10 B 
I^OREST AND STREAM. 
fell out 0f th& tree bodily in bis haste and astonish- 
ment, and left, nor stood upon the order of his going. 
Andrew Price. 
MarliKt-OS, W. Va. 
** Them Berries/^ 
A letter from a correspondent in Rensselaer, N. Y., 
who does not wish his name given, says: "About 
them red berries with a hole in there ends that you 
wrote a piece about I can tell you is juniper ber- 
ries cause they grow on juniper bushes but I allers 
heerd they was pizon to eat but was good to make 
gin with. Theys not many now about the harrow- 
gate SJjritrg as all the brush has been cleared off 
and theys a "brick-yard there, but some of them ber- 
ries is still found' down in Teller's woods and up 
back of the Denison Farm. I aint seen none for oyer 
twenty year but they must be there. Charley Melius 
showed me your piece and I remembered you when I 
was a little boy and you gave me a fish line and a lot 
of bait when I had fell off the dock and lost mine. If 
I can find some of them berries next year will send 
some." 
Here is a case of tilings cast upon the water and 
returning after many days. There is no recollection of 
the donation of a fish line and a stock of worms some 
fifty years ago, still it might have happened, and then 
passed into that oblivion where most of the things we 
did in the past have gone. Our memories are so crovyded 
with events of the past that they overflow, and at middle 
age much is lost. What remains is a melange of sense 
and nonsense. Of a schoolmate who is now a learned 
judge, his name always recalls his boyish remark, "It's 
too bad that we've got to take of? our clothes at night 
and put them on in the morning." As a boy I thought 
this funny; to-day it indicates the philosopher in em- 
biyo. My grandfather died at ninety-eight years old, and 
longed for death to come, so that he would not have to 
put on his shoes in the morning; that was all that life 
meant to him. But as usual I've run off the rtack. 
The juniper berry is not a soft berry; it is not red, 
but has a bluish cast. I know it well. It is round and 
smaller than the berry that I wrote of, and is not edible. 
That it is used to give gin its peculiar llavor is almost 
too well known to refer to, and my old friend A. R. 
Fuller, who kept the" Meacham Lake House, in the north- 
ern part of the Adirondacks, told of an old duffer who 
went to a druggist in Malone and said: 'T want to get 
.some juniper berries to make my gin a little more 
ginnj'." This is a hint to those who like the flavor of 
the juniper. But the "cedar berries" of my boyhood 
were not juniper berries, no man could eat the hard 
things, while my berries were soft, crimson, pulpy and 
sweet. 
Here is something near the solution; Mr. John Preston 
True writes from Boston as follows: "In the woods 
about one and one-half miles south of the village of 
Bethel, Maine (Oxford county), will be found a low 
shrub, squat, like a small hemlock, without a top, which 
a fat bear— or an editor— has sat on. The foliage is hem- 
locky, on the end of the twigs are salmon-colored berries 
just as you describe them in Forest and Stream, with 
the stone exposed. As I recall them, however, the 
berries are much smaller than your quotation— say two- 
thirds smaller. We boys called it ground hemlock; im- 
agined it to be the Indian poison, and shunned it accord- 
ingly. As you are still flourishing, it is clear we were 
wrong. How do they taste?" 
Dr. H. H. Montgomery, Pitcairn, Pa„ sets me right on 
the service berry, which as the ''shad blow" has been 
before my eyes since boyhood, but I hope to be ding- 
.swizzled if I ever saw any berries on it. He says: 
"Your letter In Forest and Stream of Jan. 21, in which 
you ask 'but what is the service berry?' carries me back 
more years than I care to count to my boyhood days, 
when from the city I went out to the old homestead on 
the banks of Crooked Creek to spend my vacation. 1 
happened to be there once in the early spring, and on the 
hills which line both banks of the stream were every here 
and there a tree, some hardly more than a small sapling, 
Others 30 to 40ft. or more in height, and ift. perhaps m 
diameter, and all literally covered with white blossoms, 
standing out conspicuously among all the other forest 
trees upon which the leaves had scarcely began to 
shoot. ^ , 1 T 1 
"Then I have been there in late June and early July, 
and the white blossomed trees would be covered with a 
red or purplish red berry about the size of a large cur- 
rant or small cherry. Those berries. Colonel, were and 
are the service berry vou are in doubt about, commonly 
called the June berry— the Amelanchier canadensis of 
Torrey and Gray, and the Pynis botryapium of Linnaeus. 
"For twenty-five years there has not come one spring 
that 1 have not longed for a mess or twenty messes of 
June berries or 'sarvis berries,' as they were otten 
called, and some of these rare June days— may be this 
vear, may be next year- I am going back to the banks 
of old Crooked Creek. I am going to clmib the bifgest 
sarvis berry tree I can find, and I am going to fill my 
tank with a berry before which the raspberry or straw- 
berry or almost any old berry fades into insignificance 
and then T am going to slide gracefully down the tree ^d 
go down below to a 'fishing hole' I know of to a riffle. 
There I will catch some crabs, and with their tails bait a 
hook, a good big hook, tied to a good stout seagrass 
hne, and the line fastened to a long cane pole, and i am 
croing to catch some Uss in the hole, five great big whop- 
pers, and one of them is going to get away from me 
after jag°-ing me with his dorsal spine, meanwhile al- 
most breaking my heart for fear he will get away. , 
"Then I am going to eat a lot more berries and he 
down in the shade of a big rock I know .of and try to 
imagine I am only twelve years old and t^at this is one 
day when I did eat the berries and did catch the fish al- 
mast as long as my arm, and didn't want a thing more 
in this wide world except more berries and the fish that 
^°"Nmvy' Colonel, I thought that a man who knows so 
much about so many things ought by rights to know 
'service berries' also, and that is my excuse. _ 
No excuse needed. Doctor. I asked for information 
and it came. It comes again further on, but this^ note re- 
calls a nursery rhyme about a fellow who was born m 
Se woods and scared by an owl." So much for com- 
mon names; if we boys had once found the berry we 
would have called it "shad berry," as we only knew the 
tree as the "shad blow," coming with the first shad, but 1 
want to. be kicked, I feel contempt for myself. And, be- 
fore this, to me unknown berry, "the raspberry or straw- 
berry or almost any old berry fades into insignificance." 
I cry "peccavi," having gone through the woods thinking 
my eyes and ears, were wide open. I saw but never heard 
the shad blow. 
As a scholarly angler, Dr. Montgomery has met Izaak 
Walton's quotation from Dr. Bottlier, who said: 
"Doubtless God could have made a better berry than 
the strawberry, but doubtless God never did." Next 
summer, when he gorges upon his beloved "sarvis" 
berry, I hope he will bear the quotation in mind. 
This berry question will stir up others to write about 
it. While others tell what the service berry is, none 
mention its edible qualities except Dr. Montgomery, 
Avhose enthusiasm in placing it above all other berries 
puts it in a new light. Let us cultivate them, put them 
on the market, as has been done with other berries. Fifty 
years ago there were no cultivated berries, our limited 
supply was from pickers of wild fruit. With the ex- 
ception of the huckleberry, there are no wild berries 
that come to New York. If not "chained to business" 
next June, I will look for the "service berry" and eat it 
with the notes of Dr. Montgomery singing a thrush- 
like melody as they glide down my oesophagus. 
As a full and complete answer to my many descrip- 
tions of berries, from the "cedar berry" of boyhood, 
which has never been met since, to an exhaustive 
treatise on that and others which I imagine might be 
the "service berry," the folloAving from my comrade, 
Frank Robinson, late U. S. N., now of Philadelphia, is so 
complete and exhaustive that I give it in full. 
"Col. Fred Mather: With some hesitation I attempt 
to answer your question propounded in the issue Jan. 21 
of Forest and Stream, thinking that you would be 
flooded with answers, any one of which would fill the 
bill. And then, if every one who knew thought the 
same, you would not be enlightened. I am influenced 
also by the fact that your experience in regard to two 
of the berries is very like my own. 
"The bush that you describe as growing in a ravine 
near Greenbush, that bore berries that John Atwood . 
called 'cedar berries,' is Ta.vus canadensis, American 
yew — ^popular name, ground hemlock — and is a variety of 
the European yew, Taxtis baccata. Your description of 
the berry is excellent, as I remember it, for I have not 
seen it since I was a boy in Maine, and I am now over 
sixty-two years of age. I have never found over two 
or three individual specimens of it, and have been roam- 
ing the woods with my eyes open all my life when op- 
portunity offered. The difference in manner of growth 
between the European, Irish and the American yews is 
very striking ; the two former growing upright, one with 
a thick trunk, the other, the Irish, making a narrow 
column; while the American variety grows low and 
spreading, the bush itself being somewhat cup-shaped 
and depressed in the center like the berry. It was com- 
mon report among us boys that the berries were poison- 
ous, and I never tasted them until one day, when watch- 
ing the movements of a red squirrel, I saw him go into 
the bush and eat the berries, which exploded the ques- 
tion of any poisonous properties, and thereafter I ate 
them. The Botanies do not describe it as rarfe, still, like 
vou, I have found it so. .... 
"In regard to the other berries mentioned in the article, 
I think I can set you right. The common and popular 
names of plants and berries are just as confusing as 
those of fish and animals, the same name being applied to 
widely different things in different localities, sometimes 
not very far remote either, and the only remedy is the 
one you have frequently insisted on in regard to fish, and 
that is to learn the scientific name and call it by that, and 
educated people will know what is referred to, and others 
will in time pick up something of it. 
"Referring to the wintergreen berry, also known as 
checkerberry, teaberry, boxberry and ivory plum, the last 
probably from the ivory whiteness of its substance, the 
botanical name is Gaultheria procumbens, named for a 
Dr. Gaulther, of Quebec, over 150 years ago. The specific 
name procumbens alludes to its creeping habit of propa- 
o-ating by underground runners; the foliage yields the 
well-known oil of wintergreen. There is a western 
variety that grows as a spreading shrub. It belongs 
botanically to the Heath family, of which the European 
heather and the huckleberries are familiar specimens. 
"The service berry is not either the squaw berry or 
the bunch berry, as you infer. Botanically, it is the 
Amelanchier canadensis, and is common everywhere at 
least through southern Canada, the Eastern and Middle 
States There are several varieties, but they run to- 
gether, so that botanists are inclined to regard them as 
forms of one. The variations run from shrubs to small 
trees with slight distinction in the foliage, but the berries 
of all are nearly identical. It belongs to that great bo- 
tanical family known as the rose family, of which the 
queen of flowers is the type, and is closer related to the 
apples and pears, so much so that Amelanchier stocks 
have been used for dwarfing the pear by grafting on it ; 
as in dwarfing the pear by grafting on the qumce. 1 have 
used them for this purpose myself. It floyver.s in spring 
producing in June (and therefore in some localities called 
Tune berry), a berry-like purplish fruit in shape some- 
thing like a rose hiv—Vs to >4in. in diameter— edible, 
sweet and sometimes very pleasant flavored, t he popu- 
lar name of the European species in its home m Savoy 
means service berry, and the name was probably attached 
to our American .species by the early Canadian settlers 
and has stuck. It is called in some parts of New Eng- 
land wild pear, and in others shad bush, from the fact 
of its flowering about the time the shad come up the 
rivers As the white beach is accounted the best ma- 
terial for making carpenters' planes, so the tree form of 
the Amelanchier, which is the variety usually called the 
wild pear (never, I think, over 3 or 31^111. in diameter) 
is held in high esteem among mechanics for chisel 
handles. • , 
"The squaw berry 'with two eyes' is botanically the 
Mitchella repens, the only species, and was named for a 
Dr J Mitchell who corresponded from Virginia with 
Linnceus. I have found it growing sparingly and scatter- 
in-lv everywhere from New England to Pennsylvania 
and' New Jersey, never abundantly but once, and that 
was last summer, near the center of Camden county, N. 
J in the town of Clementon, where in low shady woods 
the ground was covered with it and red with the berries, 
and boy-like I filled my pockets with them. It belongs 
botanically to the madder family, of which the Cephalan- 
thus or buttonbush may be familiar to you, though none 
but a botanist would detect any resemblance between the 
two. . , • 
"Lastly comes the bunchberry; this, like tile American 
yew, I haven't seen since- 1 was a boy in Maine, where in 
certain localities it was quite plentiful — notably "about 
decaying white pine stumps of large size, where the 
ground would be covered with it. It is botanically Cornus 
canadensis, dwarf cornell-bunchberry. The Cornus Aori- 
da, flowering dogwood, with which you are no doubt 
familiar, and which blooms about the time for planting 
Indian corn, and forms such snowy masses of bloom in 
the landscape before many of the trees have gotten their 
foHage, is a near relative ; and whUe there appears to be a 
wide and mighty difference between tlie humble bunch- 
berry and the stately dogwood, still, if the blossoms 
of each are examined, you will see the same petal-like in- 
volucre to each and the fruit is not dissimilar, and each 
have the same hard seeds, though the bunch berry has 
the most pulpy and edible fruit. The stems of the bunch- 
berry spring from running underground shoots and are 
surmounted on the top with a whorl of four' to six oval 
leaves, on top which in spring appears the cluster of 
blossoms, with the petal-lilce involucre underneath,' 
spoken of above. 
"In reviewing this, it looks as if I had used a good 
many words to answer a few simple questions, and re- 
minds me of what the emaciated Irishman told the 
doctor who was about to apply to his body an immense 
mustard plaster, Tt seems to me there's a dale of mus- 
tard for a little mate'; but if you are able to glean out 
the little meat there is in it, I shall feel repaid as render- 
ing some small compensation for the vast amount of prac- 
tical information I have received from your interesting 
articles in Forest and Stream. And generally when a 
man wants to know about anything enough to ask, he 
wants to know all about it, which I have tried to tell." 
Comrade Robinson has shown that the squaw berry 
and the bunch berry are not other names for the service 
berry; and these botanists find resemblances where we, 
who consider each plant as an independent growth, 
never would. They aver that the little edible bunchberry 
is closely related to the flowering dogwood. T 
have eaten thousands of bunchberries, but the seeds 
of the dogwood are too hard to eat. I know 
the wild rose and have tasted the berries, dr haws, 
but never cared to eat them. I can beHeve that I 
have seen the service berry, but it is possible that it never 
tempted me to eat it. The "shad blow" I know very 
well, but if it has an edibl^ berry, I never stuck a tooth in 
one, and so the "service berry" grows on the shad bush ! 
"It's never too late to learn." 
An old correspondent of Forest and Stream, Arefar, of 
California, writes me that the "ground hemlock" which 
grew my "cedar berries" is closely allied to the English 
yew, from which the famous bows of the English archers 
were made. After describing the service berry, as Com- 
rade Frank Robinson has so exhaustively done, he says : 
"We also have a Pacific Coast variety, Amelanchier alni- 
folia, which reaches its greatest perfection along the rich 
bottom lands of the Columbia River. Its berries are an 
important item of food with our Western Indians, who 
gather them,, reduce them to a paste, and dry them for 
winter." Fred Mather. 
Sarvis Berries and Buffalo Ribs, 
Browning, Mont., Jan. 24— Editor Forest and Stream: 
It seems hard to believe that there should be any one 
who does not know what sarvis berries are. To us who 
live up in the Northwest they are as well known as 
oats, or corn, or potatoes, and in many sections of the 
country are in their season a good deal more abundant. 
Another name for them is saskatoon or sascatum berries, 
no doubt the name for the berry in some Indian tongue. 
The genus to which the plant belongs is widely dis- 
tributed through the north temperate zone. It is found m 
eastern and western America— as far south on the Pacific 
Coast as southern California— in Japan and central China, 
in Asia Minor, the Caucasus and Southern Africa, but is 
not found in the great northern region of southern Asia, to 
which it might naturally have extended. In western 
America it grows over an iimnense territory. At the 
north it is found in the valley of the Yukon River in 
latitude 62 degrees 45 minutes, and it extends south 
over nearly all the mountain ranges of western Amer- 
ica, ranging eastward through the Saskatchewan Valley 
and Manitoba to the western shores of Lake Superior and 
to the northern peninsula of Michigan. . 
You have given us the Latin name and the botanical 
relations of this fruit, and I should like to tell you some- 
thing about its relations, its usefulness to man and beast 
ill the country where it grows. Like many of our culti- 
vated -fruit belonging to the same botanical group, the 
sarvis tree bears a plentiful crop only every alternate year. 
Besides that, sometimes a very dry spring or a late snap 
of severe cold will ruin the crop in a year, which, accord- 
ino- to all calculation, should , have been one of plenty. 
When either of these things happen, the animals that de- 
pend for food in part on the sarvis berries have to go 
hungry. 
Many tribes of Indians collect these berries in great 
quantities, storing them in sacks woven from grass or 
from cedar bark, or in parfleches made of the skms ot ani- 
mals When the berries are ripe the women go out m 
crreat -parties to gather them, and spreading robes blankets 
or sheets under the trees, beat the branches and the ripe 
fruit falling on the blankets below, is gathered^ up and 
afterward spread out to dry in the sun. In the winter the 
dried berries are boiled with dried meat or ^ by them- 
<;elves and form an Important part of the Indian s diet. In 
some tribes the berries are regarded as sacred, and mu.st 
be used in all feasts which accompany religious ceremonial 
of any sort. These berries are delicious when fresh, but 
not nearly so good after they have been dried and stewed 
in the ordinary wav. At the same time they have a dis- 
tinctive flavor of their own, of which one becomes very 
^^ll^an remember nothing more delicious than fat buffalo 
ribs and dried sarvis berries, as eaten among Indians of 
the Northwestern plains, unless it be fat buffalo ribs 
and dried corn, as eaten among Indians of the Soiith- 
eastern plains. But it must always be remembered that m 
