FOftEST AND STREAM. 
ids 
hdvc no regard for/ travelers, and they furrowed otlt 
gu'leys that made great detours a necessity. When, at 
intervals, the sun broke out, we shot mountain hares, and 
niDid tlie wild horses that roam.ed the mesa were bands of 
antelope. They were not very shy, and had the game 
law permitted, we should have enjoyed excellent sport. 
In one cedar thicket I found an ancient camp, and in it 
were a pair of Indian snowshoes. an old percussion lock 
smoothbore rifle barrel and a bone awl. Antelope and 
relics were alike forgotten Avhen we .struck the great black 
fissure veins that ran like section lines across the coun- 
try. They varied from 2oin. to as many feet in width. I 
admire the honesty of the St. Louis Gilsonite Company 
when it made application for a Government patent to the 
entire reservation and claimed thai only one small vein 
of mineral could be found. 
Our last camp was pitched between two veins of the gil- 
sonilc, and in the evening we started a hot sagebrush 
hro, and over it heaped a pile of the black stuff. It 
glowed, became plastic and gave off fumes like a Hunter's 
Point oil refinery. From the base of the pile molten 
streams gushed forth and ran like lava over the sand. 
We made volcanoes in miniature, and ran the liquid into 
molds where it cooled in black, shiny masses. A re- 
heating gave a smokeless, incandescent result, almost like 
coke. Two days were spent in prospecting, and then, amid 
storms that dampened interest amazingly, B. and I re- 
turned to Vernal, while our friends journeyed on to 
Meeker. Shoshone. 
On Kansas Prairies. 
Lost Sprincs, Kan. — Editor Forest and Stream: We 
are in camp in the midst of a great wheat field, but as it 
rained yesterdaj^^ the grain is too wet to thresh, so I am 
sitting here under my own little tent with the fresh, pure 
■air of the prairie drawing through. As my eyes wander 
over the fields, it is across acres almost unbounded of 
wheat and oats already harvested, to the great corn- 
|fields standing in all their magnificence, stretching away, 
rank after rank, field after field, until the eye is sated 
with their richness. Kansas is very rich this year, and 
the cornfields are beyond description, standing in great 
blocks up to 600 acres with tassels like an army of 
banners, with their luxuriant garment of richest green and 
silken tresses of gold and purple, softer and more beauti- 
ful than any that ever human hands have formed; while 
overhead from the edge of the prairie on one side to the 
edge of the prairie on the other reaches the bonnie blue 
sky of Kansas, unbroken save by a few white, drifting 
.clouds — soft and fleecy enough for the wrappings of a 
new-born babe. Surely as I sit here, life is well worth 
the living to-day. The air is pure and clear, and I so love 
to be out in it. Although I have my own tent, yet even in 
that at night I feel too much shut in and so usually (un- 
less it is stormy) take my blankets, climb up on the straw 
stack, wrap up in them, and with the stars for watchers 
and the sky for a roof, sleep as I have not been able to 
sleep in a house for years. But none the less my thoughts 
wander from the boundless level of these waterless plains 
back to the brooks and rivers, the woods and rocks and 
hills and valleys of my boyhood playground. And as the 
expression of these thoughts seems to lead others into 
pleasant ways, I have thought it were worth while to 
write them out. 
When the rainy day came and with it the coveted per- 
mission to go a-fishing, there would be a consultation 
among the tribe which way to go. There were the Cowles 
Meadow and Rttnning Gutter trout brooks, the old mill 
pond to the northwest, the Mill River to the eastward. 
The pond and river held goodly store of pickerel, sunfish, 
shiners, eels and bullheads, and were close by ; but further 
away to the southeast, down in the big meadows, was "The 
Nook," where the waters of the Mill River join those of 
the Connecticut. Here, in addition to the fish mentioned, 
we caught dace and perch. It was, and must still be, a 
beautiful place. The great elms and maples gave a de- 
lightful shade. In places the grass-clothed banks sloped 
down to the water. When the south wind blew the great 
waves came rolling in from the Connecticut. The water, 
black and deep, held the fish so dear to boyish hearts; 
and tradition told of Indian ways, of the capture of otter 
and other wild creatures. The old men whom we some- 
times found fishing there would tell of the days when the 
shad, the sturgeon and even the salmon were drawn 
from the waters, when in the woods the wild turkey and 
pigeon and gray squirrels were as plenty as heart could 
wish. 
It was a long walk down there for short legs, and so 
one spring day, so early in the season that it was uncertain 
if the fish would take the bait, when the older ones decided 
to fish at "The Nook," and I was eager to go, the tribe 
decided I was too small to go so far. Appealing to the 
mother, she said I could go, and as her decision always 
settled any matter, I got read}' and went. Trading down 
a little brook that ran past the house, we went through 
fields of grass, which Avithin the memory of men — then 
not very old — had been covered with a dense pine forest. 
The stumps still formed the fences around the fields ; one 
of the pines was such a giant that its stunlp — stubborn 
and immovable — remained for years where it grew, and 
gave in its lifetime the name of "Pine Tree," later cor- 
rupted to Pantry, to the school district in which it stood. 
Along the railroad track, then down the "Meadow Hill," 
through "Little Ponsett," and so to the fishing grounds 
we found our way. Then the fishing began, with good 
success for the older ones; but the little fellow for a long 
time caught but one small dace, and so grew tired and 
discouraged, until at length Dave C , the "Sam Lovel" 
of the neighborhood, came along hunting muskrats, and 
the older ones gathered around him for a pow-wow. I 
was too young to be admitted to their counsels, but 
could stand in the outer circle and listen. So laying down 
my fish pole, I went up to where they were gathered, and 
for a long time fish and fishing were forgotten, but when 
the council was broken up I went back to my fish pole. It 
was undisturbed, but the cork, used as a float, was in- 
visible, so I proceeded to find what had become of it. At 
first I could not start the hook, so thought it had got 
snagged. As hooks were not so easily obtained in those 
days as now, to lose one was looked upon by the tribe as 
a bad loss, so I started slowly up the bank, which 
, fortunately sloped to the water, and "snaked" out — not as 
1 expected a water-logged stick of wood, but the biggest 
daCe ever caught by any of our number. It came from the 
water_ as lifeless as a chunk of pork, but the fighting 
Qualities of a fish in those days did not count to m.e, and 
i felt about the richest boy that ever carried a fish pole 
There was no more fishing for me that day, for I was in 
too much haste to show my prize and receive the con- 
gratulations of the home powers, and we were soon on 
our way, plodding up through the meadows homeward, 
passing on our way Dave C , of whom I have spoken. 
But what so "successful as success," for from that time 
on I was a warrior in good standing, and never looked 
upon as too small to join the expeditions, however far 
afield or difficult they might be, and even Dave con- 
descended to receive me into his councils, and afterward 
to friendship, that |n=;tpd as long as T lived in that 
vicinity. ^ ^ 
The mousing hen seems to have set other hens a-mous- 
ing, so I will say, for an answer, that I have seen staid, 
well-fed New England hens try to do a great many 
strange tilings in an awkward way, but environments 
change habits, and Kansas hens early learn to roost high 
and wander far afield; and to husk shock after shock of 
corn with a trim built Biddy, keen-eyed, alert and watch- 
ful, pouncing with all the pent-up energy that Kansas 
climate gives upon each poor mouse as it appeared, was to 
me a source of keen pleasure. Pine Tree. 
Yukon Notes. 
Lyiog^Oat at Fifty iBelow, 
{Coniinued from j^age 123.) 
Mac and I kept the trail as long as we could see, and 
made camp after dark. Sometimes we slept on the ice of 
the river, but never when we could help it. At other 
times we went ashore and with our snowshoes cleared 
away the snow from a space sufficiently large for our bed 
and fire. Then, while one of us got dry wood for cook- 
ing supper and breakfast, the other made the bed. We 
could not wait to eat first, for then we would have be- 
come numbed with the cold before arrangements for the 
night were completed. We had to go at the thing while 
still flushed with the exertion of iJie trail, fell two or 
three or perhaps half a dozen small firs, throw the 
coarser portions up to the windward side of our hole in the 
snow for a wind break, and the springy ends down on the 
bottom for the bed. Then on top of these latter we laid 
our caribou skins and blankets, and at the head put a 6in. 
log for a pillow. By the time the bed was finished and 
the coverlet turned down so that we should lose no time 
getting inside, there would be a goodly pile of dead 
spruce firewood, cut in cordwood lengths and split into 
pieces 4 or 5in. through, ready for the fire. A handful of 
the smaller chips and splints were gathered up and shaken 
to free them of the mineral-like snow which sifted into the 
grain like fine sand, and then the heavy gauntlets were 
taken off for an instant and a match rubbed over a knife 
or pistol handle and the flame applied to a bit of candle 
which was always carried for this purpose. 
A bed for the fire had been arranged by laying some of 
the larger pieces of wood on the snow that still re- 
mained in our excavation, and on this the kindling was 
laid and the flame applied. Then larger splints were grid- 
ironed over the others and the flame carefully nursed, for 
the shivering devil over the fire realized that he was 
getting colder and colder each minute, and that if the fire 
failed him he might become too numb to start another. 
Tliis might very easily happen with matches alone. At 
Lake Marsh Dr. Sugden told us of two men who arrived 
at his camp partly frozen one night in the hours just 
before dawn, who had tried to camp ten miles below, and 
who were so numbed that they could not strike a match. 
Fortunately the spritce was very dry, and with the 
candle's aid we never failed starting our fire quickly 
Soon it Avould be giving out a comfortable warmth, and 
then Mac and I would crouch over the fire and revel in 
the heat and grow very sleepy, Avhile the ice was melting 
in the kettle that was to furnish the water for our tea 
and mush and beans, and while our moccasins and socks 
were drying out. These made a formidable array hung on 
poles on the opposite side of the fire, for each of us wore 
three or four pair of heavy socks and two pair of moc- 
casins — often twenty-four separate articles for the two 
of us. 
How sleepy we were over the fire ! Time and again my 
head would sink low and m_y eyes involuntarily close, only 
to be brought back to consciousness by Mac's warning 
voice, "Look out for that moccasin. It's scorching, man," 
or "Judas ! there goes the mush kettle." 
Thawing Out a Watch. 
One of the last tasks before retiring was to tliaw out 
our timepiece so that we could know when to get up in . 
the morning. The period when it was light enough to 
see the trail was so very short that we had to be up in, 
the morning several hours befc>re dawn in order to waste 
none of the precious daylight. 
I had left my good watch behind, and Mac's good 
watch had broken down, and the only timepiece we had 
between us that could be persuaded to go at all was a 
cheap open-face watch with a broken crystal. To keep 
the hands from breaking off we had improvised a case 
from an old condensed milk can. A hole had been cut in 
the bottom and a piece of ground glass from a camera 
let in and held in position by tin clips. Then the can had 
been split down and the sides bent around the back of 
the watch to hold it in place. The stem of the stem-winder 
projected through an opening at the side, and the watch 
could be wound and set without removing it from its 
case. 
Unfortunately the watch would not keep running coia 
days, and it would freeze up and stop even though sus- 
pended by a string inside our clothing next our hearts. 
Before going to bed, therefore, the watch was brought 
out and toasted in the ashes of the camp-fire till thorough- 
ly thawed, and then started and set by guess. It was often 
consulted during the hours of darkness. Matches v/ere 
struck and the candles lighted under the bedclothes, and 
the poor old watch, pitiable as was the makeshift, was a 
real source of comfort and aid. 
The reason that a cheapi watch freezes up is that all 
such watches have soft bearings and a certain amount of 
lubricant is necessary to keep them running, _ which 
thickens and clogs the action. Orily the best full-jeweled 
movements should be taken into cold countries. 
The trip from the fire to the bed was never a pleasant 
bit of travel. As a preliminary, I dusted Mac's back and 
he dusted mirie. Sitting by the camp-fire, as Mac orice 
remarked, it was "So below zero iti your back and i5od ; 
above in your face."' When water simmers ih one side of 
a kettle feet by the fire arid freezes solid in the other it is 
little wonder that a 'man accumulated ice on his back. 
The hoar frost on our rough coats was often quarter to 
half an inch thick, and it would never have done to have 
taken this mass of ice to bed with us. 
When we were reasonably free from, the ice, we crept 
over to the blankets and then inside, carrying with us parts 
of our foot gear that we were desirous of keeping pliable 
so that they could be gotten on in the morning, and wear- 
ing our tur caps, heavy gauntlets and a tiill outfit of socks 
and moccasins.. 
It was a cold, icy bed that we crawled into, but we 
knew that we should soon thaw it out. The blankets accu- 
mulated so much ice, from our breath chiefly, that we soon 
had to give up packing them on the sleds in a compact 
roll, and had to leave the stiff, board-like mass extended 
its full length, bending it once in the middle lengthways. 
It is hard to get used at first to sleeping with a great 
weight of blankets over the head. There is a very real 
sense of smothering and nightmare, of drowning in bot- 
tomless maelstrom.s, or death under avalanches of thou- 
sands of tons of soft, suft'ocating snow, and one wakes 
with a start to find that he has recklessly thrown the 
covering half oft' his body and is lying under the cold 
icicle-pointed stars at the mercy of liis enemy, the frost. 
Playing Dog. 
One of the doggerel verses of the "Cheechako's La- 
ment," printed in the Klondike Nugget, runs ; 
"We had no yelping malamoot 
To mush along our sled, 
So, with the gee-pole in our fist. 
We played tjie dog instead." 
Playing dog is the hardest kind of hard work. The 
sled runs easily enough over smooth ice or snow for short 
distances, but when the way stretches out ahead for scores 
and hundreds of miles, and the ice rises into miruature 
mountain chains abounding in precipices and pitfalls, and 
there are sheer lifts of half a dozen feet, and drops of the 
same distance, and detours along the shore have to be 
made over steep and slippery hills several httndred feet in 
height, or over fallen timber, it is a very different matter. 
The iron-shod oak sled itself weighs 30 or 4olbs., and 
with its load of i6olbs. it is considerable of a lift in rough 
places for one man. As a rule, each man wrestled with 
his own sled, and we only doubled up over the very 
hardest going. 
Sometimes the sleds were jammed in narrow defiles 
among masses of upturned ice, and at other times were 
half-buried under the snow which rolled up over the pro- 
jecting corners of the load and left a beautiful furrow in 
our wake. The snow was marvelously light and fine and 
dry, and back in the woods it never crusted, and rested 
as softly as sifted wood ashes, but out on the river it was 
packed by the wind till it would support the weight of a 
fox or a dog, but not a man or a sled. 
The early part of our journey we did not have much 
experience breaking trail, but later on the tide of travel 
had almost entirely passed, and we had our share of 
path making. 
La Grippe Under Difficulties. 
As a memento of the flashlighting experience in the In- 
dian cabin at Selkirk, I developed a full-fledged case of the 
grip two days later. Colds are almost unknown on the 
Yukon in winter. The air is pure as the atmosphere on 
the summits of the highest mountain peaks, and un- 
contaminated with germs of any kind. I remembered the 
coughing, feverish Indians and the umnistakable symptoms 
of grip only half noticed, and not before thoroughly un- 
derstood, and I knew that if I had not gone into the cabin 
T should have escaped an experience in shivers and nausea 
which is a haunting nightmare even to this day. 
There had been a day or two of unprecedentally mild 
weather, and under the influence of the Chinook wind the 
thermometer climbed until it reached the freezing point 
and even went a little above. After that it began going 
dov/n again, and in forty-eight hours had about resumed 
its normal level of 20 or 30 below zero. There was a 
difference of something like 130 degrees between my tem- 
perature and the surrounding air. It was a battle royal 
between the frost and the fire, and never for one moment 
was there a truce. A warm place would have been very 
grateful where some kind of an equilibrium could have 
been maintained, but it was an impossible luxury, and 
there was nothing to be done but to worry through to the 
time when the disease should run its course. Aside from 
tea and bouillon made from capsules, I ate practically 
nothing. 
It was hard to understand how Mac could relish the 
meals, mainly composed of scorched mush and burned 
])eans and greasy bacon and flapjacks. We found it a 
practical impossibility to keep our mush kettle clean. A 
portion of the contents persistently clung to the sides and 
froze there, and could not be scraped off, and when we set 
about getting our water supply for the next meal by melt- 
ing ice, the remnant of mush always scorched and con- 
taminated the new portion. At times we tried melting 
several kettles of ice in succession, pouring off the 
bro\vn, foul smelling water each time, without materially 
improving the flavor of the mush. The trouble with cook- 
ing beans arose from the fact that we never had the time 
to boil them the requisite four hours over any one camp- 
fire, and consequently had to carry on the process over 
successive fires. Between times they froze solid, and 
when put on the fire invariably burned before they 
thawed. Once or twice we baked our beans by burying 
them in the coals of the fire over night, but generally our 
fuel supply was too limited and our time too short to 
resort to this process. And yet to the healthy appetite, 
stimulated by the arctic cold, the food, poor as it was, was 
not only satisfying, but absolutely delicious. 
Mac was very much worried over my condition, and 
wanted to go into camp till the worst was past, but the 
food question would not permit of this. We knew our 
