S42 
FORESV A.ND STREAM. 
Types of Sportsmen. — ^I. 
Somewhere Shakespeare says that 
"All the world's a stage 
And all tlie men and women merely players; 
They have their exits and their entrances, 
And one man in his time plays many parts." 
BilJy the Bard goes on and refers to the schoolboy and 
his unwillingness to attend school. Not knowing when 
a boy begins to be a man, or when a man ceases to be 
a boy. we are constrained to consider the schoolboy as 
a sportsman. :\ little one, if you like, an amateur, but 
often proficient. 
We locate our specimen in a New England village, his 
first gun being an old-fashioned Enfield rifle, cut off 'and 
bored out for a shotgun. He obtained it from the pro- 
ceeds of the sales of scrap iron to the village blacksmith, 
driving cows to pasture, gathering cider apples, etc. Pos- 
sibly some of the iron was sold twice and the blacksmith 
didn't know and the railroad company didn't care. His 
mother felt alarmed at the purchase. His father said: 
"He may as well have it. If the gun does not kick him 
the horses will, or possibly he may fall of? the barn 
roof." 
Who can describe the joy he felt, or tell how he longed 
to hear the gun speak? He poured in a handful of blast- 
ing powder, and then followed wad after wad of news- 
paper; then the shot, and as the iron ramrod clanked In 
the barrel the last time, and the cap was on, his spirits 
were high, and there was a fair prospect that his spirit 
would go higher. Chipmunks were wont to sport on the 
wall adjacent to the barn. One posed for him in the 
altogether as a matter of convenience. There was a ter- 
rible explosion. The horses plunged and whickered in 
the barn; the would-be setting hen, tied to a stake b} 
the leg with a strap of selvage to curb her maternal de- 
sires, burst lier l.ionds, and the mass of fuss and feathers 
sailed over the barnyard fence, cackling in fright, and the 
anchor rope trailing like the tail of a kite. 
What became of the boy, the gun, and the squirrel? 
Oh! the boy went to grass, the gun went over his head 
into the watering trough, and the squirrel was dead, 
every little bit of him. The boy's mother helped him into 
the house, unbuttoned his calico shirt and rubbed his 
shoulder with balm of Gilead and opodeldoc, and then 
gave him half a pie as a counter-irritant, and he slept off 
the effects of all in half an hour and wanted more. He 
used the gun right along after that with more or less 
success. He studied loads, although of itself the gun was 
sufficient for the little fellow. 
He cleaned the gun in the kitchen one day, and then 
his mother cleaned the kitchen. He drove a pine plug 
in tlie nipple and tlien poured hot Avater into the barrel. 
It stood agai_n5t the table, while he fitted a rag around 
the stick. 'The hack ^ii-tick last -c^-^-^-st and then slipped 
too easy: tlien the black vomit iTivaded this peaceful 
home. The ceiling, the floor, the mother and son were 
besmirched with the black decoction of saltpeter, sul- 
phur and charcoal. The plug flew out and a stream of 
the dirty paste hit the cat in the eye and the pet imme- 
diately threw a fit. The boy and the shot or squirt gun 
were fired to the woodshed* 
Many btfllets lodged in the trees and fences and build- 
ings about the place, and he would haA-e done more in 
that line if his supply of lead had not run short. The 
tea-leads tliat his sisters used to crimp their hair with 
and a pewter tea-pot had disappeared. Where the sink 
spout left the. house wall there was a black streak on the 
clapboards, and he was admonished to go no further m 
that direction. 
As a bov he caught his share in trapping muskrats and 
woodchucks. snaring rabbits and partridges, fishing for 
horn pouts, perch and bream; when not fishing, shoot- 
ing or- sleeping he was playing ball known as barn tick 
and fouj old .cat, or roaming the fields and orchards for 
fruit that did not grow on his father's land. 
It may hbt be amiss to some sportsmen to State a lit- 
tle experience that is coeval to their progress. Some 
good neighbor gave his father samples of home-made 
wine, and inasmuch as the boy was a member of the 
Band of Hope and had his curiosity aroused by the oft 
repeated "Look not upon the wine when it is red," he 
sampled it, and knowing that "one swallow did not make 
a summer" he took several, and what he had sent to 
his stomach went to his head, His mother observed his 
wild-eyed appearance, and the more she looked at him 
the worse he became. He went to bed in the middle of 
the day, the furniture played tag all around the room 
with him and he was "it" all the time. The wild roses 
creeping around his window were like the sparks of his 
Fourth of July pin-wheel, but he got over it and lived to 
grow up and lecture upon temperance. 
"Men must work and women must weep." One day 
he packed his little trunk, boarded the cars and went 
away to a neighboring city to learn a trade. His moth- 
er's 'tears Avere his amulet of safety and his remembrance 
of her love and kindly care were his guide in the right 
path in after years, and he could not well wander far 
before his thoughts were back to her and to duty. In 
succeeding years he returned to his home on Thanksgiv- 
ing Day, and the associations became more valued to hnn 
wilh each visit; but time brought changes. A sister h 
sleeping the long sleep; age has its claims, and a sum- 
mons answered leaves him with but one parent;_a brrjther 
goes to the far West; another marries; then a si.ster finds 
a new protector; the homestead is sold and no more 
can they call it "home." Many long years elapsed, until 
one bright autumn day a man, impelled by a longing 
nur=;ed by time and remembrance, drops the bars at the 
pasture entrance and recalls the time when leaping over 
them was easv. As he passes under the M^alnut trees h.-. 
in the absence of other friends, tells his pointer that yon 
der buildings .sheltered h,m in the years gone by A ^ 
thouo-h his dumb companion could understand, he^ talked 
on ol the past. Who knows but what the dog did un- 
derstand? Do those soft eyes speak not, is the pjacmg oi 
iho^e paws upon his cartridge belt meaningless^ 
The changes about the place were slight. The pump 
is new, and as the gun rests against the wall the hunter 
drinks deeply and knows that the purity of the water is 
unchanged. A tap on the kitchen door is answered by a 
white-haired old lady. After explaining that formerly 
he need not knock and that he had free access to all, the 
good New England woman said: "So you are one of 
the — boys." She took him over the house, into the 
sleeping room where he quarreled with his brother one 
cold winter night and was bundled out of bed and on to 
the chilly floor in defeat. He went into the sitting room 
where winter evenings he had popped corn and eaten 
apples and nuts, while his mother knit the blue woolen 
socks for her boys and his father read the weekly agri- 
cultural paper. The nails where hung the Christmas 
stockings a generation ago were still in place, and he 
fancied that the array of little copper-toed boots were still 
behind the stove. The barn was the same, the same horse 
stalls, cow stanchions and hay mows. The kindly old 
gentleman said to his good wife: "Mother, it seems like 
as if our boy had come home at last." Tears welled from 
the dear old lady's eyes as she thought of her boy sleep- 
ing somewhere in a soldier's unmarked grave under the 
Southern skies. 
With one last look back at his old home, he entered 
the pines beyond the orchard, and coming to the cem- 
etery the names of old schoolmates are seen upon the 
marble slabs. He passes the sepulchres of granite where 
repose whole families, and recalled the evening that he 
groaned in the shade of the hedge while his accomplice 
recited to the timid children, "Hark, from the tombs a 
doleful sotxnd." He strolls by chain-enclosed plots where 
granite posts support the chains and bell-like pendants 
are suspended as ornaments. He inverts the bells and 
finds that the wasps and hornets build their mud homes 
as of yore. He finds the resting place of one to whom 
more than to others his thoughts have reverted. She was 
his favorite among the schoolgirls; hers were the little 
feet that he had often botind the skates on; her lithe form 
was beside him at the .straw-rides and at the post-ofticc 
when the mail came in. Upon no other double sled than 
his would she coast. Her loA'e and loyalty were always 
remembered, and as he placed his gathering of wild flow- 
ers above her that day his tears went with them, I^cc 
the birds sing above and the pine needles cover her, her 
voice is still heard and her smile seen, though his home 
is in a far distant citv. W. W. Hastings. 
the halter is now in the museum of the Long Island 
Historical Society in Brooklyn. 
Charles Hallock. 
Gens des Bois.— IIL 
Kootcheraw and Pemmican. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
Ca.pt. Kelly's mention in a recent' isstie of yoiir jdm-nal 
of the old-time pemmican, its manufacture, and its value 
as an economical ration for the prairie ranger of the mid- 
century period, recalls to my mind another article of 
provender almost ec[ually nutritious and compact, yclept 
"kootcheraw," which was the aboriginal vernacular for 
a composition of parched corn pulverized in a coffee-mill 
or ground between two stones, Mexican fashion, and 
an almost equal quantity of sugar. Maple sugar or West. 
India sugar, either one was used, according to the 
locality of the manufacture, which was chiefly along the 
eastern border of Kansas and Missouri, where corn 
was a product and rock maples indigenous. The modern 
corn balls of the confectioners are germane, but an 
inch cube of the old-time kootcheraw would go as far 
as a hundred corn balls in the matter of sustenance and 
distention of the stomach: And it was quite as palatable, 
forming a pleasant dessert after a meal of pemmican.- 
Only a morsel of it could be eaten at a time, not half a 
pint in a day, and a man could travel hundreds of miles 
on what he could carry in his "possible kit" or haver- 
sack. The difliculty in putting it always to practical 
use was the inordinate quantity of fluid required to 
wash it down; and any person attempting to eat kootch- 
eraw without plenty of water was in the predicament of 
the contestants in the soda-cracker match, who under- 
took to eat ten crackers without drinking; entrance fee, 
so cents; capital prize, ?io. They never won! On the 
grand prairies in midsummer, after the "wet weather 
creeks" ran dry, a very fair lubricator was contrived 
from the juice expressed from mascerated cactus, a species 
of which yields a beverage which that old Santa Fe 
trailer, Max Greene, described as "the intermediate of 
some wine and first-class swill.'' 
If pemmican is to be recommended for <jur troops 
and frontier travelers, why not kootcheraw as well? 
For my own part, having subsisted on both in my 
journeys across the plains when adolescent, I would de- 
cidedly favor their manufacture and use now. The 
commissary woidd certainly find sensible relief from the 
burdens and requirements of present-day transportation, 
while heavy marching orders would not carry with 
them the portent of hardship for our soldiers which they 
now do. 
Any superannuated army officer or soldier who was 
on active duty before the Union Pacific Railroad crossed 
the plains, and any old freighter who plodded the Santa 
Fe Trail while the trade was on, will indorse Capt. Kelly, 
T know, and accept my added testimony. If I remember 
right, something is said on this subject in an article 
entitled "The Siege of Fort Atkinson," which I con- 
tributed to the October issue of Harper's Magazine m 
1857, describing a wagon trip across the plains. 
As for pemmican. which was always a staple article 
of food so long as buffalo were running, it was packed 
in portable sacks of fifty to a hundred pounds' weight, 
with the four corners projecting for convenience m 
lifting and handliqg. The last shipment of pemmi- 
can in quantitv and bulk which I ever saw was at 
Tiegina N. W.'T.. in 1882, when it was a canvas town, 
and the Canadian Pacific Railroad had just pushed 
through to that point. A string of Red River carts had 
come-down to the station from the South Sascatchewan, 
to which point the remnant of the buffalo herds fled, 
after the terrible slaughter the previous winter on the 
Yellowstone bottom. This consignment of pemmican 
was like the last handful of meal in the barrel, when 
famine was on; and the contemplation was sad to a 
sentimentalist who realized that the great bovine race 
of the plains had perished and \va.s wiped out forever 
\t that time I exchanged my very good pony bridle 
for a shagianappi halter, traded even, to the contempt 
(.f the hirsute plainsmen who witnessed the swap, and 
Ben Jourdaa. 
"Old Ben Jourdan is a noble son of the forest— a man 
you can't measure by dollars and cents," said Mr. W. R. 
Woodbridge, of Port Henry, N. Y. "I have camped 
with him since '64 and know something of the man." 
This is the truth concisely stated about Jourdan, or Jer- 
dan, as he is called in his Adirondack home. He is not 
to be measured by the standard applied to most men 
noAvadays, when the very alphabet seems based on the 
$ $ and cts. symbols and little is said or written without 
the use of these characters; and it is as a man who 
has escaped the stamp of the market place and has no 
ambition to get ahead in the world that Jourdan deserves 
consideration. 
Jourdan has accomplished absolutely nothing in Lis 
three score and ten years, and to-day he is doing chores 
for a farmer in return for his board." 
It is safe to say, however, that on the side of character 
his life has made more of an impress on the personality 
of those Avho have known him than the great majority of 
the self-seeking elboAvers they meet every day of their 
lives. 
Jourdan Awas bort; seventy years ago in the town «.«f 
Moriah, Avhich is one of the largest as well as one of 
the roughest, topographically speaking, in the State. His 
father was shiftless, according to most standards, and 
particularly so in the days when the sweeping characteri- 
zation was made of all hunters that they were men too 
lazy to work and not smart enough to steal. His hon- 
esty, however, was never questioned, and he lived up to 
his standards of right and wrong as he saw them. When 
he needed money he would take a job of shaving shin- 
gles, but soon becoming tired of this, he would go ofif 
hunting or fishing, as the case might be, following the 
Bible precept of taking no heed for the morrow. x\nd 
yet he liA^ed and reared a family, and probably enjoyed his 
life a great deal more than city dAvellers who feel guilty 
pangs for chance momentary recreations snatched from 
the busy days. 
Ben Jourdan was, the eldest of three boys, who were all 
born woodsmen, and later developed into good guides. 
His brothers, Orlando and Napoleon Bonaparte, called 
Don and Bony for short, have since died. As guides 
they were almost as well known as Ben. No one of them 
could be made a commercial guide. They would not 
go Avith some men for any price, while they were accus- 
tomed to guide others they liked for very small compen- 
sation at times. 
Ben began guiding as a boy of fifteen, and has carried 
a pack basket for fifty years. He traveled west into the 
wilder sections of the .\dirondacks aJid camped on Clear 
Pond, Elk Lake and the Boreas. Sometimes his wan- 
derings carried him as far as Preston Ponds and Cold 
River, but his favorite territory was the watershed at the^ 
headwaters of the Hudson, in Essex county. In the cold 
weather Ben hunted and trapped, and in summer he 
fished and guided. Certain qualities Avhich he possessed 
made him carlj^ in life much sought after as a guide. 
Ben in Camp. 
Ben was good-natured and jolly about camp, and he 
was always ready to impart to anyone the knowledge he 
possessed. The present Representative from the Con- 
gressional district where Ben lives tells of his patience 
in teaching him as a twelve-year-old hoy some of the 
rudiments of woodcraft. "Mind you notice that tree," 
Ben Avotild say, as they traveled some woods trail, "We 
will come back this Avay, and I Avant you to stop and tell 
me when we come to that tree." At times he would show 
the boy how to make birch bark cups that would hold 
water without leaking a single drop, and instruct him in 
the art of building a fire or gettin,g his bearings in the 
woods. 
■ Ben is a good cook, and it is this fact that most im- 
pressed itself on the boniface of the Stickney House when 
he had him for a guide. He remembers perfectly hoAv the 
trout tasted which Ben cooked years ago at Preston 
Ponds, though the circumstances of their capture long 
since faded from memory. 
As a fiddler he is an important factor at country dances. 
He also sings in falsetto, a style that used to be common 
enough in the North Woods, but which at the present 
time has almost passed aAvay. His songs are chiefly of 
tlie ballad type, and are characterized by a somewhat 
monotonous refrain and an unlimited number of verses. 
One of them, entitled "Brave Wolf." has for its theme 
the assault on Quebec, and another tells in mournful 
strain of a soldier Avho learns that his child is djdng, and 
on being refused a furlough deserts, with the ultimate 
result of being captured and meeting the deserter's fate. 
How Ben was Lost. 
Ben has all the natural aptitude of the woodsman for 
finding his way in the wilderness, but even the best man 
at times makes mistakes. Mr. Woodbridge tells of an 
occasion when Ben \vas at fault. He was guiding a 
party on a trip to Mt. Marcy from the Boreas Ponds- 
.It was drizzzling rain and familiar landmarks were blotted 
out by sodden clouds. Members of the party Avho Avere 
provided with compasses tried to perplex Ben, tellin.z 
him he was traveling in the wrong direction, but nothing 
they cotfld say bothered him, and he kept along in the 
same course as before. 
"I've got a better compass than any of you," he said 
at length. "See that hemlock tree? Well, the top twig 
of that tree points due east." 
The men who had compasses looked at them and found 
that the statement Avas true. 
"What do you do, Ben, when you get to a place where 
there aren't any hemlocks?" one of them asked. 
"Oh, I use something else for a compass," said Ben. 
"same way that you take a lead pencil to Avrite AA'ith if 
you can't find a i5en, or a burnt stick, or the bullet of a 
rifle cartridge. There's more ways, of killing a dog thari 
choking him to death on fresh butter." 
