 
liar to this part of the Mississippi valley. Webster gives 
the pronunciation 'slou,' and here it is spelled sloo and 
means a sink or depression in the islands in which the 
water gathers and in some cases remains all the time, and 
in others it signifies channels or sluiceways in which part 
of the waters pass from one stream to the other, i. e. , the 
over-swollen Mississippi to the depressed Grant River and 
vice versa, hence we have 'Swift sloo,' 'Hay sloo' and 
several others known to the fishers and hunters. They 
are the natural habitat and breeding places for frogs, rep- 
tiles and mosquitoes, as well as a great resort for ducks in 
the spring and fall. During J.he spring freshets the fish 
gather in them in large quantities and are entrapped 
when the water falls, which is usually in August and 
September. This year a large number of German carp 
and black bass were taken in willow woven nets by the 
boys, although this is prohibited by law. The upper 
waters of the Mississippi were stocked a few years ago 
with these fish by the Government. It is in April and 
May, when the 'spring rise' overflows the banks and 
spreads over the bottoms, that the fat cattish, buffalo and 
other fishes are found out of the channels and main 
streams feeding in the grassy bottoms. Then the boys 
wade in and have their fun catching them. Sloughs are 
creations of the great river and are part of it." 
The domesticated hog ran wild on these islands and 
once a man said to me: "Now, you will want some pork, 
and you ought to buy a claim o' hogs. I've got five 
marked sows on the islands and I'll sell you a claim in 
'em fur a dollar." 
On inquiry Charley said: "That's all right. There's 
about ten claims o' hogs on the islands. It's this a- way: 
a man turns out a sow with certain ear marks, and all 
the pigs found with her in the fall are hers if there's a 
hundred. Give him a dollar and you can kill all the pigs you 
want, only don't kill an old one with marks in its ears." 
I bought in and was part owner of all pork on the hoof 
that had two Vs in the right ear and a round hole in the 
left. 
Guyon, Bill Patterson, Henry Neaville and I went for 
pork about the middle of September. Charley and BiU 
skinned theirs, and this was tne usual custom, but I agree 
with Neaville that a properly dressed pig looked best, but 
"How can we dress them on these islands?" I asked. 
Henry said, "I'll show you," and we pulled the scow up 
high and dry, filled it with water, made a roaring fire 
and heated a lot of stones which had been brought to the 
island for the purpose, and boiled the water to scald the 
pigs. How easy it is to do things if you know how! 
Fresh pork was cheap in those days, and I have seen 
where a hog had been kflled and only one ham taken and 
