Forest and Stream! 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun, 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 26, 1896. j^a 
rSHUE, ii A YhAB. 10 Cts. a OOFZ. 
Six Months, |3. i 
VOL. ZliVn.— No. 26. 
346 Broadway, Nkw \ors. 
For Prospectus and Advertising Rates see Page iii. 
FOREST AND STREAM OFFICE 
346 Broadway 
NEW YORK LIFE BUILDING 
% Present Entrance on Leonard Street 
ENLARGE THE YELLOWSTONE PARK. 
A GOO J many years ago the Forest ano St ream sug- 
gested that the Jackson's Hole country south of the Yellow- 
stone National Park ought to be added to that reservation, 
and recently the subject was brought up again by one of our 
Montana correspondents. This enlargement of the reserva- 
tion is clearly something that ougM to take place, and as 
soon as possible. It would add much to the attractiveness 
of the Park, for here may be found some of the grandest 
scenery in Wyoming— deep rivers, broad lakes, and snow- 
clad mountains as yet unsealed. Here are Jackson's Lake, 
the Three Tetons, and many other tall peaks and beautiful 
valleys of a wonderful region; places without number where 
one may camp and travel undisturbed, and may imagine 
himself to be living again the life of the real wilderness. 
Moreover, this is the home of the game, of moose, elk, deer, 
antelope— perhaps even of buffalo, and is especially in- 
teresting as being the winter range of some of these 
species. 
This region is one of great elevation, of heavy winter 
snowfall, and as yet is almost without permanent settlers. 
Its principal use at present is for summer hay ranches for 
the Mormons, who live lower down on Snake Kiver, and 
who come there early in the summer to cut the grass that 
grows on the Saake River bottoms and on the fiats about 
Jackson's Lake, and for hotels from which hunting parties, 
desiring to kill game along the southern borders of the Yel- 
lowstone Park, may start out on their trips. On either side 
from Snake River rise the wide, sage- covered benches of the 
river's flood plain, a few years since the feeding is:round of 
herds of antelope. In the ravines which run down from 
the mountains there were many mule deer, and in the pine 
forests of the foothills, and among the quaking aspen groves 
of the higher land, the elk used to band up in Ssptember 
and the clear bugling of the bulls echoed along the moun- 
tains. Down close to the lake, or in the willowy swamps of 
the high land, there are still some moose, though their 
numbers are few by comparison with what they were in 
years gone by. 
To the west rises the superb range of the Tetons, seeming 
like a wall which overhangs Jackson's Lake and the river 
valley; away to the east the land rises more gradually to 
pine crested foothills, then to higher bald plateaus, and then 
still further away to loftier mountains, with here and there 
a peak, until at length the stupendous heights are reached, out 
from which pours the mighty stream of the main Yellow- 
stone. 
Truly this is a region worthy to be preserved in its native 
wildness, a region valueless for settlement, but priceless as a 
park and summer wandering place for the tourist who loves 
nature and her solitudes. As a resort for game, it is perhaps 
unequaled on this continent, and joined to the Yellowstone 
Park as it stands to-day and to the adjacent forest reserva- 
tion it will make a game preserve that can nowhere be 
equaled. 
It is hardly to be conceived that anyone will object to the 
setting aside of this region as an addition to the territory of 
the Yellowstone Park. If such objectors shall be found it 
will be among the settlers adjacent to the region, or tempo- 
rarily occupying it. The haymakers may declare that tkeir 
claims should not be interfered with, and the men who 
Dccupy buildings there in the summer and who take out 
hunting parties may grumble, and say that their business is 
being interfered with; but in a matter where the interests of 
the whole nation are involved. the objections of these people 
are not worth considering. The greatest good of the greatest 
number must be the guide for legislation. 
When our correspondent brought this subject up again, 
we urged that he try to interest in it members of Congress 
from districts immediately about the Park, and to induce 
them to move actively in the matter. This has been done. 
Senator Carter, of Montana, is understood to have drawn a 
bill providing for the setting apart from settlement of a tract 
^l30Ut fifty miles square, to include the Jackson's Hole country, 
and it is said that the Senators of Montana and Idaho all 
indorse the bill. Of course, for such a bill the support of 
the Wyoming Senators is greatly needed, since all the land 
to be withdrawn from settlement will be taken from within 
the borders of this State. 
It is a cheering sign that the Senators from States border- 
ing on the National Park are beginning to take an active 
interest ia that reservation. Heretofore it has been the Sen- 
ators from other and distant States who have chiefly con- 
cerned themselves with this national pleasure ground, while 
those whose districts it lies in or near have been careless of 
ii.s interests It is to be hoped that the present movement 
presages better things for the future. 
FRED MATHER. 
It is a pleasure to present to day one who is known 
so well. If in the face any one shall fail to recog- 
nize those features which have been pictured in fancy, he 
may know nevertheless that it is an excellent portrait of Mr. 
Mather, taken on Aug. 3, 1893, that being his sixtieth birth- 
day. 
The author of "Men I Plave Fished With" was born into 
this fishing world Aug. 2, 1833, in the little village of Green- 
bush, opposite Albany, on the Hudson. He has said that as 
a boy he loved shooting and fishing so well and hated school 
£0 much that he now wonders how he learned anything. 
However this may be, we are all agreed that he was destined 
to win large acquisitions of the philosophy of life and to mas- 
ter the art of felicitous discourse — witness the series of chap- 
ters to which his Christmas story belongs. 
In 1854 Mr, Mather went to Wisconsin, where, as he has 
already told in our columns, three years were spent in hunt- 
ing and trapping; thence he drifted to Kansas, and then his 
fritnds gathered at Old Port's to give him a Christmas wel- 
come home. In response to the call for troojas in 1862 he 
enlisted in the army as private, and served until the close of 
the war. Our choice of a portrait for the Fobest and 
Stebam happened to be that one which shows him in uniform 
and with service insignia which will tell their own story. 
Mr. Mather took an active interest in fishculture at an 
early stage of its development in this country. In 1868 he 
bought a farm iu western New York and began trout breed- 
ing, and was called on to hatch shad for the United States 
on several rivers. He was sent to Germany four times on 
fishcultural business, the last time in charge of the flshcul- 
tural branch of the American exhibit at the International 
Fisheries Exposition in Berlin. He hatched the first sea 
bass and took the first grayling eggs. In 1883 he took 
charge of the New York State hatchery on Long Island, 
where he remained until last spring, when he moved to 
Brooklyn. He urgfd the stocking of the Hudson with 
salmon and did it; discovered how scallops breed and that 
lobsters spawn only once in two years. He founded the 
American Fisheries Society and is an honorary member of 
all foreign fishery societies. 
As a writer on fish and fishing Mr. Mather has been known 
to Forest and Stream readers since its first number in 
1873. For several years he was the editor of our angling 
columns. Always delightful as a story teller, he has never 
written anything in happier vein than these chapters of per- 
sonal sketches of companions of field and stream. 'The 
heroes of his tales are to be counted fortunate in their his- 
torian; and yet more fortunate are the thousands whose 
privilege it is to read the remiaiscences chronicled, and so 
often to find in them each for himself something of the ex- 
periences, the fortunes and the friendships of his own life. 
AN INCIDENT OF CHRISTMAS EVE, 1586. 
In the black letter of Hakluyt, in the narrative of "The 
admirable and prosperous Voyage of the Worshipful Mr. 
Thomas Cavendish, of Trimley, in the County of Suffolk, 
Etquire, into the South Sea, and from thence round about 
the circumference of the whole earth, begun in the year of 
our Lord 1586 and finished 1588," it is written that on the 
16th day of December, 1586, the fleet of three ships fell in 
with the Coast of America, and on the l?th, in the after- 
noon, entered into a harbor which they called, after the 
name of the Admiral's ship. Port Desire, an appel 
lation which if you will look on the map of 
South America, you will find to have remained until this 
day. Here in Port Desire was found a wonderful great, 
store of seals. These seals, the old chronicle reads, "were of 
a wonderful great bigness, huge and monstrous of shape, 
and for the forepart of their bodies cannot be compared to 
anything better than to a Hon; their head and neck and fore 
parts of their bodies ai'e full of rough hair; their young are 
marvellous good meat, and being boiled or roasted are hard- 
ly to be known from lamb or mutton." Sealhuncing in those 
early timea was very much like seal hunting in Alaska to- 
day; it was simply a matter of clubs. "The old ones," the 
narrative records, "be of such bigness and force that it is as 
much as four men are able to do to kill one of them with 
great cowle-staves : and he must be beaten down with strik- 
ing on the head of him, for his body is of that bigness that 
four men could never kill him, but only on the head." 
Here at Port Desire the crews careened and trimmed their 
ships, the Desire, the Content and the Hugh Gallant; and 
laid in a great store of seal and of penguins, for these fowl af- 
forded a favorite food supply for the voyagers of those times. 
While thus engaged, on Dec. 24, being Christmas Eve, the 
Hakluyt story tells ua: 
"A man and a boy of the Rear- Admiral went; some fbrty score 
from our snips unto a very fair grfeen valley at the foot of the moun- 
tains, where was a little pit or well, which our men had digged and 
made some two or three days before to get fresh water. Therefore 
this man and boy came thither to wash their linen, and being in 
washing at the said well, there were great store of Inaians which 
were come down and found the said man and boy in washing. These 
Indians being divided on each side of the rocks, shot at them with 
their arrows and hurt them both, but they fled presently, bein^ 
about fifty or threescore, though our General followed them with but 
sixteen or twenty men. The man's name that was hurt was John 
Garge, the boy's name was Lutch. The man was shot in through the 
knee, the boy in the shoulder, either of them having very sore 
wounds. Their arrows are made of little canes, and their heads are 
of a flint stone set into the cane very artificially. They seldom or 
never see any Christians; they are wila as ever was a buck or any 
other wild beast, for we followed them and they ran from us as if it 
had been the wildest thing in the woi-ld. We took the measure of 
one of their feet, and it was 18 inches long. " 
In the famous voyages of De Bry, published at Frankfort- 
on-the-Main in 1593, the adventures of the voyagers and ex- 
plorers of the world are set out in engravings now counted, 
among the most cherished possessions of the book collector. 
From one of the volumes owned by the Forest and Stkbam, 
we have copied out for this Christmas of 1896 the quaint 
picture of the misadventure which befell the sealers at Port 
Desire on that Christmas Eve of 1586. The artist on the 
spot has left us a graphic delineation of the incident; if any 
shall object that his drawing is in its perspective not up to the 
standard of to day, be it remembered that a proper apprecia.. 
tion of perspective is something many a well-meaning in- 
dividual lacks even in this year of grace. 
CHECKMATED? 
Op all the game birds, none approach the ruffed grouse 
in cunning devices to avoid its pursuer, and courageous 
dash in their execution. It is a versatile strategist, whether 
afoot or awing, often evading the most skillful shot and 
always taxing the highest capabilities of the dog to baffle its 
wiles and evade its vigilance so that a point may be secured; 
or, failing that, a flush within range of the shooter, a not 
infrequent occurrence in ruffed grouse shooting. 
Our full-page illustration of a shooting scene in the haunts 
of the ruffed grouse is from the deft brush of Prof. Edm. 
H. Osthaus, whose .skill with brush and pencil in the por- 
trayal of the wholesome sports of field and forest has more 
than a national fame. The spirited sketch pictures the 
juncture when the dog has at last brought the 
bird to take refuge in concealment, checkmated, 
perhaps; and the shooter, keyed up to the high- 
est nervous tension, is ready for the bird's roar of 
wings, and the lightning dash for cover, with the accompany- 
ing trick of putting its line of flight so that a tree, rock, 
fence or wall is between it and its pursuer, thus defeating 
many times what seemed almost a success for the gun, and 
making the checkmate always doubtful; for this resourceful 
bird is never governed by set rules — what in appearance ' 
seems to be a certain checkmate may be turned at the last 
moment into a dashing evasion and brilliant escape. Prof. 
Osthaus most happily catches the spirit of the theme in the 
ensemble of wild, secluded haunts, crafty dog and skillful 
sportsman. 
WILLIAM LYMAN. 
We regret to record the death of William Lyman, in th 
city, Sunday, Dec. 30. Mr. Lyman was gifted with inveu 
five genius of decided versatility. Among his invention ^ 
were the bow facing rowing gear, an important improve- 
ment of the clothes-wringer, and the several rifle and gun 
sights which have made his name familiar to the sportsmen 
of America and Europe. He possessed a rare fund of quaint 
humor which never failed to charm his friends, of whom 
the circle was wide, with their friendships growing closer as. 
the year? went by. Mr. Lyman wj^s i^ |of ty-third ye^r, 
