Forest and Stream 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. 
Six Months, $2. 
} NEW YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1897. 
J VOL. XLVIX.-No. 11. 
( No. 346 Broadwat, New York. 
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OmLT CHIEF. 
A PEW days ago there died in Oklahoma, full of years, 
a good matt whose name will be familiar to some of the 
readers of Forest and Sxkeam. This was Curly Chief, the 
chief of the Kit-ke-hahki tribe of the Pawnee nation. 
Curly Chief was one of the famous "Seven Brothers" of 
the Kit-ke-hahki tribe, and by his bravery, shrewdness 
and rare common sense, very early took a prominent place 
in the councils of the nation. Brave to the utmost limit 
of daring when bravery was needed, he was as wise as 
brave, and as kindly and gentle as wise. Those who have 
slept in his lodge, and eaten of his food, and listened to his 
stirring war tales of the olden times, or to his accounts of 
the marvelous doings of the Indian priests in the buffalo 
days, will not easily forget the time spent with him. He 
was loved and venerated by the Pawnees, and respected 
by all who knew him. 
It was Curly Chief who told the story of the first coming 
to the Pawnee territory of the white man sent out by a 
' Government far to the eastward, to make a treaty with the 
Pawnees, and to get permission for the whites to pass 
through their country. 
To win the Pawnees' good-will, this man had brought 
with him many presents, such as blankets, guns, flint and 
steel and knives. When he had told the Pawnees the 
purpose for which he had come, the chief pondered for a 
time and then spoke, saying that the Pawnees required 
none of these things which had been brought to them. 
He said: "We have our bufialo and our corn. These 
things the Spirit Fa<-her gave us, and they are all that we 
require. Look at this robe. This keeps me warm in win- 
- ter. I need no blanket." 
The white men had brought with them some cattle, and 
the chief of the Pawnees said: "Lead out a heifer on the 
prairie." They did so, and the chief, stepping near, shot 
her through behind the shoulders with his stone-pointed 
arrow, and she fell down dead. The chief turned to the 
white man and said to him: "Will not my arrow kill? I 
do not need your guns." Then, with his stone knife,-he 
cut off a piece of fat meat, and when he had done this, he 
said; "Why should I take your knives? The Spirit Father 
has given me something to cut with." 
Then he took fire-sticks and kindled a fire and roasted 
his meat, and while it was cooking he spoke again, and 
said: "You see, my friend, the Spirit Father has given us 
all that we need— buffalo for food and clothing; corn 
to eat with our dried meat; bows, arrows, knives and hoes; 
all the tools that we need for living, for cultivating the 
ground, or for killing meat. We do not want your pres- 
ents, and we do not want you to come into our country. 
Go back to your own." 
But in time a treaty was made between the Pawnees and 
the Government, by which permission was given to the 
whites to pass through the land, and swiftly following the 
permission came changes. 
At the time of hia death Curly Chief was over seventy 
years of age, so that his memory went back to a time when 
indeed the wild Pawnee hunted free and uncontrolled. 
To him it must have seemed but as yesterday when the 
buffalo blackened the plains, and when the joys of a suc- 
cessful warpath were the keenest pleasures that he knew. 
His memory went back to those early days before emigra- 
tion had cut deep roads across the plains, or ever the 
route to Taos was laid out, or the Santa Fe trail opened. 
He had seen all those marvelous changes which have 
taken place west of the Missouri Kiver during the last two 
generations, and had beheld his people, once free wander- 
ers over the whole broad land, curtailed little by little of 
their liberty, and now at last made citizens of the United 
States. 
We who are civilized people, who live esssentially as 
pur fathers lived, who are accustomed to new ideas, to 
new discoveries, to the swift march of modern progress, 
pannot comprehend what such ghanges as they experienced 
meant to these simple people. New methods were con- 
stantly shown to them, new ideas continually thrust upon 
them; and so rapidly did these changes succeed one an- 
ther that they merely confused the savage, who compre- 
hended them not at all. For every human mind the pro- 
cess of adjustment to new conditions is deliberate, and 
above all others the primitive man is conservative and 
slow to change. 
Thus in the span of life of this man were wrought tribal 
changes, new modes of living, altered surroundings and 
conditions, such transformations as usually come to a race 
only in the slow succession of generations. With this 
Indian of the West it was as if centuries had intervened 
between his childhood and his age. 
In Curly Chiefs earlier life the rare white men seen by 
the Pawnees were wandering trappers, who came to-day 
and to-morrow were gone, or who took an Indian wife 
and remained to become aipart of the tribe. Much later he 
witnessed the rush of emigration to California, and the 
building of the forts for the troops. Then he saw his 
people restrained— gathered together and kept on a reser- 
vation, and later still he sent out his young men in the 
service of the Government to fight against the hostile Sioux, 
Cheyenne and Arapahoe. Following that, he beheld the 
extermination of the buffalo, their replacement by cattle, 
and the settling up of the country. 
Then came the removal of the Pawnees to the Indian 
Territory, their decimation by wasting illness, and later by 
the operation of the severalty act they were forced into 
citizenship, and thus destroyed as a tribe and as a nation. 
All these things Curly Chief had witnessed, and it is not 
difficult to imagine something of the deep and hopeless 
sadness with which he must have beheld the decadence of 
his people and their change from a condition of limitless 
freedom and of absolute mastership of the soil to that of a 
mere remnant, overwhelmed, broken and lost among the 
hordes of an alien race. 
THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSIOH, 
The old project- has been revived of transferring the 
United States Fish Commission to the control of the 
Agricultural Department. The scheme, we need not say, 
does not originate with the friends of the Commission, who 
are best informed as to its work in the past and most 
sincerely concerned for its future; for the change would be 
one which could not fail seriously to affect the character 
of the Commission, and to detract from its efficiency and 
public benefit. 
As now constituted, the Commission is an independent 
and non-political institution. Congress made it so in the 
beginning, at the earnest insistence of Professor Baird, 
who saw in such independence, freedom from political 
control and direct accountability to Congi-ess, the only 
possible conditions under which the great work it was to 
undertake could be accomplished most economically and 
most efficiently. The history of the Commission from the 
initiative under his direction has justified most abundantly 
Professor Baird's wisdom and foresight in this. The Com- 
mission has accomplished a work of vast magnitude; it has 
been of invaluable service to the country, increasing the 
yield of the fishery resources by millions of dollars, and it 
has done this and done it so well, for one reason because 
absolutely free to do the best work in the best way and 
with the best men, without political interference. 
To take from the Commission its independence would 
be to make wreck of so much of its usefulness as lies in its 
long-standing immunity from interference and outside dic- 
tation. To put it into the Department of Agriculture 
would completely and disastrously change this very essen- 
tial condition of good work. This in itself is a considera- 
tion sufficient to forbid the carrying out of any such 
project. 
THE PENNSYLVANIA SITUATION. 
The fishcultural interests of Pennsylvania have been 
menaced by the failure of a legislative appropriation for 
carrying on the work; but there is reason for hope that the 
required funds may be forthcoming for tiding over the 
most important interests. As told in our angling columns, 
there will be a convention in Harrisburg pn Wednesday 
of nest week to take action upon the suggestion made by 
Gov. Hastings, that the fish protective societies of the State 
should advance the funds for use as required, upon the 
understanding that the Legislature shall reftind the money 
at the next session. 
QREEN TURTLE EGGS. 
That Florida man told of in our correspondence to-day 
who instead of making into an omelet the green turtle 
eggs he had taken on the beach, kept them until they de- 
veloped into infant turtles and then committed them to 
the sea, set an example which might well be followed by 
all Florida turtle eggers. Indeed, to some such practice 
must the State come if it is to preserve its important and 
valuable green turtle resources. 
The Florida green turtle fisheries in the past have been 
worth many thousands of dollars annually, but of recent 
years the catch has decreased with alarming rapidity, un- 
til now the pursuit is becoming unproductive and profitless. 
An investigation recently made by the United States Fish 
Commission elicited almost universal testimony to this 
effect. 
In Tampa Bay and tributary waters, where in 1890 the 
fishery was important, the turtles have been killed off and 
it no longer pays to follow the fishery. The same story 
comes from Cedar Keys, Key West, Biscayne Bay and 
other points: over fishing, depleted supply, diminished 
catch and deserted breeding grounds. The turtle. Key 
West people complain, no longer deposits its eggs on the 
Key, but has been driven by the eggers to distant and in- 
accessible keys; and this has ruined the egging industry. 
The industry is one which deserves to be ruined, for it is 
ruinous in itself; from the very nature of the case it could 
not be otherwise. 
The nesting time of the green turtle in Florida extends 
from April to July. Coming ashore on the sandy beach, 
the turtle selects a spot above high-water mark, digs with 
its flippers a hole in the sand one or two feet deep, deposits 
from one hundred to two hundred eggs, covers them over, 
and then smoothing the surface to conceal the nest, re- 
turns to the deep. In a few weeks the eggs hatch and the 
young take to the water. The mother turtle visits the 
shore two or three times in a season, and thus lays from 
three hundred to six hundred eggs a year. 
Bears and men hunt out the turtle nests and take the 
eggs. The bear is a dumb brute and knows no better; but 
man can be taught, though it may take time to teach the 
lesson. Robbing turtle nests of their eggs is in the effect 
precisely like robbing birds' nests or taking trout from the 
spawning beds; if the eggs ar.3 destroyed, the stock of 
mature birds and fish and turtles must fail. With the tur- 
tle as with other species, the eggs are in themselves, as 
food or commercial products, of such little value in com- 
parison with the grown turtles, that it is simply inconsid- 
erate and wasteful folly to take them. There is no senti- 
ment about this; it is only a question of the conservation and 
profitable using of a great natural resource. Florida turtle 
egging should be numbered among the lost arts. 
GUIDES AND GUNS lA TEH YELLOWSTONE. 
There is a misunderstanding on the part of the public 
regarding Colonel Young's order respecting the carrying 
of arms in Yellowstone Park by hunters who are going 
into the territory south of the Park for big game. The 
order simply provides that hunting parties going through 
the Park shall carry sealed arms and provide themselves 
with a registered guide. Any guide of good reputation on 
registering at Fort Yellowstone, Mammoth Hot Springs, 
will be authorized by Colonel Young to conduct hunting 
parties through the Park, where their objective point is 
the Teton country, Jackson Lake or contiguous territories 
beyond the boundaries of the Park. 
There are some fourteen reliable guides who have al- 
ready registered and are in position to conduct hunting 
parties through the Park to the hunting grounds referred 
to. The order will therefore in no manner interfere with 
hunting parties who may desire to make this trip during 
the fall months. In fact. Col. Young states that he will go 
even further, and in case of responsible parties who desire 
to go through the Park to meet their guides or pack train, 
will furnish a small escort thoroughly familiar with the 
roads and trails to accompany each party to the south, 
east or west boundary line, according to their destination. 
Why "lynx-eyed," when we naean acute of vision? Is 
the lynx so much further and clearer and sharper-eyed 
than other wild creatures that it should be the proverbial 
paragon of sight? We would like to hear from Antler, 
Corporal Lot Warfield, Le\y Wilmot, and soine of the 
ptheyi authorities, 
