Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
^'=""''*UlT^Hs!°82.'''^^°"''} NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 7, 1897. {no. a^^^Ko^nSii^^-TW. 
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I ttevef liad an ailment a week^s fishing would 
liot cure, and I nevet envied prince, potentate or 
president so long; as I could find the time (and I 
always did) and had the opportunity to make a 
cast. I think I am and have been as sympathetic 
as most men, I know I have lost many a night's 
sleep on hearing of the misfortune of some friend 
who deserved a better fate. I know, too, that I 
would rather toss a dollar to a beggar than ex- 
change salutations with a king, and I have had 
both experiences. Indeed, my sympathies have 
uniformly been with ** the under dog in the fight,'' 
no matter which was the aggressor. But my 
heart has always been stirred to its deepest depths 
when I have met a good fellow who was so insen- 
sible to his own happiness, so absorbed in his ac- 
quisition of wealth, and so inappreciative of the 
example of the holy apostles as never to have cul- 
tivated a taste for the angle. Angling Talks. 
ACCIDENTS IN MOUNTAIN CLIMBING. 
The frequently recurring accounts of accidents to moun- 
tain climbers call renewed attention to the increasing pop- 
ularity of this pastime among residents of western 
America. No recreation is more wholesome, exhilarating 
and elevating than this, and none deserves greater en- 
couragement. That accidents occur to those who indulge 
in it is nothing against the sport. This is true of almost 
every pursuit of life, and the casualties are probably rela- 
tively less frequent in this than in most other recreations^ 
In many of the cases reported the accidents are obviously 
traceable to a lack of experience by the climbers, which 
leads them to take risks to which an older hand would be 
slow to expose himself. 
Mountain climbing, more than almost any form of recre- 
ation, calls for physical and mental vigor. Stout muscles, 
strong lungs and a sound heart are the first essentials to a 
good mountaineer; but even these avail little unless backed 
by steady nerves, cool judgment and a prompt decision. 
These mental qualifications come to most men only 
through the experience of actual work upon rough moun- 
tain sides, along steep clifis and over slippery slopes of ice 
and snow. 
No inexperienced climber should attempt the ascent of 
ice or snow slopes except in company with persons accus- 
tomed to work of this kind. So far as one may judge from 
the newspaper despatches, the accidents lately reported as 
occurring on Mt. Rainier, and elsewhere, seem to have 
been due chiefly to an ignorance of possible mountain 
dangers. Large parties of excursionists start from the sea 
level to climb a mountain over 14,000ft. in height. Having 
reached the altitude of the glaciers, they are overtaken by 
night, lose the trail and scatter in search of it. In the at- 
tempt to find it, some members of the party fall into cre- 
-vasses in a glacier, while another falls over a precipice 
and . is kille'd. These melancholy happenings tell their 
own sad story. 
While Alpine climbing is a noble recreation, and is as 
safe as any other, it is yet full of dangers to the individual 
who undertakes to practice it on difficult mountains with- 
out some previous training. The novice, knowing nothing 
of the conditions which may confront him, is unfitted to 
face them. He is like the person who, unused to fire- 
arms, handles them for the first time, or one who ventures 
for the first time on the water in a canoe or sail boat, alone. 
The history of all the most noted and daring mountain 
climbers of Europe is alike in one respect. If their careers 
be traced, it wiU be found that before climbing alone, they 
passed a long period of tutelage under the guidance of ex- 
perienced men, whose lives had been spent among the 
peaks, men who were ever watchful, alert and ready, men 
for whom heights and depths had no terrors, to whom 
nervousness in bad places was unknown. Such men, 
whose whole lives belong to the mountains, have absorbed 
and again give forth to their associates that knowledge 
that is indispensable to the mountaineer. 
It is true that in our American mountains, so far as they 
have yet been explored, the dangers to be faced by no 
means equal those of some of the mountains of Switzer- 
land and the Tyrol. Yet in the Eocky Mountains, the 
Cascades and the Sierra Nevadas, there are many peaks 
which have their dangers, and which should be ascended 
only after a man has passed through an apprenticeship at 
mountaineering, or else only in company with experienced 
climbers. 
It must be remembered also that even in the case of an 
experienced climber, an absence of a year or two from 
the mountains may result in a partial loss of nerve. He 
who has not climbed for a long time may on his first 
ascent feel timid about walking along sharp, knife-edged 
crests, beneath which yawns a fall of some hundreds of 
feet on either side. But he who has once acquired a head 
for the mountains will find that — even though he may be 
shaky at first — a few hours, or at most a day or two, will 
give him back the nerve that he once possessed, and that 
he will then be able to run and jump over places where 
but a short time before he had crawled tremblingly, with 
his heart in his mouth. 
It true that, even to experienced mountain climbers, 
accidents occasionally occur which are quite inexplicable 
on any theory of carelessness, recklessness or ignorance. 
Such accidents, no doubt, are sometimes due to some con- 
stitutional weakness in the climber, hitherto unknown. 
The continued exertion of the ascent and the rarefied air 
of great heights force one's heart and lungs to do much 
more than their customary amount of work, and thus tend 
to bring to light any functional weakness of these organs. 
A weak heart is especially likely to show itself under such 
conditions, and it may well be that many of the deaths 
recorded among practiced climbers are due to such func- 
tional weakness. 
The accidents which occasionally occur to mountain 
climbers should not prejudice anyone against this recrea- 
tion. It should be practiced, however, by both men and 
women, in an intelligent way. So followed, it will benefit 
all who indulge in it. 
THE FOREST BESERVES. 
A SERIOUS blow was dealt to the hopes of those interested 
in forest reservation in the United States when Congress 
passed, as a rider to the Sundry Civil Service hill, an 
amendment suspending until March 1, 1898, President 
Cleveland's proclamation setting aside thirteen forest 
reservations in the West. This rider, as a sop to public 
sentiment on one side, authorizes the Secretary of the In- 
terior to establish a system of forest administration in the 
old reserves, and to prescribe rules and regulations for their 
care; but no machinery nor any funds are provided for 
carrying out such a system. The rules and regulations 
have recently been published, and so a considerable quan. 
tity of ink and good white paper has been wasted. 
As is well known to most people, such fiats by the Sec- 
retary of the Interior are wholly inefiective. The country 
has had one experience of their futility on a small scale — 
the case of the Yellowstone National Park— where for 
more than twenty years, Secretary after Secretary estab- 
lished rules and regulations which were a laughing stock 
to all who chose to infringe them. It was only after the 
enactment by Congress of a definite law, which established 
a machinery for enforcing the law's provisions, and an ap- 
propriation to set that machinery in motion, that ofienses 
could be punished. The regulations with regard to the 
forest reservations will be as efi'ective as were those issued 
for the Yellowstone Park; no more so. 
The report to the Secretary of the Interior of the Na- 
tional Forestry Commission, appointed by the National 
Academy of Sciences, upon which a part of these regula- 
tions appear to be based, expresses the needs of the Western 
forests so well that it ought to be read by every intelligent 
and patriotic person in the land. It shows how almost all 
civilized countries which have forests, except the United 
States, protect those forests, and derive from them an an- 
nual income, precisely as the fruit grower protects his or- 
chard and sells his crop. It calls attention to the special 
dangers — fires and sheep grazing — from which our forests 
suffer, and describes the present condition of the different 
reservations and the depredations which are committed on 
them. 
It then proposes a system of forest organization, intelli- 
gent and effective; but since such an organization cannot 
at once be set in operation, advises the employment of 
troops as a temporary police force to protect the forests, 
citing the good work done in this respect by the troops 
employed in protecting the Yellowstone,Park. It recom- 
mends also the establishment of a board of forest lands 
which shall survey all forested lands in the public domain 
for the purpose of withdrawing such lands from sale and 
entry, shall determine what ought to be retained perman- 
ently as forest reservations, and shall then recommend to 
the President the restoration of all other lands to the pub- 
lic domain. It advises also the establishment of two ad- 
ditional national parks, one to include the higher portions 
of Mount Eainier in Washington, the other the Grand 
Caflon of the Colorado. Both of these are rapidly being 
defaced, owing to depredations by tourists and others, and 
unless in some way protected, many of their beauties will 
soon be utterly destroyed. These parks, if established, 
should be treated like the Yellowstone National Park, 
and would be of almost equal interest. 
Several pages of the report are devoted to an abstract of 
the clumsy, loosely drawn, misleading and inefiective tim- 
ber laws which have been passed by Congress. These 
laws in practice afibrd no protection to the public forests. 
Under them many millions of dollars worth of timber 
have been taken from the pubUc lands for which the peo- 
ple of the country have received no return, and besides 
this, the records of the General Land Ofiice show that dur- 
ing the last eleven years timber to the value of more than 
$26,000,000 has been taken without any color of law, and 
suits for the recovery of this amount have been instituted 
by the Government. 
As an appendix to the report, there are printed five bills, 
drawn by the Commission i for the purpose of carrying out 
their recommendations. The first of these authorizes the 
employment of troops to protect the public forest preserves 
and national parks of the United States. The second — a 
bill to protect and administer public forest reserves- 
guards the right of settlers and miners, establishes a for- 
estry bureau with all its machinery, and provides penal- 
ties for injury to the forest reserves by depredators. A bill 
for the management of the unreserved public timber land 
and for the sale of timber thereon, temporarily withdraws 
from settlement or sale all timber-producing lands until 
they shall have been survey,ed and their value as timber 
lands determined by the Board of Forest Lands. Then the 
Secretary of the Interior is authorized to sell the timber 
on them under certain restrictions, but it is provided that 
such withdrawal of timber land shall not be allowed to 
interfere with mining, prospecting, or agricultural opera- 
tions, and that miners, prospectors, agriculturalists and 
other bona fide settlers, not corporations, shall be allowed 
to use timber in their operations. The other two bills 
provide for the setting aside of the upper slopes ot Mt. 
Rainier and of the Grand Canon of the Colorado as 
national parks. 
The recommendations of this report fully justify all the 
predictions made about it in Forest and Stream last spring 
A broad and liberal view is taken of our forest lands, and 
of the needs of the adjacent population in connection ith 
them. Many of those who are especially interested in for- 
estry will regard the view taken as too libei-al. On the 
other hand, the provisions of the third bill. Which places 
all the public forested lands in the hands of the Govern- 
ment, will be thought very radical by others. It is impos- 
sible to satisfy every one, but two things are certain: first, 
that troops should be employed to police the forest reserva* 
tions; and second, that a bureau of forestry, such as recom- 
mended in the second bill, should be established by Con- 
gress on its reassembling. As the Western country is 
settling up, more water is being used, and more is con- 
stantly needed. In many places the streams are going 
dry, hay meadows are turning again to bunch-grass prairie, 
and ranches are being deserted. Some time before very 
long a halt must be called, or else portions of our country 
now sparsely inhabited will become real desert. 
Congress took no action on Senator Proctor's hill to 
regulate the sale of game in the District of Columbia; so 
the National Capital will continue to serve as a dumping 
ground for the out-of -season game of the several States. 
It is disgraceful that this condition should have existed so 
long as it has. Now that attention has been called to the 
subject, we may look for an early remedy in a regular ses- 
sion of Congress. 
