FOREST AND STREAM. 
[June 25, 1898. 
' Reminiscences* 
Charlestown, N. H. — Editor Forest and Stream: The 
announcement that the forthcoming number of Forest 
AND Stream, for June 25, would complete its fiftieth 
volume^ and in some sense be a "Jubilee Number," car- 
ries me back to the day when I first saw it, and wel- 
comed its appearance, as a worthy successor to my old 
loA'e, the old Spirit of the Times, which had been wrecked 
in the great crash of the Civil War. The old Spirit at its 
prime depended largely on Southern contributors and 
subscriptions, and as these dropped off the paper sus- 
pended, but my thoughts return to those days, half a 
century ago, when I depended on its weekly arrival as 
much as I now do on that of Forest and Stream. 
I alwaj'S dropped into the old office in Barclay street 
when in New York in those days, and had a chat with 
the editor, Wm. T. Porter, the "'tall son of York," genial 
John Richards, the publisher, and Dick Hayes, the ever 
active factotum of the office, and as Porter and myself 
were both natives of the Upper Connecticut Valley we 
soon fratei^nized most cordially. I well remember going 
with him one day to eat "broiled oysters at Windust's 
old restaurant, at the corner of Ann street, overlooking 
the park, and making the acquaintance of Horace Greeley, 
who was there on the same errand. There were almost 
always some of the old contributors in at the office about 
rtoon, and in those days an adjournment to Frank Mon- 
teverde's, next door, for a cocktail, at that time was 
alwa3's in order. Those were rather Bohemian days, 
which luckily have changed for the better, and the spirit 
flask is no longer a necessary companion of the powder 
flask in a sportsman's outfit. It is long since I became 
a believer in the creed of Kingfisher, and trusted to a 
rubber drinking cup and the coldest spring 1 could find 
for refreshment on my tramps. 
But to return to the Spirit office. There I often met 
Frank Forester, Phil Anthon, Wm. P. Hawes (J. 
■Cypress, Jr.), and occasionally Albert Pike, the great 
Southern poet and Free Mason, when he was in the 
city. I may call him great justly, for he was so physi- 
cally as well as mentally; full as tall as either Porter or 
myself, he far outweighed either of us, and his imposing 
presence was never to be forgotten. There were many 
others, whose names after fifty years have faded from 
my memory, but the "old Spirit crowd" was a jolly one, 
and I was proud to be a junior member of it. 
Herbert was not much of a fisherman, though he after- 
ward wrote a book on fishes and fishing, but he was an 
authority on dog and gun and feathered game, and I well 
remember the deli eht with which I read his "Warwick 
Woodlands" long before I ever saw him. 
The old Spirit covered a wide field; it took in the 
turf and the stage as well as the rod and gun, and filled 
the place in those days now occupied by Forest and 
Stream and I know not how many more. Its dramatic 
criticisms were especially good, and its Boston corre- 
spondent Acorn was a recognized authority on stage 
matters. 
It had other good Boston correspondents; Tom Bat- 
telle (Corinthian Tom), the brothers Durivage (the Old 
'un and the Young 'un), a sketch by one of whom. "The 
Fastest Funeral on Record," describing the spurt of 
speed made by an old race horse, who had descended to 
drawing a hearse, on the way to Mt. Auburn, when ex- 
cited by the attempted passage of a fast trotter, would 
excite the risible muscles to-day if it could be reprinted. 
Some of the Southern corixspondence was very bril- 
liant. The story of Bob Herring and the Big Bear of 
• Ark^.nsas would outlay any of Brother Hough's ex- 
periences with Capt. Bobo, and another sketch, "How 
we Ride and Shoot in South Carolina," still lingers 
in my memory. 
But enough of the old Spirit, for few of your readers 
will recall it, and Forest and Stream, though less wide 
in its scope, covers its own ground far more thoroughly. 
1 have spoken of this as a Jubilee Ntimber; it may be 
considered as marking the golden wedding of science 
arid sport! The fifty volumes which this concludes are 
replete with valuable information, zoological, ichthyologi- 
cal and biological, and a treasure of delight in their de- 
scriptions of excursions by field and flood, during which 
all this knowledge was gathered and accumulated. 
Since the days of which I have written the Adiron- 
dacks have been explored and opened to the sportsman, 
for all we then knew of them was the waters of Fulton 
and Hamilton counties and Piseco and Schroon lakes. 
We had some of us been a short distance into Maine, and 
knew of the "Sebago trout," now the landlocked salmon, 
and that there was good fishing somewhere about Ban- 
gor, but of the salmon fishing in the British Provinces, 
or the wealth of the Great West in both fish and game, 
we had no conception, and our experiences of both 
■were gained this side of the Mississippi, if not of the 
Alleghanies. 
My thoughts go back a dozen or more years further 
to the days when I caught my first trout, and shot my 
first gray squirrel, the latter with an old-fashioned, small 
bore, muzzle-loading rifle, carrying a ball of about 
eighty to the pound, which was the way we counted 
gauges in those days. 
I may have told the readers of Forest and Stream 
of that first trout before, and how, like old Christopher 
North on a similar occasion, I ran home with him, en- 
raptured with his beauty, to show my prize without ever 
waiting for another! That was a long, long time ago, 
for I was a very small boy, in ja.cket and trousers which 
buttoned together at the waist; but how well I remember 
it all! How when I went into the alder swamp, which 
then lay back of my father's house, to cut a pole, I lost 
a brand new green fish line, for which I had just paid 
5 cents at the village store, and how my mother made 
up the loss by a ball of strong "piping cord" from her 
capacious work basket. My father had showed me how 
to braid a strong snell out of black sewing silk, which 
made a very good substitute for gut, then unknown to 
the country boys, and how I sallied forth to the mill 
pond and cast into the little brook under the bridge 
where it crossed the road, with the result above noted, 
and how that afternoon a young man, who was studying 
medicine with my father, went back to the brook with 
me and gave me a lesson. 
Then I annually extended my range of excursions. 
For the first three or four years I would start from home 
with my fish line in one pocket and my bait box in the 
other, cut the best pole I could find on my way to the 
brook, and throw it away when I got done, and string 
the fish on the most convenient willow crotch I could 
find when I caught the first one. After a while an uncle 
of mine gave me a slender bamboo tip, about gft. long, 
and to this I lashed rings and extemporized a reel o\it 
of a big thread spool, to which I fitted a crank handle 
and mounted it on a wire pin, for which I drilled a hole 
in the butt of the rod. This served amply for my pur- 
pose — to wind up my line short, to poke it under an 
overhanging busli or let it out for a deep hole, or to 
cast across a wide reach to the opposite bank. For my 
first creel I fitted a cover, cut from a broad shingle, to 
an old work basket of one of my aunts, and adorned it 
with pen and ink drawings of trout. 
It was a somewhat crude rig, but I caught hundreds 
of trout with it, and gave it away to an old playmate 
when I left home at the age of seventeen to seek fame 
and fortune, the last of which at l?.ast I never found. 
When I went home again on my first vacation I was 
the happy possessor of a rod, an English trunk rod 
in five joints, which J picked up at a bargain in a variety 
store, and which did yeoman's service for many years. 
I had bought a regular creel too, and was fully fitted out. 
Some time after I began, an older friend brought me 
from Boston a hank of gut and two or three dozen Lim- 
erick hooks, Avhich I soon learned to tie properljr, and 
since then I have tied all my own hooks if possible, for 
I have lost too many good trout by the hooks slipping 
from the gut when I had bought them ready tied at 
some cheap tackle store. I lost three that way one after- 
noon when last up north from some hooks I had picked 
up at a store in Colebrook, having run short. 
I also cleave to the Limerick hook yet, despite my 
friend Mather. I do not. like those long-shanked, slen- 
der, crooked hooks. The real Limerick is stronger in 
the bend, the barb is long, and the point projects a 
little from the line of pull, and after sixty years' ex- 
perience I find nothing better, though I am well sat- 
isfied with the sproat. When my old trunk rod gave 
out finally, after using up half a dozen tips, I bought 
a long, slender bamboo and had a country gunsmith 
joint it for me in 4ft. lengths, of which I used three for 
trout and four for pickerel and other river fish. I still 
keep this and use it for bass occasionally, but I have 
had a looz. split-bamboo for more than twenty years 
now, which has "killed its thousands," and is good 
yet. I have also a 6j4oz. rod, which is as light as I want. 
The reminiscent mood sent me May 2 of this year (May 
I being Sunday) to the spot where I caught that first 
trout, but not a bite did I get (trout never nibble!), and 
the brooks were too full of cold water. May 13 I went 
again, caught one trout 7in. long and lost one by the 
hook, which had been tied at least three years, slipping 
from the gut! It was not one of my tjdng though! That 
one trout would just about have mated that first one 
I ever caught, more than sixty years before, but I did not 
come home in quite such an exalted condition. 
Plowever, I was not disheartened, and the next morn- 
ing, being somewhat warmer, I decided to try a little 
brook within a quarter of a mile of the village, which is 
fed entirely by springs from the base of the hills, and on 
which Livingston Stone once had his well-known Cold 
Spring trout ponds. 
After my usual after-breakfast visit to the post-office 
I slipped on my shooting jacket and boots and started 
for the springs, not a rifle shot from the sheet to fish 
down. The first three pastures showed no signs of a 
fish, and it was not till I got down on the meadow level 
that I had a bite. The first trout proved about 6in. 
long, but I put him in my basket for luck and went on. 
Just as I came to the meadow road, by which the fields 
are reached for farm purposes, I had a more vigorous 
bite, and my hook came back to me pretty well stripped 
of hait (the brook was barely 3ft. wide, and no room to 
cast a fly). I rebaited, and dropping on my knees cast 
again in the same place, and was rewarded by a pin. 
trout; another cast met a still stronger response, and 
my rod bent as I swun.g a trout a foot long and very fat 
and heavy, weighing nearly a pound, over my head on 
to green grass of the meadow. I. was so utterly surprised 
that I yanked him out as if he had been a fingerling. 
No such trout had been seen in that region since the 
day of Stone's breeding ponds. A third cast followed 
with no bite perceptible, but on lifting my line from 
the water I drew up another one 8 or gin. long, just out 
of water, when he dropped off on the bank and was 
back in the brook before I could reach him. The next 
meadow gave me two more of the I2in. fallows, and 
the third one two more still, so that when I got to the 
next boundary, just as the noon mail train was whistling 
for its entrance to the village, I had five trout, each a 
foot long, and weighing nearly a pound, one of pin., or 
a quarter pound, and four vi 6m. each, and I turned 
home to dinner. 
I had all the t-rout I wanted, and gave away part of 
them to my neighbors. Where those big fellows came 
from in that little brook is a mystery. No such trout 
were ever caught there before in the memory of the 
present generation. 
I think they came up from the Connecticut River, 
tempted by the heavy rain of Thursday and Thursday 
night, to explore this cold , brook in search of food, 
and that, like Nessmuk, "I met them on the June rise." 
I fear my reminiscences have taken too personal a 
turn to be interesting; let us return to our subject. 
While Forest and Stream has taken a position and 
maintained a character, never before attained by any 
periodical devoted to field sports, may it not be assumed 
that it has because it has been true to its name and con- 
fined itself to the recreations found in the woods and 
waters, leaving the drama and the turf to find other ex- 
ponents? 
Nor should the contributors who have aided in making 
it what it is be omitted. As we look back down the vista 
of years we recall with sad, yet pleasant, memories the 
names of Nessmuk, Ned Buntline. Ufford, AVells, O. O. 
Smith, and many more, who have filled its columns 
with delightful experiences, and we find others who are 
still adding to our pleasure. To the founder, Charles 
Hallock; to Awahsoose, Antler, Piseco, and Aztec; to 
Kelpie and Kingfisher; to Comancho and Shoshone; to 
Fred Mather and A. N. Cheney; to S. H. Greene and A. 
B. Wingfield; to Podgers and Special; to the gorgeous 
and effen'^escent Starbuck, and the irrepressible and in- 
domitable Hough; with the hope that all may long find 
in the actual delights of Forest and Stream the 
pleasures of which they give us the reflections in its 
printed columns, I send the greetings of their brother 
angler, Von W. 
The Record of ^Torest and Stream/' 
The record of any journal which has passed the fifty 
volume mark in its history, of which so many good 
things can be said as may be truthfully said of dear old 
Forest and Stream, is one to be very proud of. It is 
not given to very many journals to enjoy this distinction, 
hence it is that to-day every contributor to its columns, 
every subscriber upon its mailing list, all those who have 
in any way or measure assisted in this work, and especi- 
ally those who have stood with the enterprise from the 
first days of its existence, feel a personal pride and ex- 
ultation in the successful completion of this record. 
Since the days when Charles Hallock and his co-laborers 
began the task of a practical demonstration of the 
soundness of their belief that a pure, dignified, honest, 
high-toned and withal readable paper, devoted to the 
best interests of field sports, natural history, aquatic pur- 
suits; to the dispelling of prejudice and the destruction of 
crookedness, rowdyism and illegal practices; to the bet- 
terment of their fellow men, could and would be sus- 
tained, its course and varying success has been watched 
by its friends, sometimes with solicitude, but always with 
pride, and strengthened by words of encouragement. 
jJuring all these years I have been an interested weekly 
reader of its pages, and enjoying the appreciated distinc- 
tion of being a frequent contributor to its columns, I 
have in a special corner of my abode, and it requires a 
liberal allowance of space at that, piles on piles of these 
papers. Not a complete file, I most deeply regret to 
add, but many hundred copies that are like old friends. 
I doubt, if I had now the whole of the fifty volumes 
bound and set up in formal and impasmg array in my 
library, that 1 should take the same comfort and pleasure 
in them. They would not be the same as the old copies 
that I have read and often marked — sometimes clipped 
from — not the old familiar friends that have been coming 
weekly for so many years. 
The conviction has forced itself upon my mind, as it 
has upon hundreds of others, who, like myself, have 
followed its course in the courageous ireatnient of all- 
topics coming up within its domain, that it has been a 
mighty factor in the moulding of public sentiment, in 
the elevation of field sports, in the inauguration and up- 
holding of all movements for the punishment of illegal 
practices. But it is not to be supposed that its senti- 
ments have always pleased even its friends. No man 
that has ever been known on earth has succeeded in 
pleasing everybody. It remains for the future to produce 
that rara avis. Tastes differ. Prejudices exist. Opin- 
ions are widely various on every subject. In many thmg.s 
there is no standard, and just what constitutes perfec- 
tion in a particular object may be an open question.. It 
is said of Lincoln that upon being asked what he thought 
should be the proportionate length of a man's legs, he 
rephed: 
"Without giving the matter any thought, I should say 
a man's legs should be just about as long as necessary to 
reach from his body to the ground." 
Thomas Jefferson said that it was as undesirable that 
men should all think alike as that they should all look 
alike, and on that point, if any, we arc pretty nearly 
agreed. One cannot help thinking what a horribly 
monotonous state of things would exist if there was not 
an occasional dispute over what constitutes the differ- 
ence between a large and a small-mouth bass, and what 
the most successful lure wherewith to enveigle him from 
the crystal depths; or what was the weight of the big 
fish that got away; or the kind of ammunition that is 
best for a certain purpose; or the particular make of gun 
that is infallible. Life would indeed be "stale, flat and un- 
profitable." So we are content when the views of our 
favorite paper differ from our views, as we know the 
difference is. anyhow, an honest one, and we immediately 
sit down with the most trenchant of pens, the most de- 
cided of black inks, and most killing of arguments, to 
prove to our dear Mr. Editor that he is dead wrong on 
every one of his points. 
But to return. What a wonderful community of inter- 
est and feeling of comradeship exists between the con- 
tributor and reader! As a good example of this, a fel- 
low sportsman said to be a day or two ago when talk- 
ing about the Forest and Stream: "I actually feel that 
I could take any of those writers by the hand with as 
cordial a grasp as though I had known them personally 
all my life." That I think conveys the highest compli- 
ment to the writer's best gift in any domain of literature 
— perfect naturalness. 
Yes, the position which Forest and Stream occupies 
to-daj% after rounding out its fifty volumes of entertain- 
ment, education and usefulness, is a proud one: it has 
contributed to that new gospel of orthodoxy which is so 
clearly, naturally and truthfully spoken ot by Rev. Dr. 
Henry Van Dyke in the following words: 
There is such a thing as taking ourselves and the Woria' too 
seriously, or at any rate too anxiously. Half of the secular unrest 
and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the 
vain idea that every man is bound to be a cntic of life, and to 
let no day pass without finding some fault with the general order 
of things, or projecting some plan for its improvement. 
And the other half comes from the greedy notion that a man's 
life doesn't consist after _all in the abundance of the things he 
possesseth, and that it is somehow or other more respectable and 
pious to be always at work making a larger living, than it is 
to lie on your back in the green pastures and beside the still 
waters, and thanlc God that you are alive. 
That covers the ground, I think, and having done it, I 
will simply say, let the anniversaries come, and may each 
successive one bring a still greater measure of success. 
John M. Bulkley (Keuka). 
Detroit, June, 1898. 
Sportswomanship. 
"To take no unfair advantage of any living thing is 
a good code for the sportsman of to-day." — Forest and 
Stream. 
This theory does not apply to sportswomen when the 
gam.e is man. — New York Sun. 
