Forest and Stream: 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
[ new YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1896. 
Terms, f4 A Tkab. 10 Ora. a Copt. 
Six Months, 
j VOL. ZLm-No. 28. 
( No. 346 Bhoadwat, Nkw 'Xors. 
For Prospectus and AdverUsing Rates see Page iii. 
I 
Y' 
%\ 
FOREST AND STREAM OFFICE 
346 Broadway 
NEW YORK LIFE BUILDING 
Present Entrance on Leonard Street 
bear of any other kind, and where^not even the oldest in- 
habitant can recollect the existence of a black or a grizzly 
or any of the others listed by Dr. Merriam; 
"TSB PASSING OF COLORADO." 
As timely and appropriate comment upon the communica'- 
tion of Mr. H. G. Dulog, respecting the passing of the game 
of Colorado, may be cited the report of State Game Warden 
Gordon Land, who has recently returned to Denver from a 
trip into the White River country to investigate the reported 
wanton slaughter of elk and deer in that region. This 
statement shows that there is yet a great supply of game in 
Colorado, but that it is "going," as Nessmuk used to say. 
In company with the sheriff of Rio Blanco county and three 
deputies, Warden Land went to the headwaters of the 
White River, where he found numerous camps of Indians, 
who, he gays, were off from their reservation without a per- 
mit; and all were prepared to stay in the mountains through 
the winter to hunt deer and elk for the skins. In some of 
the camps were found great stacks of hides, many of them 
already tanned. No arrests were attempted, the warden's 
party being insuflacient to compd the Indians to accompany 
them. Three of the Indian police^ who had been sent out 
from Fort Duchesne to bring back the Indians, were them- 
selves detected violating the game law. 
Warden Land found one hide hunter who had taken 2,000 
hides across the line into Wyoming, and he reports having 
heard of "half a dozen traders who this season have pur- 
chased from 1,000 to 5,000 hides from Indians and hide 
hunters." The ranchmen, he asserts, respect the law, but 
there are other men in the county who own no land and 
make their living by slaughtering game. This is the conclu- 
sion of the whole matter as expressed by Mr. Land: "The 
law should be so changed aa to make buying of hides, 
tanned or untanned, a felony. If the trafdc in hides can be 
stopped the slaughter of the game would cease." In other 
words, put into operation the principle of our platform 
plank, 
THE STUMP BEAR. 
tlNTlL Dr. C. Hart Merriam, Chief of the Division of 
Ornithology and Mammalogy of the Department of Agricul- 
ture, began to collect the skulls of American bears and from 
them to determine the number of species on this Continent, 
all our bears were classed by naturalists as belonging to three 
species: the polar, the black and the grizzly. The result of 
Dr. Merriam's investigations was to add to this list seven 
others, making a total of ten, namely: the Kadiak bear, of 
Kadiak Island, Alaska; the Yakutat and the Sitka bears, 
also of Alaska; the grizzly, the Sonora grizzly, the barren 
ground, the common black, the L®uisiana, the Everglade 
and the glacier bears. This was an astonishing addition to 
our bear supply, but there is reason to believe that the end 
is not yet, and that we shall have occasion to adopt still 
another classification considerably extending the species of 
North American bears. 
It is certain that one important bear has been entirely over- 
looked by Dr. Merriam and all other scientific students of 
the subject. This is the stump bear, a well-established spe- 
cies, and the most widely distributed of all our bears. 
The stump bear is known to science (or is now at least 
made known to science if science cares to know it) as Ursus 
ligneus; that is, ursus, bear, and ligneiis, of wood. There 
are several varieties, among the best known being Ursus 
ligneus quercus, the oak stiunp bear; Ursus ligneus pinus, the 
pine stump bear; and a more or less famiHar variety, Ursua 
ligneiis malus, the apple stump bear. 
The stump bear is found throughout the American Conti- 
nent from the desolate wastes of Labrador to the Everglades 
of Florida. Its range includes mountain, valley and plain, 
and in all of these regions it is more common than any other 
species is now or ever has been. It is the last of all bears to 
abandon the country at man's approach; it lingers long upon 
the confines of civilization, and is at all times numerous in 
newly settled districts. Thus it is seen in hundreds of local- 
ities where those who report its presence have never seen a 
Like its congener, the black bear, the^stump bear is found 
in huckleberry patches, and on hillsides to which women 
and children resort for raspberries and blackberries. It is 
particularly common in old fields which have not long been 
cleared of their timber, through which fire has swept, and which 
have grown up to blackberries and raspberries. It haunts 
those pasture lots to which small boys go at dusk to drive 
home the cows; it has frequently presented itself to the vision 
of wayfarers by night in close proximity to lonely country 
roads i and it has even invaded apple orchards, though never 
until after sunset. This bear, too, is quite commonly seen 
in the purlieus of Sunday-school picnic groves, particularly 
when the lesson of the previous Sabbath has liad to do with 
the story of the bears which came out of the woods and ate 
up the forty and two children who had mocked Elisha for his 
bald head. It is an interesting fact in physics and natural 
history that often the smallest child sees the largest stump 
bear. As the campaigns of Napoleon, by tlie sacrifice of so 
many of the stalwart men of France, are reported to have 
lessened the stature of the French race, so it may with rea- 
son be assumed that the stump bear, by scaring so many 
small boys "out of a year's growth," has exercised an ap- 
preciably unfavorable influence upon the American physique. 
The variation in color and size is more marked in the 
stump bear than in any other species. Individuals range 
from silver gray and dead bark shades to jet black, the last 
predominating in burnt clearings. In size the differences 
are quite as marked ; a small stump bear may be very, very 
small, but a really large one is tremendous. While we have 
no such carefully recorded data for the stump bear as Dr. 
Merriam has collected for the ten species he has catalogued, 
there is nevertheless abundant evidence to correct his state- 
ment that the Kadiak is the largest bear in the world. The 
stump bear is bigger. 
We have said that the stump bear is not shy. It is also 
courageous. The black bear has been denounced as 
cowardly, but the stump bear never decamps. If it does 
not advance to the charge, as the grizzly, it at least holds its 
ground and never runs from man. The human being does 
the running. Thus the stump bear is a powerful promoter 
of sprint running. If the subject were to be studied into, 
we probably should find that the sprinters most famous in 
athletic annals came from the country, where at an early age 
they were given their first start by a stump bear experiencCi 
Exciting stories have been, .told hjr frightened fugitives, 
who have averred that they have been chased by a bear, 
and since no bear of any other species was within a thou- 
sand miles, their pursuer must have been the stump bear; 
but no victim has ever yet actually been overtaken by a 
stump bear, or mangled by its fangs, or killed by it unless by 
fright. 
The stump bear has been shot at repeatedly, from the days 
of the flintlock to the present, and by the most perfect mod- 
ern weapons, held in the hands of men who do not miss 
their mark ; but never yet has hunter brought home a scalp. 
No leaden bullet can harm it. It is more impregnable than 
the alligator was fabled to have been in the olden days. 
Whether any one has ever tried on it the charmed bullet of 
silver we cannot tell. Its invulnerability would appear to 
class it as among those wild animals which an Indian 
reckons as "medicine," beings which have a charmed life, 
and against which the wiles of man can avail nothing. In- 
deed there is, under certain circumstances, something posi- 
tively uncanny about the creature, for the most highly 
trained bear dogs, which always attack the black bear with 
the utmost ferocity , will pay not the slightest attention to a 
stump bear, beyond perhaps going up and smelling of it. 
Moreover, there are legends which tell of certain bold men, 
who, armed only with a club, have advanced upon a stump 
bear in the dark, and who as they drew near were mystified 
at beholding the bear metamorphosed into a common black 
stump, as Apollo with arms outstretched to clasp Daphne 
saw her changed into a laurel. Probably we may here find 
the origin of the term "stumped." 
fireside has been enlivened by the narrative of what has 
taken place outside in the dark. It would be interesting to 
have the stump bear's side of such stories. Yet the thing* 
to ask about a bear story is not "Is it true?" but "Is it a 
good bear story?" If the tale gives play to the imagination, 
establishes the superhuman prowess of the narrator, and 
sends the chills down the back of the listener, what boots it 
whether the bear was a bear or a stump? 
There is no bounty on the stump bear, for it is not like its 
black brother, a hog thief; nor is there any market for the 
pelt. Long after all other bears shall have been obliterated 
from the land, the stump bear will remain as the last of the 
fearsome denizens of om- woods and fields. 
The stump bear has done more than any other species to 
stimulate the written and unwritten hterature which goes 
under the general head of bear stories. Many a back door 
has been entered with startling precipitation, and many a 
"AND be:' 
A PKES8 dispatch from Boston the other day stated that 
Mr. Philip Marquandj a civil engineer of that city, had been 
declared a fugitive from justice in the State of Maine, and 
that papers for his extradition had been signed by Acting 
Governor Wolcott on request of Governor Cleaves, of Maine, 
The charge was that the Boston man had killed a moose in 
close time of this year, the meat having beenj discovered 
by wardens in his camp on Eagle Lake on Sept. 39, Mr. 
Marquand had left $100 with the wardens as surety for his 
appearance at the hearing in Foxcroft. This hearing he 
failed to attend, and the Commissioners had to retort to 
extradition, a proceeding which has been used before under 
similar circumstances. Eventually Mr. Marquand did at- 
tend a secret court at Dover, with his counsel, and the affair 
was settled upon terms which we have not seen reported. 
The case prompted some discussion respecting the penalty 
provided by the statute for the offense of moose killing in 
close time. The text of the law reads that one so offending 
"forfeits not less than $100 nor more than $300 * « * and 
be imprisoned thirty days." That may be good law, but it is 
certainly bad grammar, as we pointed out when the Legisla- 
ture perpetrated it. Under the rule that a penal statute must 
be construed literally, is there any warrant here for impris- 
oning an offender against this law ? The text does not say 
"and shall be imprisoned." We might assume, of course, 
that the framer of the law intended it to read, "and shall be 
imprisoned;" but can a man be put in jail on the strength of 
an assumption that the law was intended to provide some- 
thing which it actually does not provide? We have already 
expressed an opinion that under the reading of this section 
an offender may not be both fined and imprisoned; that he 
may be fined, but that there is no warrant for the penalty of 
imprisonment thirty days nor thirty seconds. 
At the same time we believe that at the first opportunity 
this flaw in the statute should be corrected to the end that 
the men from Boston and New York and Philadelphia and 
Chicago and St. Louis and New Orleans — not to count 
Worcester and Springfield and Hartford and New Haven — 
who go down into Maine in summer and engage guides and 
sneak off into the woods and kill moose and deer out of sea- 
son, shall forfeit a good rouad sum "and shall be im- 
prisoned" as well. And since the Supreme Court of the 
United States has declared in effect that a State may incor- 
porate in its game laws a discrimination against non-resi- 
dents, we would like to see a Maine law so framed that it 
would jail the visiting "sport" who kills moose out of sea- 
son, while at the same time it could not be used by corrupt 
and vicious game wardens as an instrument of oppression of 
the backwoodsmen who kill game for their families in 
winter. 
The fact is that we have in this country a growing class 
of those who assume, and act upon the assumption, that 
with their money they can buy anything they may fancy, 
among other things permission to break the laws by paying 
the money forfeit therefor. Fine they spell p-r-i c-e. If 
they fancy a moose in midsummer, they take it. If 
detected, they jauntily hand over the amount of the fine, and 
try for more at the same price. They may perhaps feel 
piqued at being detected in their illicit deeds, but their only 
chagrin is over being found out, not over having been law- 
breakers and sneaks, violators of the rights and privileges of 
their law-abiding fellows, and corrupters of the guides they 
hire to aid and abet them. 
Manifestly the only way in which we may secure to the 
law-respecting sportsman his rights is to find some punish- 
ment which will actually deter these close season killers from 
their selfish and defiant practices. If they laugh at fines, 
it is certain that they would not laugh at a term in jail, Ai 
the old man said to the boy in the apple tree, "If turf and 
sticks will not bring you down, I'll try stones," 
