508 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[June 25, 1898. 
Early Days in the West, 
Denver, Colo., June 3. — Editor Forest and Stream: 
First, I want to congratulate the Forest and Stream 
most sincerelj^ upon its first quarter century of history, 
creditable to it in every way and at all times. I have 
read it from the beginning, and can say conscientiously 
that it has always pursued an even course and a dignified 
tone, above criticism. Next, I congratulate the editors 
upon the able and consistent management they have 
given it for these many years. The journal has been a 
power in the land in its field, and its influence grows 
from year to year. 
As you remind me, I have seen the growth of this 
western half of the 
United States for a long 
period; almost from the be- 
ginning of its civilization. I 
have seen the red man go 
and the white man come, 
and I have noted the de- 
cimation of many varie- 
ties of wild game, and the ■ 
great reduction of all ^..^ 
others. It seems almost 
like a dream. I was first in 
Chicago in 1850, when its 
sanguine people claimed a 
population that was vari- 
ously estimated by them at 
from twenty to twenty-five 
thousand. In the winter of 
that' year I went hunting to 
the "Big Timber," as it was 
then called, upon the upper 
waters of Iowa River, in 
Iowa. About twenty or 
twentjf-five miles above 
Iowa City was a little town 
of log cabins named Mar- 
engo, and this was the 
frontier settlement, except .-; 
about half a dozen families 
who had pushed on twenty- 
five or thirty miles further 
to the beginning of the 
"Big Timber," where they 
had built cabins and started 
a settlement. This had been 
the country of the Musqua- ■ 
ka Indians, who had been 
removed the year before, 
rather against their will, by 
the Government, to the In- 
dian Ter.-itory, and set down 
somewhere in what is now 
either Nebraska or Kansas. 
They spent the winter west of the Missouri River, but 
did not like it, and in the spring of 1850 returned to 
their old stamping ground, and announced their inten- 
tion to hold it. The few settlers were so terrified that 
they "forted up" in a couple of block houses and lost 
their summer's crop. Before the next snow the In- 
dians were removed again, with an escort of blue- 
coats, and they came back no more except as stragglers 
to mourn over unforgotten graves and sell moccasins. 
We were visitors to a conquered country, and among 
old-fashioned pioneers 
who knew nothing of 
luxuries, and lived main- 
ly ofif the natural re- 
sources of the neighbor- 
hood. The city of Mar- 
shalltown now occupies 
the site of that early set- 
tlement. Marshall was 
one of the settlers, and 
he and the writer claim- 
ed a distant relationship. 
The country was full of 
game, but we struck it at 
a bad time; got caught 
in a spring thaw and 
with flooded streams, and 
finally had a man badly 
hurt in crossing the river 
on an ice jam, and left 
for home on the Missis- 
sippi River. We violated 
no game law and have no 
big story to tell. 
The next fall I again 
headed for the West with 
an outfit to engage in the 
survey of public lands in 
western Iowa. Fort Des 
Moines was then the 
frontier, though two 
town sites, Indianola and 
Winterset, still further 
west, were marked by a 
few log cabins. After 
passing them there were 
two settlers, Allcorn on 
ThreeRiversand 
Hedges on Indian Creek 
(at an old Indian town), 
and then there were no 
more until we reached j.v,o 
the vicinity of the Missouri River, where was then the 
great headquarters of the Mormon Church. After leav- 
ing the Des Moines settlements we traveled through a 
country plentifully supplied with game— deer, turkeys 
and prairie chickens. We had a young man with us 
who had never seen a wild deer, and he was very 
much excited in anticipation of that event. We also 
had a rifle, and he took much pleasure m handling and 
caring for the gun, and speculating upon how he would 
kill game. When the first bunch of deer was sighted 
near the trail, he happened to be standing up m the 
wagon with the gun in hand, at "order arms. When 
his attention was directed to them he gazed a moment, 
then stooped and carefully laid the gun in the bottom of 
the wagon and began climbing out. Some one asked: 
•'What are you going to 4o?" He answerecl; Im 
going up close to get a good look at them." I never 
have seen that man since the close of that season's 
work, but two or three months ago I received a letter 
from him asking me to arrange a meeting some time 
this summer or fall at the Trans-Mississippi Exposi- 
tion at Omaha. 
The heart of the Mormon settlement at- that time 
was Kanesville (named for a brother of Dr. Kane, of 
Arctic fame), now the city of Council Bluff Sj Iowa. 
When the Mormons were driven from Nauvoo, 111., in 
the winter of 1845, they wandered across Iowa by many 
routes, living mainly upon such food as the country af- 
forded. One article that entered largely into their diet 
was slippery elm bark. For many years their trails 
The Old West. 
THE BUFFALO, CHASE. 
By Edward Kemeys. 
could be followed by the dead elm trees from which 
the bark had been stripped as high as men could reach. 
They reached and crossed the Missouri River, and built 
a great camp of log cabins and called it "Winter Quar- 
ters." The next spring they plowed up the broad 
plateau of second bottom land from where the heart of 
the city of Omaha now stands for six miles north to 
their Winter Quarters, and planted it to corn. The 
Trans-Mississippi Exposition buildings now occu- 
py the very heart of that great cornfield of fifty-two 
RECLINING BUFFALO. 
Clay Sketch by Edward Kemeys. 
years ago. Then the Indians complained to the "Great' 
Father" that white men were encroaching upon the 
Indians' land, plowing it up, cutting their timber, and 
killing of driving their game away. Government 
placated the Indians by a promise that the Morrnons 
should remove before another summer, and pacified 
the Mormons by offering them the free use of land on 
the east side of the river for five years. When winter 
came, on they did move, hauled their cabins bodily 
across the river on the ice, and strung them along the 
banks of Lousy Creek, where it emerges from the hills 
and flows out across the Missouri River bottom to that 
stream. And that is the city of Council Bluffs to-day. 
The actual and original "Council Bluff" of Lewis and 
Clarke, where they held council with the Indians in 
1804-5, was twenty milf5 «p the x'mt, Wm, N. Bysr§, 
Anniversary days cause us to look backward, 
and often with regret. It is human to be blind 
to the good things of to-day, and to long for 
the vanished joys of days gone by. In America 
the period covered by the lifetime of Forest and 
Stream is a long one, in the sense of that it 
shows a multitude of changes. Ours is a century 
of rapid development, a time of swift transformations 
and progress, and nowhere do the scenes shift more 
rapidly, nowhere do events follow each other in quicker 
succession than in America. And of all America what 
portion has moved fastest during these twenty-five 
years? The West. 
It is well to pause a little 
and to think what has hap- 
pened in civilization since 
Forest and Stream began. 
Some of the conveniences 
of life that are now most 
common, most necessary — 
since we have become ac- 
customed to them — were un- 
known then. Commercially 
a knowledge of electricity 
had not advanced beyond 
the use of the telegraph. 
There were no electric 
lights, no electric railroads, 
no telephones. Cable lines 
had not been invented, the 
half-tone process of illustra- 
tion was unknown. 
In the West there was 
already a transcontinental 
railroad, a single line, 
stretching like the thread 
of a spider's web from ocean 
, . to ocean, but it supported 
no adjacent population. For 
all its length it touched but 
one considerable commu- 
nity, whose people it could 
transport. As you rode 
along on it you could often 
see from the car windows 
deer, antelope, elk and 
sometimes buffalo. 
• " '"I.,. While that railroad was 
being built the hands em- 
ployed in its construction 
were fed very largely on 
wild meat, and professional 
hunters took contracts to 
supply such meat in quan- 
tities at $2 per loolbs., and 
did supply it. Nevertheless, while twenty-five years ago 
game was often seen from the car window, the best hunt- 
ing was of course not along the railroad track. Yet in 
very many places by going twenty-five or thirty miles 
north or south from the line of the road, game might 
be killed — and often was killed — literally by the carload, 
and was often hauled to the railroad and shipped to such 
Eastern markets as Omaha, St. Louis, and Chicago, 
while many of the settlers, as regularly as _ the cold 
weather of late autumn came around, made trips to the 
game country to load up 
their wagons with meat 
for the winter's use. 
In those days there 
were buffalo, and these 
great beasts with black 
beards and crooked horns 
were still found within a 
day's ride of the Platte 
River. At this time the 
skin hunters had just be- 
gun to realize that in the 
buffalo they had a bonanza 
of small proportions, and 
they slaughtered them 
with so much energy that 
they lasted in that country 
only a couple of years 
longer. They butchered 
them in most systematic 
fashion, and ended up by 
surrounding all the wa- 
ter in the country and kil- 
ling all the buffalo as 
they came to it. The his- 
tory of the butchery 
which took place at that 
time in the southern 
country and nearly ten 
years later in the north 
has been well told by- 
Dr. Allen, as well as by 
a number of other writ- 
ers. 
In those days the man 
who was traveling often 
carried no provisions 
with him. When he 
camped at night he rode 
out and killed a heifer 
and the next day carried 
on with him the choice 
parts of the animal, which would last him for two or three 
days. In those days too the buffalo robe constituted the 
almost universal bed of the plains traveler and his winter 
overgarment. A good robe, Indian tanned, could be 
bought for $3 or $4. I paid $7 once for one that was 
really a silk robe. 
Nebraska was a new State then, thinly settled in the 
east and not settled at all in the Avestern and northern 
parts. Omaha was a good-sized country town. In the 
summer of 1873, just about at the time the Forest and 
Stream was started, I killed elk in Nebraska only a 
little more than 100 miles west of Omaha. Here where 
there were elk there were also mule deer, whitetail deer 
and a few antelope, though the antelope and the mule 
deer were somewhat more abundant further to the west 
and north, in the high sand hills of the Loup Fork 
