Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rop and Gun. 
Copyright, 1899, by Foresi- and Strbam Publishing Co. 
TbRAis^ $4 A Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. I 
Sw Months, f 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MAY IS, 1899. 
VOL, LI I, -No. 19, 
No. 844 Broadway, N«w York, 
TIfE CONNECTICUT FISH COMMISSION. 
The rottenness of politics and* the potency of pull have 
ruined before now many a fish commission in this coun- 
try, and the latest instance in point is that of Connecti- 
cut. Gov. Lounsbury has committed an outrageous 
vsTong upon the people of his State by debasing the fish 
commission into making it a berth for his political friends 
and cronies, irrespective of their fitness for the place, and 
regardless of the effect the appointment of incompetent 
individuals will have upon the commission's work and 
the important interests it is designed to conserve. 
The commission as hitherto constituted consisted of 
Messrs. A. C. Collins, of Hartford; James A, Bill, of 
Lyme, and Hubert Williams, of Salisbury. Mr. Collins 
was the active man. He was thoroughly devoted to the 
work and did it in a sagacious and successful way which 
brought results. Years ago Mr. Collins won the reputa- 
tion of being an energetic game protector, and he has 
had that name ever since. He believed that the game laws 
were laws intended to be enforced. He was convinced 
that the game and fish supply of Connecticut should be 
saved from the poacher, the snarer, the market hunter, 
the fish dynamiter and the trout netter, for the benefit of 
the community. He had the rare good sense to recog- 
nize that denunciation of "the farmer" was not the whole 
of efficient protection, and he set himself to the task of 
organizing the Connecticut State Association of Farmers 
and Sportsmen, an organization which enlisted the sup- 
port of the land owners and for years was an efficient 
agency in advancing the cause to which it was devoted. 
Mr. Collins did this public service purely as an individual 
moved by large motives; and the reform he accomplished 
was one of far-reaching good throughout the State. His 
personal services were characterized by energy, fearless- 
ness, common sense and a sort of bulldog tenacity, which 
made him a terror to the evil-doers in every county of 
Connecticut. 
It was with most unqualified satisfaction, then, that the 
appointment of Mr. Collins to the reorganized fish and 
game commission in 1895 was received by all right minded 
citizens who were cognizant of the condition of affairs in 
Connecticut, and who felt assured by the appointment 
that the work of the commission would be done honestly, 
economically and well. That expectation was not unful- 
filled. Mr. Collins applied to the work the most ad- 
vanced modern fishcultural methods, which resulted in re- 
stocking the streams with trout and in restoring the shad 
to the rivers. If the business of the State were conducted 
as a private citizen would conduct his own personal busi- 
ness, retaining in its service those who had shown them- 
selves to be efficient and valuable in advancing its inter- 
ests, no one, from the Governor down, would have 
dreamed for a moment of dispensing with the services of 
Mr. Collins as fish commissioner. It is no credit to Gov, 
Lounsbury to say that his failure to reappoint Mr. Col- 
lins has not particularly astonished people; but the indig- 
nation aroused by his course is none the less deep and all 
pervading. 
The terms of the Connecticut commission expired this 
year, and the only one of the members of the old board 
retained is James A. Bill, of Lyme, who through age and 
sickness is largely incapacitated. Mr. Collins was shoved 
to one side to make way for a man whose only claim to 
the place is found in his personal relations with the Gov- 
ernor. His successor is a Mr. Solomons, of Norwalk, a 
fishing companion and personal friend of Gov, Louns- 
bury, and reputed to know nothing more about trout than 
how to catch them. The third member of the new com- 
mission is a brother of Gov. Lounsbury's business part- 
ner. It would be difficult in all the range of rotten ap- 
pointments with which the cause of fishculture has been 
cursed here and there during recent years to find nomi- 
nations less defensible and more directly personal in the 
pull which promoted them than these two. 
What Connecticut needs to-day is a single-headed fish 
commission in the person of a man versed in fishculture, 
interested in the work of fish propagation and game pro- 
tection and qualified to perform the duties of the office. 
One such man, given the opportunity, could do more 
for the public interest of the community in one year than 
thirty commissions constituted as the Conneticut board is 
now made up could do in thirty years. It is of course 
useless to hope for any public redress from the Governor; 
he has committed himself and the State to a policy of 
foolishness. The Legislature, however, is still in session, 
and if the citizens of the State who appreciate the situa- 
tion and are moved by an honest indignation to have it 
remedied would make their influence felt, it might be 
possible to secure such a modification of the law as would 
make practicable the provisions of a competent commis- 
sioner. 
BUSINESS AND SPORT. 
With the return of business prosperity there comes a 
general and active revival of sport. It is a manifestation 
which demonstrates that the fondness of men for the 
pleasures of rod and gun is a constant and abiding qual- 
ity, requiring only the ways and the means for its grati- 
fication to be at all times manifested. During the last 
few years there had seemed to be some weakening of in- 
terest in these alTairs, notwithstanding that the pursuits 
of the rod and gun have been cherished by 'mankind from 
a time immemorial, and that human nature has not 
changed. There were many conjectures to account for 
the cause of this apparent defection; some attributed it 
to the rivalries of the wheel and golf and other engross- 
ing pastimes; while there were those again who found the 
cause in the growing scarcity of game, the narrowing of 
available shooting territories and the insufficient and dis- 
appointing returns so often rewarding long effort and 
expense in search of sport. Few, however, considered 
the real cause, that which brings so much of dolor to a 
nation or a community, and colloquially is called "hard 
times." When revenues are cut down and retrenchment 
is the order of the day, the luxuries and the pleasures are 
the first to be curtailed or surrendered entirely. If the 
necessities of life exact all earnings, there is nothing left 
to be applied to sport. 
The Grand American Handicap the other day was in 
its magnitude a suggestive index of the general revival 
of sport with the gun. Shooting at the trap, in all parts 
of the country, has taken a general impetus; and the sales 
of targets are something enormous. The demand for fish- 
ing tackle this season has in most sections been far 
ahead of that of the seasons of past years. The gun fac- 
tories feel the general prosperity, and are taxed to their 
utmost to fill orders. People talk more of where to go 
and when to go; of what to buy and where to buy it; of 
the technique of the sport and methods of improvement; 
all this may rightly be interpreted as showing that the 
love of sport has only been held in check, and as soon 
as the check is removed the irrepressible love for sport 
on land and water, the heredity transmitted through the 
eons of time, bursts forth in undiminished ardor. 
SOME GUIDES AND THEIR WA YS. 
We have adverted before now to the way some Maine 
hotel keepers have of recommending as guides incom- 
petent individuals who happen to be in their debt for 
board, and who work it out in this way. The whole sub- 
ject of the relations existing between the visiting sports- 
men, the hotel or camp keeper and thfe guide might profit- 
ably be discussed; for there is no question that some feat- 
ures of the prevailing system are essentially adverse to the 
interests of the visitor. It would manifestly be a gross 
error to make any sweeping assertion which should ap- 
ply to all resorts and all guides. ' Human nature in Maine 
is just the plain every-day human nature we find the 
world over. Some men are honest and some are dis- 
honest. Men in the Maine woods have a living to make; 
and precisely as with other folks outside of the woods, 
some make the living honestly and some dishonestly. 
Premising that nine out of ten are honest, the tenth is so 
ubiquitous as to warrant our giving him some attention. 
Among the numerous camps for sportsmen in Maine 
may now and then be found one which is conducted in a 
way not very different from the manner in which it would 
be conducted if its chief purpose were to sell as much 
whiskey as possible in a season. And there are guides 
whose chief intent appears to be to keep their ''sports" 
within sound of the dinner horn of the camp to which 
they are attached. Ostensibly in the employ of the man 
from Boston or New York or Philadelphia or Chicago, 
they are actually in the service of the camp proprietor,a nd 
look to his interest first, last and all the time. Many an 
honest fellow indeed is in virtual bondage to the camp 
proprietor and the slavery galls him. He is not playing 
fair with the man he is guiding, and he knows it. When 
he tells his employer that old stock story that the fish are 
not biting to-day but they did last week, he lies, and be- 
cause he lies he despises himself for the lie, and would get 
out of the necessity of lying if he could. He cannot 
emancipate himself, however, because of his real or fan- 
cied double obligation to his two employers, with their 
diverse interests — the only interest of the camp keeper to 
keep the visitor at his own place, and the true interest of 
the visitor to go to some other place. As one guide has 
well put it, such a person has two fires to tend. 
The evils here outlined are very real and very wide- 
spread. A correspondent who writes in our angling 
columns to-day tells us that his unfortunate experience 
has been always to employ guides with axes to grind. 
The remedy he had resort to was to study up his own fish- 
ing country, lay out his own routes and persist in pur- 
suing them in the face of the protests of his guide. His 
experience appears to have made him impatient of all 
guides and distrustful of their capacity and honesty of in- 
tention, a conclusion, we need not say, unncessary. 
There are many so-called guides who are lost the instant 
they stray from a familiar trail or get off from the buck- 
board road. But there are others who are competent and 
skilled masters of woodcraft, natural hunters, explorers 
and woodsmen, and who would be honest, too, with the 
man who employed them if they wer& accountable to him 
alone. They would be thus solely answerable to the 
sportsman if employed by him directly, without any 
intermediaries. The remedy of the whole trouble is to 
be found in direct employment of independent guides, in- 
stead of indirect employment through camp keepers. 
Then the guide will feel that he is answerable to the vis- 
itor alone; that he may serve the true interest of the 
sportsman, and not be in peril of the woods boycott. For 
there is a woods boycott. It works in this way: If the 
guide hired for the sportsman by the camp keeper does 
not exploit the sportsman for the camp keeper's benefit 
he does not get employment the next time. 
A system of independent engagements between the 
guide and the guided would surely work to the benefit of 
the Maine visitor, and it would as certainly be welcomed 
by the guides and elevate the standard of the pursuit and 
the self-respect and responsibility of the men engaged 
in it. 
BIGNESS. 
That man George Kennedy appears to be a fellow of a 
delightful sort to carry on a discussion of pure science 
with. When he fails of other argument he calmly pro- 
jects his rival up a tree, stations a frantic wild hog at 
the foot of the tree, and then wraps about himself pure 
philosophy as a mantle and lapses into sweet slumber. As 
for Mr. Kennedy's eye dilation theory of greatness there 
is much to be said in support, both as to the brute and 
the human. For proof of the magnifying power of the 
human eye, whether "subjected to certain lights," as Mr. 
Kennedy has it, or in the darkness of the woods, one 
would need only to cull from the rich storehouse of ex- 
perience chronicled in the Forest and Stream the thou- 
sand and one instances of hunters whose dilated optics 
have transmogrified porcupines into bears, beheld charg- 
ing bull moose tremendous as rogue elephants, or seen 
grizzlies loom up big as barns. There is in common 
speech, in the proverbial expression "it's all in your eye," 
a recognition of this great scientific truth, the discovery 
of which is claimed by Mr. Kennedy; and as a matter 
of fact we majT'lnd many a record in the books illustrat- 
ing the theory and demonstrating that it has long been 
known and acknowledged by the men of the wilderness. 
Here, for instance, is an illustrative passage from the 
curious narrative of "The Shipwreck and Adventures of 
Monsieur Pierre Viaud" in Florida in 1776. Among 
what the French editor rightly terms the "shocking mis- 
eries" and "horrid circumstances" of Viaud's adventures 
were the nights spent in terror of wild beasts, concerning 
one of which the author writes thus, italics ours: "All 
hopes of sleep or rest, for this night, were now given 
over; our apprehensions were continually kept awake by 
the incessant bowlings which surrounded us, and contin- 
ued till morning; several bears approached near enough 
for us to distinguish their horrid forms, and some tygers 
appeared also in sight, which, perhaps magtMed by our 
fears, appeared of a most enormous size; nay, there was 
one of them that advanced nearer to us than any of the 
rest, in defiance of our passive fire; but upon my darting 
several faggots at him he retreated, after having sent forth 
a most horrid howl, which was echoed back by all the 
other beasts of the forest." 
