Jdlt 31, 1897.] 
We gave up this day dreaming and soon had a couple of 
rainbows frying in the pan. After a hearty meal, selecting 
some of our most tempting flips, we stowed ourselvts on 
board our jaunty little skiff, the Possum, for a good row up 
the late. 
The sun was just climbing over the §now-capped mountain 
tops as we pulled out, and so engrossed were we in the beau- 
tiful scenery, the high range of mountains, with the long, 
dark line of snow sheds stretching away along their face, the 
quiet stillness and the glistening water, that we quite forgot 
our mission. But shaking ourselves together, we resumed 
our pull and were right among them. 
Most of the fish were of what is known here as the cut- 
throat species (although where they derive that I am at a loss 
to determine), with now and then a silver beauty. 
On reaching Possum Cottage again and counting our catch , 
found we had just thirty-five, whose combined weight lipped 
the beam at 9(5 lbs 7oz. 
Here are cooling breezes all through the summer, the pur- 
est and the hest of water, with fishing and scenery that is 
hard to surpass; and only six miles, with a good road and 
pheasant drive to Truckee, and the Overland R. R. 
Having had our fill of lake fishing, we resolved to break 
camp and try the famous Truckee River and adj-cent creeks. 
Next morning before sun up found us doing the Truckee 
with fair success, but owing to high water our catch was not 
phenomenal. September is the best month with the fly. 
Truckee River could and should be the ideal fishing water 
on this coast, being, as it is, the outlet of Tahoe and Donner 
lakes; but owing to the many dams, it is utterly impossible 
for fish to ascend the stream. I used to think that there was 
a State law obliging corporations doing business on a river 
to put in fishways, but I failed to obseive more than two, 
and one of these was high and dry on the bank. 
Our next visit was to Alder Creek, distance four miles 
from Truckee, where but a few years since were planted 
New Hampshire trout, bat owing to high water we failed to 
secure many. Martis and Donner creeks were visited with 
poor success. While I was fishing at Donner Lake near the 
dam, a laughable incident took place. I hnd just landed a 
beauty, and dropping him into the weeds that lined the bank, 
I continued fishing down stream about .^Oyds., when, on 
looking back, I saw my newly-caught pn'ze m the jaws of a 
big mink, which speedily disappeared with him in the 
stream. 
One more adventure. While whipping the Truckee, I 
came to a black, swampy spot, and on looking out for a hard 
place to jurfip on to, picked out a low bunch of what 1 took 
to be dried willows or dead sagebrush, I reasoned that if I 
could jump on to that I could jump on to an old log at the 
next jump, and would be all right then. Reasoning after this 
fashion, 1 seized my rod tightly and made the jump. But 
what struck me? Who ami? Where am I at? For no 
sooner had I struck that innocent little bunch of shrubs, 
when w-o-o-8-h! up jumped a big black sow and landed me 
backwards in the blackest and softest of black mud. 
To say that I was rattled fails to express my feelings, for 
honestly 1 did not know what town 1 was in. When 1 
pulled myself together and looked around and saw the 
author of my strange position, not over 20ft. away, with 
bristles all ruffed the wrong way, eyes tiashing fire and her 
jaws snapping together like a castanet solo, I suddenly re- 
membered that I had left my gun at home, besides I had fish 
enough for one day, and, gradually backing away from my 
dusky companion, I left her to resume her siesta undis- 
turbed. 
But as every fish line has an end, so has my outing. 
After enjoying over five weeks of the best of fishing, reluct- 
antly I turned my face cityward, where, after a pleasant 
ride, I arrived, feeling much invigorated and in a happier 
frame of mind. E. Nettleton. 
Ban FflAscisco. 
MEN I HAVE FISHED WITH. 
LI.— George Tweddle. 
Among the playmates of early boyhood now held in pleas- 
ant remembrance is George Tweddle, the son of a wealthy 
maltster of Albany, N. Y. George was a city boy, while I 
was a "Greenbushwhacker," as the Albany boys termed those 
who lived in the village of Greenbush, across the Hudson 
River. As I knew all the desirable fishing places within the 
reach of boys, George was fond of coming over to see me on 
Saturdays or other school holidays. We must have been 
about twelve years old when I took him to fish in the pond of 
the old red mill, which looked down on the village from a 
height of some 200ft., and whose waters tumbled about half 
that distance over the dark slate rock and showed up against 
it as a foamy cataract from the opposite side of the river. 
The old mill has been replaced by a smaller one lower down, 
the pond has shrunken, the stream which supplied it is 
almost dry, and the water no longer leaps down the precipices 
and foams over the slopes as it did half a century ago. 
There are handsome country seats where we boys shot rab- 
bits, and the place looked unfamiliar when 1 saw it last 
summer. 
When I first showed George how to fish I was under the 
tutelage of John Atwood, an older boy, whom I wrote of in 
the third article of this series, exactly a year ago, and who 
* had declared that there was "no fun fishin' with a pole, 
'cause you jerk 'em out when your float goes down and don't 
feel 'em wiggle." So I rigged our lines with light sinkers, 
. two hooks on snoods fastened on each line above the sinkers. 
Then with bails of angleworms we twirled the lines and 
dropped the sinkers some 80ft. away in the pond, and awaited 
the pleasure of the fish. Fishing tackle was not to be had in 
such variety as to-day, and we village boys bought ours of 
the grocers, the only ones in the place who kept such stock. 
We bought Limerick hooks, with the end of the shank flat- 
tened, and then cut ofl! a piece of the fish line for a snood 
and made the hook fast with several half-hitches, clumsy, 
but strong and effeclive for our kind of fishing. The hooks 
were sold two and three for a cent, according to size, while 
lines cost 2 cents a knot of loft , as I remember. We pounded 
out the sinkers from nieces of lead into long, four -sided, 
tapering shapes, finished them with a file, and made a hole 
in the smaller end; and there we were, rigged out for a sea- 
son's fishing for about 10 cents. George had brought some 
hooks on gut snells, which had cost 3 cents each, and then I 
first saw how a hook with a tapered shank was put on a 
snell. I had seen the hooks, but had no use for them, be- 
cause I did not believe they could be securely fastened to a 
line; but here they were, and George did not lose a hook 
that day, yet it was evident that to whip such a hook on a 
gut snell or a fish line was far beyond my power. 
"George," said I, "your line is too slack. Draw in until 
you feel the sinker, but don't move it; your lower hook wil 
FOREST AMD STREAM, 
then be on the bottom for suckers, bullheads and eels, while 
the upper one will hang clear for perch, sunfish and rock 
bass. When you feel a nibble, be ready to strike at a haid 
tug, and then pull in hand under hand to examine the baits, 
if you haven't got a fish " , 
i soon had a bite and pulled in a yellow yerch of fair size, 
perhaps a 41b., for they did not grow big there, and Gi oige 
danced around it in great glee. It was the greatest fish he 
had ever seen alive, and in his enthusiasm at seeiap me un- 
hook it and put it on a string to keep it alive in the water, 
he forgot his own fishing, until I had baited and was ready 
to throw out, when he saw his line running out into the 
pond, and grabbed the wooden winder just as it reached the 
water. He tugged away, and after hauling in 10ft. of line 
landed a large sucker that, lo-day my memory says, must 
have weighed at least 21bs , but memory is not a steelyard 
nor a grocer's scale, especially when the guessweight of a 
fish is attempted fifty years after it was caught. Suckers 
of 21l)s. weight were often taken from that pond years after, 
and this was a big one 
"What kind of a fish is it?" he asked in his excitement, 
"and is it good to eat?" 
"It's a sucker, George, and in early spring many people 
cat them, and numbers are sold, but in summer thfy are 
soft and don't keep long; you'd better let it go." 
"Let it go! Not by a long shot. I don't care whether it 
is good to eat, nor whether it keeps in warm weather, I'm 
going to take that fish to Albany and show it to the boys. 
Say, can I get it there alive?" 
"Yes, if 1 don't have to cut the hook out of it. You see, 
you weren't paying attention to your line, and most likely 
the fish has the hook down in its stomach. Let me see it." 
The fish had gorged the bait, as 1 suspected, and I pre- 
pared to cut out the hook, when George said : "Look here, 
1 don't care anything about that hook. What I want is to 
get that fish to Albany alive, so that people will believe that 
I caught It. If I cut the snell and leave the hook in the 
fish, will it live long enough to get to Albany?" 
"It may live long enough for that. I lieard old John 
Chase, who sets fyke nets in the river 'most ail the year, say 
that he has caught lots of fish that had hooks in 'em, and 
John Atwood and I brought up a lot of perch alive from the 
Popskinny by packing them in wet eel grass in a basket. 
Cut off your hook and string the fish, and before we go we'll 
get some water weeds and pack thefish in your lunch basket." 
We did this, and a week later George told me that the fish 
lived and that he showed to every man, woman and boy that 
he knew from the South Ferry to his home in upper Broad- 
way, and he never tired of talking about that fish. It grew 
with his growth, and although we took pickerel of 41bs. and 
over in Kinderhook Lake half a dozen years later, he still 
enthused over that 21b. sucker. This shows what memories 
an angler will retain of his first fish, which is a great event 
in his hitherto uneventful life, and the author of "The Old 
Oaken Bucket" has reminded us that the scenes of our child- 
hood are dear to our hearts. 
I have spoken of "snoods" and "snells" as though they 
were two different things. The Standard Dictionary defines 
the former as short lines by which hooks are attached to the 
main line, but has no mention of snell. The market fisher- 
man uses a snood and the angler a snell. My distinction is 
that the latter is made of silk-worm gut, while the snood is 
of linen or hemp, a distinction without much difference, but 
the term? are used by men who fish in different ways and for 
different purposes. 
We fished the Popskinny, two or three creeks between 
Troy and Greenbush, and the Normanskill on the Albany 
side. With shining morning face I crept unwillingly to 
school in Fort Cralo, the oldest building now standing in the 
United States, on the river bank below what was then the 
village limit, and several times George and 1 ransacked its 
great garret for flints and other relics, and watched the wrens 
nesting in the stones, which were pierced for musketry, but 
were then plastered up on the inside. A copper plate on the 
front of the now crumbling building says: "Supposed to 
have been erected in 1642 as a manor house and place of de- 
fense, known as Fort Cralo. Gen. Abercrombie's headquar- 
ters while marching to attack Fort Ticonderoga in 1757, 
when, it is said, at the cantonment east of the house, near 
the old well, the army surgeon, R. Shuckbury, composed the 
popular song of 'Yankee Doodle.'" The building was of 
Holland brick, but the port holes were in several brown 
stones, each over 1ft. square. When we were going to fish 
down the river George always wanted to dig the worms in 
the old Cralo garden, in hope of turning up some relic, and 
we did find several arrow-heads and a portion of a bayonet. 
He would dig long after we had more than enough bait. I 
didn't share his enthusiasm, for I got plenty of the old place 
six days in the week. 
Once while fishing in the pond by the red mill, George 
had seen me bring in a smaU painted tortoise, one of the 
little pond turtles which love to sit on logs when the sun 
shines, and plunk in the pond when danger threatens or the 
first drop of rain falls; and he noticed that I put a knife 
handle in its mouth while I took the hook from its lower 
jaw. It would have been easier to cut the snell and let the 
hook go, but I never did like to lose a hook, and so spent 
time to save one. An hour or so after this I went into the 
woods to get dry fuel to roast our lamb chops, and to make 
coffee for our nooning, when 1 heard George yell, and I ran 
to him while he kept up the yelling. He had caught a little 
snapping turtle, not larger than the little "skillypot" I had 
caught, which was about Sin. long; and the snapper had 
caught George by the side of his thumb nail, and seemed 
perfectly satisfied to hold on to what he had if it didn't tear 
loose; and it was a question of which was the catcher and 
which the catchee, and I hardly knew what to do. I stuck a 
case knife down the reptile's throat, and in trying to pry its 
jaws open the blade broke, leaving about lia. of it on the 
handle. I turned this edgewise and forced the mouth open, 
and George danced around and sucked his bleeding thumb! 
As soon as he cooled down, I asked him how it happened 
that the snapper got hold of his thumb. 
Said he: "I was trying to lake the hook out of its mouth 
the same as you did when you caught a turtle, and as I tried 
to put the knife handle in its mouth it grabbed me, and I 
couldn't shake it off." 
"No, George, that kind of turtle never shakes off; but you 
are in luck that it was a small one. If it had been 8 or luin. 
long it would have taken your thumb oft". The one I caught 
is a harmless thing, although it can bite hard if provoked ; 
but a snapper is always provoked, and will fight at the drop 
of a hat. This is your first lesson in turtles No Greenbush- 
whacker would risk a thumb near a snapper's jaws. Even 
that little fellow would have crushed your thumb-nail, and 
made an ugly looking thing of it for life. You got off cheap." 
I had turned the turtle on its back and was holding my 
80 
foot on it to keep it there. George said : "Let's see you take 
the hook out." 
"No, my boy, I don't want a hcok at that price," and I 
cut the snell and picked the turtle up by the tail. 
"Can't I have the satisfaction of cutting the hook or the 
heart out of that beast without getting hurt?" 
"No trouble about it if you want lo gpend the time. All 
turtles can make a snap straight ahead or over their backs as 
far as they can reach, but they can't bend the neck on the 
lower shell. This fellow has swallowed the hook, and I'll 
put him on his back and stand one foot on Its head while I 
pull on the tail to keep its neck stretched, and you may carve 
away at him until you get the hook, his heart, satisfaction, 
or all three." And so George got his hook and also a view 
of the interior arrangements of a turtle. George carried a 
small scar on his thumb, but the turtle had no scar, ita 
wounds never healed. 
On that same day George caught his first eel, and allowed 
it to wriggle among the coils of his line in its efforts to get 
back to ttie water while George was trying to catch it in his 
hands and hold it. I was only a few feet away, but was en- 
joying the fun too much to tell him what to do, until, in a 
final effort to grab the eel, both went into the pond. He 
scrambled out, while I grabbed his line and pulled in the eel, 
stunned it with a stick and unhooked it, .A.ny uneducated 
eel that has never seen the outside of a mill pond since it 
came there as an "elver," can tie more knots in a line in a 
minute than a fisherman can pick out in an hour, and 
Tweddle's line had evidently been operated on by an expert. 
We took off the hooks, and sinker and each began at one end 
to untie the knots which I had tightened by hauling in the 
line, and it delayed our luncheon about an hour. When we 
had finished and washed the shme from (he line, George re- 
marked: "Oh, I'm learning how to fish, and the next turtle 
I catch will not get a bite at my thumb and the next eel will 
never get among the coils of my line. I s'pose there's lots o' 
things to learn about fishing yet, and I wonder what the next 
thing that will help my education will be, and how long be- 
fore Til graduate. " 
"You're doing all right." I answered; "for a boy who has 
been brought up in the city and has seen neither turtles nor 
eels caught on fish lines, you are doing well. You need to 
catch a bullhead, yet, and take it off the hook without get- 
ting its horns into your hands, for you know I've unhooKed 
all you've caught. But let's go and get something to eat be- 
fore we starve. " 
"But is a bullhead hard to unhook? Tell me about it." 
' Not now; that's another lesson. See that the tin pail is 
put over the fire on the pole in the crotches, while I go get 
some birch twigs." I had to attend to all the details, for 
George did not know birch from hemlock, and would have 
been as likely to hang a chop on a pine stick full of turpen- 
tine as on birch or beech. He was quick to learn, however, 
but it seemed queer that he shouldn't know some things 
about fishing and camping that had been such every-day 
things in my boyhood life that I didn't reahze that I'd ever 
learned them — they seemed to be things that everybody knew 
without telling, just as a young honey-bee knows how to 
gather honey the first day it leaves the hive. 
On our previous trip to the millpond we had eaten a cold 
bite, and George was curious to see coffee made and chops 
roasted over an open fire. I had cleaned some p'rch and 
stuck them on slanting sticks so that they hung before 
the fire, and had run the birch twigs through the chops and 
they were roasting, while the coffee was being made. Then, 
with bread and butter, George declared that he had never 
eaten such a meal in his life. The fact was that with the 
exercise, excitement and outdoor air, he had never been 
£0 hungry in his life. That sauce of hunger! How many 
an ordinary, half-cooked dinner it has converted into a 
feast! This and our fishing for pickerel in Kinderhook 
Lake must have been before we were fifteen years old, be- 
cause at that age I left Fort Cralo and went to school in 
Albany, where my people emigrated two years later. But, 
like that first big sucker he caught, George loved to talk about 
his first camp dinner, the eel and the snapping-turtle, up to 
the last time I met him. 
After our nooning we pulled in our lines which had been 
fishing, boy fashion, while we were feeding, and found bare 
hooks. In the afternoon we took a few perch and a number 
of rock bass, but George's bullhead did not come until near 
evening. "Now, hold on, let me take him off," said he, 
and then he dropped the fish and remarked on the sharpness 
of its fins, while a drop of blood showed where he had been 
pricked. 
"Just as I expected. Now, as the fish lies there, put 
your left hand over its head, straddle its back with your 
first two fingers and bend them around the thorns on the 
side fins; they can't hurt, and the other thorn on the back 
can't reach you and you can takeout the hook in safety." 
He did so, and remarked : ' 'Easy enough when you know 
how. what else have I got to learn?" 
"Oh, there are lots of things, but no one can tell you till 
you come to 'em ; there's much that I don't know, such as 
catching trout and striped bass, but I'll get out with some of 
the bass fishers some day and see how they do it." 
Since those boyish days 1 have learned that the catfishes, 
of which the New York bullhead is one, have the single 
spines in the pectoral or throat fins arranged with a curious 
snap joint, and when attacked or caught they set these 
thorns at right angles to the body, and they may be broken 
but not pressed down to the side of the fish; but behind the 
fins are bony triggers, just under the skin, which, if pressed 
on, will allow the spines to be put down. I once took a 
small catfish from the stomach of a loon and the pectoral 
spines were rigidly set, yet their sharp points had not 
pierced the bird's stomach. 
After my people moved to Albany, George left the city, 
but I found him back again when I returned from the West 
in the fall of '59, and we then fished for striped bass in the 
river during the season when young bass follow up the 
spawning shad and sturgeon, so that he was an expert at 
this kind of fishing when we initiated Ned Bantline to it in 
1865, as related last week. . The elder Mr. Tweddle had 
died before this, and George inherited a portion of his 
father's wealth, which portion was a fortune in itself. 
George and his sisters gave to Sc, Peter's church in Albany 
a chime of bells which cost $10,000 as a memorial to their 
father. We fished for a few years, until I left the city, and 
then George met with business troubles and he went away, 
and since 1873 I have never heard of his whereabouts, 
although I've often asked Albanians who knew him. Noth- 
ing is left in Albany of the once well-known name of 
Tweddle except the handsome building which stands on the 
corner of State and Pearl streets. George was an only son, 
and had one or more sisters, who, if living, bear other 
names. 
