FOREST AND STREAM. 
[March 26, 1898. 
Some Yukon Notes*— I. 
Onk of the main attractions which drew me to the 
Yukon along with the rush of gold seekers last fall Was 
the prospect of hunting. I had seen the skins of the big 
brown Alaska bears measuring 12ft. from paw to paw, 
and nearl}' as much from nose to tail, and I knew thj^t 
caribou and moose and other game were also on hoof 
in the country. 
The two record-breaking moose heads which Forest 
AKD Stream told about last year had much to do with 
my journey. 
As a matter of fact, however, the big bears and the 
big moose are chiefly confined to the coast country, and 
the mountainous barren waste lying along the upper 
Yukon watershed has little to attract the sportsman. 
Game is nowhere abundant, and what little there is is 
hunted to death. The coast, on the other hand, still 
affords some magnificent sport, and a trip to Cook's 
Inlet, for instance, would insure good hunting and 
unique trophies. 
Owing partly to the scarcity of game and partly to 
the exactions upon my time, first to get into the country 
and then to get out, my hunting ambitions^ were never 
realized, I got no game except a few ptarmigan, grouse 
and ducks, two timber wolves, and some fur. I talked 
with Indian and white hunters, however, and made per- 
sonal observations, and in view of the public interest in 
the Yukon at the present time, some notes on the game 
may not be without value. 
Beginning with the passes which lead to the head- 
waters of the Lewis (to all intents and purposes the 
Yukon below Tagish on this route), by far the most 
abundant game is the white goat. In August and Sep- 
tember goats were seen daily from the trail, in places 
where it skirted the upper edge of the timber; and 
though there was little if any systematic hunting, a num- 
ber were killed b}'^ men who chanced upon them. One 
was shot in this way by a packer on the hog-back 
mountain on the main trail between the last btidge and 
the ford. This man told me that the goat let him 
approach with 30 or 40yds. It was killed only a few 
rods from the trail. 
Another was killed by a man named Johnson, grub- 
staked by Howard P. Curtis, a young New Yorker, who 
has since acquired a number of claims in the Klondike. 
Johnson was sick in bed at the time in a tent just above 
the Second Bridge over the Skagway. He saw the 
goat on the almost vertical hillside above, and lying in 
bed killed it at a distance of several hundred yards. 
Curtis and others of the party secured the skin the 
next day. 
Just above the Ford one day I noticed _two men la- 
boriously climbing the bare rocky hillside opposite. 
Something in their movements told me they were hunt- 
ing, and scanning the rock above, I discovered the 
object of their quest- — a big goat standing out in plain 
view at the top of a perpendicular ledge. The goat was 
watching the hunters attentively, and seemed ful^f aware 
of the situation. When they got Avithin a quarter of a 
mile he wheeled and darted up the mountain at a pace 
that was in the sharpest contrast to the slow, clumsy 
progress of the men. Usually it is folly to attempt 
to stalk a goat from below. From the hog-back before 
mentioned I saw two small black bears .one afternoon 
on the mountain opposite. All along the trail horses 
and men were toiling — the horses dumbly patient, the 
men voluble in their disgust. 
Practical profanity aimed at horses and mud attained 
its highest development on that trail. Its picturesque- 
ness was only exceeded by its volume. Two hundred 
men within a very short distance were swearing at the 
full capacity of their lungs, their remarks punctuated by 
blows of the cudgels thejr carried on horses' backs or 
the clatter of iron-shod hoofs on ledges of bare rock. 
Yet, despite the fact that the air was very still, and 
every sound carried across the cafion gorge of the Skag- 
way, as I found afterward from personal observation, 
those little bears paid not the slightest attention to the 
rumpus. They were peacefully engaged in scooping 
the watery moss berries and pulpy blueberries into their 
mouths, and were minding nobody else's business. 
Soon the bears began to attract attention. They were 
pointed out for a mile along the trail. Some persons 
called them grizzlies. They were nearly a mile off, but 
this did not prevent one man from shooting a box of 
cartridges in their general direction. 
Two hours later I had closed a contract for some 
packing, and having an hour or two before dark at my 
disposal, I took my rifle and climbed the hill where the 
bears had remained in sight up to the last few minutes. 
It was a tooth-and-nail scramble up from the cafion to 
a bench where grew a belt of timber perhaps a quarter 
of a mile in width. Above that the mountain was bare 
of vegetation except for low bushes, and very steep and 
\edgy. In the timber I found abundant signs of goat. 
The spoor was everywhere, and wherever there was a 
natural pass between rocky ledges tufts of white hair 
were caught in the trees. Judging from appearances, 
the signs had all been made the winter before, and there 
was nothing to indicate that the goats frequented the 
timber in summer. 
I circled round in the timber to get a position to lee- 
ward and above the bears, but my trouble was in vain, 
for when I reached the spot they had disappeared; and 
though I threw stones into all the neighboring gullies 
I could not start them. 
Fresh goat trails were numerous on the mountain 
side, in plain sight and hearing of the noisy crowd on 
the other hill; but like the bears, the goats seethed to 
pay little attention to the influx of strangers to their 
chosen country. 
Bears were common all along the trails over the 
passes, and were the subject of many good stories. One 
very large brown feear dragged away the carcass of a 
horse entire near the foot of the first hill, and was 
wounded the following night by hunters lying in wait. 
One of my partners saw the tracks- and blood of the 
bear, and also the partly eaten carcass of the horse, and 
the trail along which the bear had dragged it. 
When the time came for our descent of the river the 
bear season was nearly over, and most of the provident 
ones had already found for themselves winter quarters. 
Just above Lebarge, however, while trying to head off 
from the shore a black fox which we had surprised on 
a sandbar, we came upon the tracks of two very large 
bears. The fox, it may be as Avell to state, reached the 
river bank behind the shelter of a point and escaped, 
though a few seconds more would have given us an 
excellent shot at short range. The tracks of the bears 
were between 12 and I4in. long, and showed very plainly 
in the new snow. The date was toward the last of Oc- 
tober. 
Coming out on the ice last month, I met a party who 
had camped at White Horse Rapids along with us the 
day before seeing these bear tracks.. Messrs. Henning 
and Campbell, of this party, told me that they had killed 
a large grizzly bear ten miles or so above the point 
where we saw the tracks. They reached the Takeena 
River about noon of the day they left White Horse, and 
finding the river running mush ice bank full into the 
Lewis they landed to investigate. While on shore they 
sighted the bear swimming the riyer amid the ice. They 
hastily got into their boat and gave chase, but though 
the bear was carried a long distance down stream by the 
current and ice, they were unable to come close enough 
for a shot before the bear landed. They followed his 
track, howeA^er, and soon came in sight of the bear, 
which for want of a better opportunity Henning shot 
in the tail. As the bear turned, another lucky shot in 
the neck severed his spinal cord and killed him. Hen- 
ning, who is an old Rocky Mountain prospector, said 
the bear Avas a genuine grizzly, and weighed about 
6oolbs. Campbell has the skin, but as he had left it at 
his cabin down river I did not see it. 
Gov. Walsh told me of another grizzly killed by the 
Tunnies and Breed outfit near the island (Richtofen) in 
Lake T^ebarge. The bear was first seen on the shore of 
the island. When the boat, containing ten men, came 
opposite he deliberately took to the water and swam 
tOAvard them. They opened fire on him at short range, 
and had all they could do, they said, to keep the bear 
out of the boat. When only a few feet aAvay he turned and 
swam back to the island, and succeeded in getting en- 
tirely out of the Avater before d^'ing, though a post-mor- 
tem revealed thirty-two bullet holes in his hide. Gov. 
Walsh saw the skin, and assured me that it was a grizzly. 
In his long sojourn in the NorthAvest as chief of the 
Canadian Mounted Police the Governor saw and killed 
a large number of grizzlies, and consequently speaks 
Avith authority on the subject. 
Just across the divide from the ocean, near Middle 
Lake, I saw' the tracks of both moose and caribou in 
September. ScA'eral caribou Avere killed a little later 
by the Indians near Lake Lindeman. Caribou Avere 
seen on several occasions on the west shore of Middle 
Lake, but as far as I knoAV none Averc killed at the time 
I was there. I saw moose tracks crossing some open 
glades in a thick willow groAvth just above a be'lt of 
fir timber on the mountain west of Shallow Lake, and 
running south from there to Middle Lake. 
The chief engineer of the surveying party who were 
locating the route for the railroad- through White Pass 
told me that at Lindeman he had seen two moose. 
Half a dozen men told me they had seen elk at various 
points just north of the summit, but I am inclined to 
think that Avhat they saAV were either moose or caribou, 
as I cannot find that elk exist much further north than 
Vancouver Island. It Avas also commonly reported that 
mountain sheep were found in this neighborhood, but 
on talking Avith men making this statement I ahvays 
found that thej' referred to the white goat. Goats, in 
fact, were more often called sheep than giA'en their 
proper name, and Sheep Camp, noAV a prosperous little 
city second only to Skagway and Dyea, owes its name 
to this popular misapprehension. 
Sheep there are along the upper Yukon, but they 
inhabit a country better adapted to their requirements 
than the humid coast range. They are found in a high 
plateau country abounding in buttes and grassy sand- 
hills, lying between Lake Lebarge and Lake Teslin, at 
the head of the Hootahnqua. A party of prospectors 
who wintered on the upper Hootalinqua a year ago 
brought down the river with them the heads of several 
"big horns." .Mr. H. H. Pitts, the storekeeper at the 
Pelly, measured one of those heads and found that the 
horns at the skull had a circumference of i6in. Mr. W. 
Macintosh, Avho is Avintering at the foot of Lake Marsh, 
and who crossed to the Hootalinqua via the Mc- 
Clintock River on a prospecting trip recently, 
told me that the Indians reoorted sheep plenty 
about Teslin Lake. He said they described the 
sheep by making a circular motion Avith their hands 
on both sides of their head, saying: "Horn all the 
same as this." They said the meat was "good mucka 
muck," Avhile goat was "no good." At Lebarge the 
Indians also told me that sheep were plenty ("hai-yu") 
just east of the lake, and they traded some fresh meat pur- 
ported to be mutton, and Avhich certainly tasted dif- 
ferent from the moose and caribou Ave had been getting. 
There are no goats in the immediate neighborhood 
of Lake Lebarge, or, for that matter, on the river beloAV. 
In the interior the mountains are too low, and with the 
glaciers of the coast range the goats seem to disappear. 
At the Pelly the Wood Indians (or Yukon, as 
they prefer to call themselves) had some goat skin 
raucklucks procured in the course of trade from the 
Chilcoot (coast) Indians. Curiously enough, while they 
professed ignorance of the animal, they used the name 
"sheep" to designate it. These mucklucks were made 
from kid skins. Ptarmigan inhabit about the same 
range of country as the goats. I heard of none on the 
main river beloAV Lebarge. Barnes, the constable in 
charge of the Northwest Mounted Police station at the 
foot of the lake, told me that they Avere fairly plenty in 
the immediate neighborhood. Mr. H. P. Curtis killed 
a number at the foot of Lake Marsh, and at Tagish they 
are reputed to be plenty. They are not found in these 
localities in summer, however, and one has then to go 
nearly to the snow line to get them. J. B. Burnham. 
[to be concluded.] 
Camp of Two Cranks. 
"White "Water River, Indiana. 
{Continued from ^age 22-3). 
Next morning we took five catfish from lo to isin. 
long off the set lines, but no turtle, which was a disap- 
pointment, as we wished especially for a turtle to make 
a ste\^' or soup for the Sunday dinner. It may have been 
a little late in the season for turtles — I never studied 
up much on turtles anyhow — and we laid our failure to 
get one to the season^ and it served to pacify our feelings 
as Avell as a better reason might have done. 
However, one of the hooks was straightened out, and 
Tom was sure it was done by a turtle or a "Avhoppin' big 
cat." One circumstance we couldn't account for was 
the evening before we had tied on bright Cincinnati 
bass hooks and now they were every one as black as 
ink. We haven't accounted for it yet. - 
We baited the hooks again and left them out, and took 
off three more catfish when we came in to get dinner. 
After breakfast we went down to the wide water, where 
the old boat lay, to try for the big bass that got away, 
and if Tom got him I had about made up my mind to 
sneak off down the river to town and take the first 
train for home, for if he got that bags there Avould be, 
as Dick Mac would say, "No sich consistency as livin' 
Avith him." I would never hear the last of how he 
caught "old Hickory's big bass." 
When I opened the bucket to get a minnow I found 
old yaller dead and stiff; the two cyclones he had passed 
through the day before had undermined his constitution, 
and he had passed quietly to the "beyant." I hooked 
on another big chub — Ave were after big fish — and both 
of us fished for near an hour, casting up and down along 
the willows and bushes lining the bank, and far but 
into the stream, reeling slowly in at times and casting again 
and again, but it was of no avail; the big one wouldn't 
bite; he had more. than likely sprained his jaw in the 
encounter of the day before and Avas doubtless lying 
somewhere under the bank nursing it and wondering 
what the big chub was loaded Avith. 
The spirit moved me to go prospecting, and 1 mean- 
dered off down the river for a half mile, fishing two or 
three good-looking holes on the way, but I got but one 
bass, and meandered back a^ain to try for "the big 
bass of Riggles' Bend." I sent in my card in the shape 
of a big lively chub, but he AA'as not at home, or was still 
in hiding, and I Avent around to where I had taken the 
darlin', and in a few minutes had another fair-sized bass 
on the stringer. Failing to get another in a half hour's 
fishing, I went on up the path and found Tom sitting 
on his favorite rock at the lower crib, motionless as a 
blue heron, waiting for some giddy minnow or unwary 
frog to stray inside of the "dead line," and Avith an ex- 
pression of patient enjoyment on his face that was good 
to look at. 
Just below him, holding down another rock, was a 
brother of the rod who, as I learned, had come over in 
his buggy from a couple of miles east for a quiet Satur- 
day's fish, and he and Tom had struck up a fishing ac- 
quaintance, as is inevitable in such cases, and Avere of 
course on the A^ery best of terms. I Avas duly presented 
by Tom to "Mr. Park Bradway," and soon gauged him 
as another "way up" crank; a quiet, unassuming, unos- 
tentatious gentleman whose ways and demeanor remind- 
ed me very much of my old comrade Dr. Elliott, of 
Lodi, O. 
I selected another uncushioned rock near by, and we 
sat and talked and fished, and fished and talked till it 
was time to go up to camp and start a fire for dinner. An 
invitation to "jine" was politely declined by Brer B. 
on account of having a lunch with him,, and not wishing 
to intrude on and be a bother to us, as he put it. I Avent 
to camp and started a fire and got the dinner going, 
leaving them discussing the merits of different kinds of 
rods, and waiting for a bite. BradAvay had told us that 
he once took forty-five bass in a half day's fishing right 
at that spot without moving loft., the water was clear,, 
hoAvever, and with this weighing on his mind it took 
several calls to pull Tom from his rock when I had 
dinner about ready, and I belicA'e he would have sat there 
till dark if he hadn't been moved by hunger to come up 
and join me at dinner. 
Tom can sit longer on a rough rock or log without 
abrading the nap on the rear of his corduroys and fish 
Avith more . expectant determination, heedless alike of 
sun or rain or cold, than any disciple of gentle Ike that 
I have ever been out Avith. He's a marvel of patience 
and endurance, and even-tempered in all weathers; some, 
more reasons why I like Tom. 
He set his rod, leaving Bradway to keep an eye on 
it, and came up to camp, and Ave ate dinner and Avent 
back to our fishing; Tom to keep Brer BradAvay com- 
pany and cogitate over those forty-five bass, while I went 
on below to the old boat for another possible interview 
with "the daddy of the pool." I have noticed that there 
is an inexphcable influence that draws old anglers back 
to the place where they have taken or lost a big fish, 
be it bass, trout or maskinonje, and it is of no use to 
try to resist it; I never resist. I didn't get the big one, 
nor any little ones, and after fishing near an hour without 
getting a bite I went back up to the crib to sit a while 
with Tom and Bradway. We put in most of the after- 
noon here, taking seven or eight bass, of which I got 
none, and Tom chuckled some more, "the graceless 
cuss." 
When it was time to go up and make preparations 
for supper. BradAvay Avent along and on up the stream 
to his horse and buggy and for home, promising to come 
back next day and catch the big bass. 
Tom and I got supper, and rebaited the set lines, 
with the sole object in view to catch a turtle; we wanted 
that turtle for a special purpose. The next day (Sun- 
day) was to be our last in camp, and Ave sat late that 
night in front of our last camp-fire and planned for the 
wind-up. 
Our friend Geo. H. Smith, assistant general passenger 
a^^ent of the C, H. & D., had promised that if nothing 
interfered Avith his plans he would come up that night, 
stop at the Commercial, and come up io camp early in 
the morning and spend the day Avith us. We Avanted 
to surprise him with a camR dinner that he could talk 
