Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1899, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JANUARY 2 8, 18 99. ] 
Tkrms, $4 A Year, 10 Cts. a Copy. I 
Six Hontus, $2. j 
VOL. LII.— No. 4. 
No. 346 Broadway, New York. 
The Forest and Stream is the recognized medium of entertain- 
ment, instruction and information between American sportsmen. 
The editors invite communications on the subjects to which its 
pages are devoted. Anonymous communications will not bt re- 
garded. While it is intended to give wide latitude in discussion 
of current topics, the editors are not responsible for the views of 
correspondents. 
Subscriptions may begin at any time. Terms; For single 
copies, |4 per year^ $2 for six months. For club rates and full 
particulars respecting subscriptions, see prospectus on page iv. 
tU forest ana Stream Platform PlanR. 
*'T/ie sale of game should be forbidden at all seasons. 
— Forest and Stream, Feb. 3, 1894. 
There be four tilings which are little upon the 
earthy but they are exceeding wise ; The ants are 
a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat 
in the summer ; the conies are but a feeble folk, 
yet make they their houses in the rocks; the 
locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of 
them by bands; the spider taketh hold with her 
hands, and is in kings' palaces. — Proverbs. 
SNAP SHOTS. 
Here is a suggestion for those who are proposing else- 
where to follow Maine's guide license system. One 
serious defect of the Maine system is that the holder of 
a guide license is not of necessity a good guide. He 
may be, on the contrary, a worthless, incompetent, no- 
account woods loafer, whose foisting of himself upon his 
employer by means of his license, is a rank imposition. 
The holding of a guide's license in Maine is no evidence 
of ability and fitness. Nor, in default of discrimination 
between the competent guides and the incompetents, the 
worthy and the unworthy, can the Maine system more 
than partially effect its declared purpose of controlling 
the hunting through the guide. 
This would be a better way: Make the obtaining of a 
guide license depend upon merit. Let the merit be de- 
termined by adequate examination and by duly prescribed 
giving of evidence. Make the fee for the license merely 
nominal; and let the taking out of a license be wholly 
voluntary. Under these conditions the license would 
mean something; it would be a guarantee of the charac- 
ter of the holder as a guide. Licensed guides would 
then, as a matter of course, be preferred to others. Every 
guide who could pass the required examination and 
demonstrate his fitness, would be eager to take out a 
license. An esprit de corps would be created, which 
would raise the standard. Such a system of voluntary 
license would inevitably advance the interests of all con- 
cerned. We believe that if the Maine guide law should 
be amended in this way the results would be most happy. 
The Connecticut Fish and Game Commissioners re- 
peat this year the suggestion urged in a former report 
that they should be empowered to lease tracts of land for 
State game preserves. We have advocated this very thing 
repeatedly; it is something which ought to be taken up by 
the game commissions of all the States. In these days 
of rapid increase of private game and fish preserves, of 
the acquiring and setting apart for private use of vast areas 
of lands hitherto open to the public, it is high time for 
the community to take steps to secure preserves for its 
own benefit. Such tracts are available at slight cost. To 
set apart wild lands as game refuges is at once the cheap- 
est, simplest, most easily accomplished and most fruitful 
game preserving expedient open to the commonwealth. 
It has been demonstrated time and again, and in widely 
separated sections and under widely diverse conditions, 
and with different varieties of game, that if a tract of land 
is strictly protected against the gun, the depleted supply 
"will speedily increase and multiply and stock the preserve 
and overflow into the adjacent territory. Nature does the 
work, without effort or expense on the part of man. All 
she asks, the one condition she demands, and without 
which her beneficent work may not be accomplished, is 
protection from human interference, freedom to work in 
her own time and in her own way. Most of us can cite 
specific instances of this out of our own knowledge of 
some farm or piece of woodland, where the trespass signs 
have barred the way, and the strict exclusion of shooters 
has given the game a chance to increase, to the ultimate 
improvement or restoration of shooting on all contiguous 
fields; so that the posting of that particular piece, which 
was at first resented, has since come to be recognized as 
a public benefit. In the development of the Yellowstone 
National Park game protective system, with its stocking 
of adjacent regions with big game, we have an example 
on a large scale. The Yellowstone Park game protection 
demonstration ought to be an example to challenge en- 
terprise in the same direction in every State in the Union 
which has any game worth the effort. In the Adiron- 
dacks, for example, instead of permitting tens of thou- 
sands of acres of choice game country to pass into pri- 
vate control for exclusive preserves, the State of New 
York should have held on to what it possessed and have 
acquired much more that it might have come into pos- 
session of,- to hold as perpetual game refuges for the ad- 
vantage of the people for all time. 
The establishment of game refuges is an enterprise 
which may well engage the attention of all vho are in- 
terested in protective work. 
to proceed intelligently in such matters than thus to con- 
sult representatives of fish and game clubs, and get their 
suggestions as to the framing of proposed legislation. 
Commissioner Carleton of Maine figures that the moose 
hunters brought into the State in the year 1897 the sum 
of $125,000; and that the number of deer killed in 1898 
was larger than in 1897, which would mean that in 1898 
the moose hunters left more than $125,000 behind them. 
And yet in the face of this there are people in Maine 
who think that non-residents should be compelled to 
pay roundly for 't-he privilege of coming into the State 
to spend money for moose hunting. 
There is one sentiment which must be reckoned with 
in these non-resident game restrictions. This is the 
feeling engendered by an alien tax, that one is an alien, , 
The payment of his tax, as any Chinaman or Malay 
might be required to pay it at the border, gives one a 
sense of being among foreigners, and not among fellow 
citizens o£ the same common country. It is much like 
going abroad or crossing the line into Canada. Leaving 
the country, one leaves the home feelmg behind. This 
home feeling is as all embracing as the bounds which 
mark the limits of the United States. The native of 
Maine may wander as far away as Texas, the Californian 
may find himself in Missouri, and the Dakotan in New 
Jersey; but go never so far, so long as he shall not cross 
the lines beyond which another Hag flies to the breeze, or 
so long as he shall not run up against a stand and de- 
liver non-resident hunting license tax, he yet may feel 
himself in a way at home, and not an alien. It is this 
expatriation, we are convinced, and not the, exaction of 
the money itself, which is so repugaant to the man of 
fine sensibilities. And as this home feeling is one to be 
cherished and guarded and strengthened, so a community 
should pause and consider well before outraging the 
sentiment by an alien tax. 
The abolition of spring shooting is something we have 
got to come to in this country, and the sooner we get 
there the better. In numerous cases where spring shoot- 
ing has been done away with, the local shooting in the 
fall has improved in such a degree as to demonstrate be- 
yond cavil the sound wisdoin of the principle. We would 
be glad to have the observations of those who may send 
us facts to illustrate the effects of immunity for wild- 
fowl in the spring. 
We print in our angling columns two further letters in 
the correspondence addressed by Mr. Chas. Stewart Davi- 
son, of this city, to the Quebec Department of Lands, Forests 
and Fisheries, respecting the preservation of salmon 
rivers. The annual report of the Department shows an 
earned intention of dealing with the subject in an effect- 
ive way; and it is not too much to say that the labors 
of Mr. Davison in this field entitle him to the gratitude of 
. every person directly or remotely interested in Canadian 
salmon streams. The letters printed to-day, though writ- 
ten some time ago, have but just now been forwarded, in 
connection with a meeting held Jan. 24, in Quebec, for a 
conference of clubs with Commissioner Parent. The 
Commissioner sent out invitations last week to individu- 
als and clubs to meet with him for the purpose of giv- 
ing their views respecting the fish and game laws, and 
any desirable alterations in them. There is certainly no 
betie'r way, as Mr. Davison remarks, for a department 
A recent experience of Hon. J. L. Cleaves, of Wytheville, 
Va., with bursting shotguns is not without its instruc- 
tion. Mr, Cleaves was quail shooting, using a standard 
and reliable make of gun, with ammunition also standard 
and reliable; and both gun and powder safe under 
normal conditions. Two guns in succession burst in 
his hands, the shooter escaping injury as by miracle. 
When the gun makers came to investigate the affair, 
they discovered from the unused shells forwarded to 
them, th^t the charge used by Mr. Cleaves was not at 
all the charge he supposed he was using; and on in- 
quiry it was ascertained that the local dealer from whom 
he had secured his ammunition, having run out of the 
particular nitro powder ordered, had substituted for it 
another powder, a very powerful compound, and had 
put in loads of double the proper amount as prescribed 
by the manufacturers. It was in fact a load which no 
ordinary gun could have withstood. Another shell in the 
lot was found to contain a trifling quantity of the nitro 
oi'dered by Mr. Cleaves, while the rest of the charge 
was made up of a fine grained black rifle powder. The 
dealer who loaded the shells in this way, or permitted 
them to be loaded, was, of course, the responsible agent 
here; he should be held for the value of the guns he 
burst; and had Mr. Cleaves lost his life, the criminal 
negligence of the dealer would have subjected him to a 
charge of manslaughter. 
We print elsewhere a note of Game Protector Beede, of 
Essex county, in the Adirondacks, who seems to think 
that our recent paragraph remarking upon his inefficiency 
as a protector consisted of anonymous statements, which 
were false and malicious, and could not be proven. So 
far from entertaining any malice, we recorded Mr. 
Beede's direlictions with genuine sorrow that one who 
formerly had done such good service should have de- 
generated so lamentably as practically to let protection 
go by the board in his district. It was notorious last 
season that deer hounding was practiced without cessa- 
tion in Essex county. The music of the hounds was 
heard day in and day out. Travelers on the public high- 
way encountered deer hunters driving along the road 
with deer guns in the wagon and deer dogs under the 
wagon. Still-hunters frequently followed their game 
only to have it cut out and driven away from them 
by the hounds of hounding parties. Deer chased 
by hounds raced through vegetable gardens. At some 
sporting resorts the vast majority of deer killed were 
killed by hounding. At some resorts deer were killed 
practically in no other way than by hounding. If there 
had been no law on the subject and no Protector Beede, 
the hounding in some parts of that official's district could 
not have been more open and free than it was, there being 
a law and a Protector Beede. Several of the Essex 
county papers have quoted what we said, but we observe 
that no one of this protector's home papers has ques- 
tioned the accuracy of our statement of the situation. 
The Canadian Fisheries Department has received a 
report from a former employee of the department now 
in Dawson, who reports that the Yukon fish are of great 
value for a food stipply. JFhe species include whitefish, 
buffalo-fish, pike^wd grayling, the whitefish and gray- 
ling being of a superior kind. It is the announced inten- 
tion of the department to provide suitable regulations for 
the fishing, that the supply may not be wiped out. 
An efTort is making to change the sessions of the New 
York Legislature from annual to biennial. For one 
thing the change would be of decided advantage with 
respect to the game laws. As it is now, the public can 
hardly learn what the law is at any given time before 
it has been tinkered again into something quite different; 
whereas, if there were two entire years between changes, 
people might indulge -in some Confidence that they knew 
what the law was. 
The open door may be a good policy for China and the 
Philippines, but it is a short-sighted system for Eastern 
markets for Western game. The corked-up-tight policy 
would be better. Washington, New York and Boston 
should be closed ports for Minnesota venison. 
