402 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Nov. 18, iSgg. 
^^arhttim ^onmt 
The Equipment of Old Times. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
Sitting here in my den, smoking my first after-dinner 
pipe, I am led into a train of reflection on the changes, 
improvements and cheapness of sporting articles, com- 
pared to their cost when some of us were younger and 
game was more plentiful. These thoughts are suggested 
by the advent of a young gentleman — a grandson of ten 
years — who just rushed into my snuggery in high glee 
to show me his new gun, a rew^ard for proficiency in his 
school studies. He is too young to own a gun by half a 
dozen years, but he had fairly earned it by hard study. 
To gratify him I looked over his gun, a double-barreled 
i6-caliber, and was surprised to find it possible that such 
a finely finished gun could be sold for the price ($20). 
It was fully equal in finish to guns that I own for which 
I paid five times that price. In fact, my collection em- 
braces some famous old Tom Moore and Westley Rich- 
ards muzzleloaders that were once my pride and glory, 
the cost of which would now purchase a whole armory 
of guns that look as well and no doubt shoot as well. 
There they rest on their racks, relegated to the past as 
''has-beens," to be scorned by the farmer's boy, and would 
not bring $10; and yet what famous old shooters they 
were in their day. Even yet I have an affection for them, 
and I carry it so far as to take one of them out occa- 
sionally as a reserv^e gun for a long shot at ducks when 
the breechloader has failed to do its duty. 
In my collection I have an old flintlock Joe Manton that 
was my father's. It w^as the apple of his eye, and many 
is the back-load of wnld pigeons that as an urchin I have 
toted home that he_ shot from the great flocks of thou- 
sands that used to fly over. Then I have one of the 
early day Colts army pistols that I carried On many long 
marches in Arizona when it was necessary to be ever 
on the alert for the wily Apache. Nothing serves better 
to show the stride of improvement than a comparison 
with the neat, light Smith and Wesson of the present day, 
with its handy cartridge in lieu of the loading with flask 
and bullet. 
Who does not remember, among the early-day re- 
peaters, the "Cochran patent," a flat dislc perforated with 
( six chambers, with a percussion nipple opposite each 
chamber? The disk was moved bj^ hand at each shot. 
These arms had a short run, as they had a habit of com- 
municating the fire to the adjoining chambers, and in 
consequence would all go off in succession, shooting a 
complete circle, as illustrated on one occasion when an 
officer friend, having taken a great fancy to one 
I owned/ stumped me for a trade for one of a small-sized 
Colt. The exchange being made, he w^ent down by the 
mule corral at the lower end of the camp to ti-y it. It 
took that occasion to show its quality by every charge 
going of? at once, barely missing some brother officers 
and killing a mule. I was not much more fortunate in 
my trade, for the first time I fired my little Colt the cyl- 
inder and barrel departed, leaving only the stock in my 
hand. The odds were about even, the only difference 
being that my brother officer had to pay Uncle Sam 
for one mule expended in target practice. Such were 
the idiosyncrasies of the early-day repeaters — quite a 
contrast to the perfection of the present-day weapons. 
And the improvement, in all sporting paraphernalia have 
been as great. 
Take fishing rods, for instance, and reels. My father's 
best fishing rod was an unjointed bamboo, which stuck 
out behind the wagon when we weiit fishing. There were 
no reels in those days — at least.they had never reached us 
in the country — and we made our own lines of twisted 
horse (tails) hair, and right good ones they were, elastic 
and never tangled. We made our own flies also, laying 
the old red chicken cock under contribution for his long 
neck feathers, and the plumage of birds; and the trout, 
less fastidious than at the present day, did not object to 
them. 
It has always been a source of great regret that my 
father could not have lived until the present day, so that 
I might have had the satisfaction of presenting him with 
a full fisherman's outfit of these times — a split bamboo, 
silk lines, reel and creel — and also that my dear old 
mother could not have lived to be the recipient from me 
of a box of tea from China. Their happisess would have 
been complete. 
Speaking of split bamboo rods, they, too, have followed 
the cheapened methods of manufacture. I paid $25 for 
my fii'st and $2 for my last; and it is a bold assertion 
to make, but I do say it, that in point of utility I do not 
see any great difference. I know I shall be hooted at 
and called no sportsman for such a statement, but the 
proof is in the fishing. It did not break and I caught as 
many fish with the $2 rod as I did with the $25 one. 
The trout did not apparently note the difference. My 
real standby, however, is an old greenheart rod that I 
have used for thirty years and that has a record of over 
25,000 trout, many salmon (steelheads) and innumerable 
bass; but at last it shows signs of the heavy work that 
a salmon gives a light rod. It is sprung badly, and on 
looking at it the other day I was forced to the conclu- 
sion that its days of usefulness were over and it must be 
relegated to the attic with the old muzzleloaders, powder 
flasks, wad cutters, percussion caps and a chest of drawers 
full of obsolete sporting paraphernalia that at some later 
day the rising generation will amuse themselves by over- 
hauling and have a deal of fun criticising grandpop's old 
.. , traps. 
Taking my semi-occasional walk through the market 
to-day, to look at the fish and game, I was surprised to 
see the small quantity of the latter and inquired of a 
dealer why. He informed me that the restrictions put on 
the export of game by the Supervisors of the adjoining 
counties and the preserving of the marshes by the shooting 
clubs had knocked out the market-hunter to a considera- 
ble extent and the receipts of game were small. Ducks 
were selling at $16 a dozen, quite a contrast to old-time 
prices, when a pair of mallards or canvasbacks brought- 
but 40 cents and teal $1 per dozen, at which time salmon 
were 5 cent per pound, and in still earlier days btit 3 
cents; and T have seen cart loads unsold dumped into 
the bav. These were called poor man's beef. 
At thg fs-te the Cstnrferies on the coEtst above are p^clt* 
ing them, it won't be many years before a salmon will be 
a curiosity. I saw a ship loading to-day with 150,000 
cases for Liverpool, and this is no uncommon thing. 
The only wonder is that there are so many fish left at the 
present time in the Northern rivers, especially as as those 
caught are spawning fish. Think of the millions that 
are destroyed. One cannot but have sympathy for the 
next generation, for by the time it comes along the show 
for game and fish will be mighty slim. However, we old 
fogies will all be tucked away by that time, and like Bret 
Harte's Chinaman when curled up on the floor by a biff 
on the pit of his stomach, will take no further interest in 
the proceedings. All the game will be wiped out by this 
geueration before we go. The next will have to fall back 
on Filipinos and such like live game. There's very good 
shooting down that way just at present — no close season. 
The only drawback is they have a bad habit of shooting 
back again, which is objectionable. What a lot of high 
cost breechloaders there will be in a few years reposing 
on brackets in attics which there will be no use for — no 
game left to shoot, and a deer or moose will be one of the 
menagerie curiosities, with the hippopotamus. 
PODGERS. 
Sa.v Francisco, Cal., Nov. 3. 
Yukon Notes, 
{Concluded from J>age 304.) 
Changes in the Yukon/ 
The other day I received some, letters forwarded from 
Dawson City which had been two years all but two 
months in reaching me. Apparently they are getting 
postal matters straightened out on the Yukon. For seven 
months I heard nothing from my family, and when I 
came East I came to the wrong place and lost a day in 
seeing them because I was unaware that their plans had 
been changed and that they had passed the winter in an- 
other town. Everything has changed on the Yukon now. 
They have a railroad that carries goods across White 
Pass to the navigable waters of the Yukon for $6 a hun- 
dred where we had seen the rate $ioo a hundred. There 
are fine river steamers on the lakes above White Horse 
, and on the river below, and the route that caused so much 
agony and sweat but two short years ago is now opened to 
tourist travel. The telegraph has at last reached Dawson, 
and never again will the great log city — the greatest the 
world has ever seen — be cut off from communication with 
the outer world, as it was all through the winter of 
1897-98. How like romance does the story of the first 
newspaper to reach Dawson when the river opened in '98 
read! Already we begin to doubt the .historic fact that 
$15 was paid for it on the river's front, and that the man 
who bought it earned hundreds of dollars reading from it 
the account of Dewey's victory to eager audiences who 
paid a dollar a head admission to the hail which he had 
hired to read it to them. We begin to doubt that snow- 
shoes were ever $40 a pair at the Pelly, or that our simple 
meals of mush and bacon and scorched beans cost as 
m.uch a day as we could have lived at the Waldorf- 
Astoria for. Yet a glimpse at the expense account in 
my notebook substantiates the latter fact. On the last of 
our journey we ran out of supplies and in three instances 
had to purchase limited amounts of food from persons 
who happened to have a surplus. For this food we paid 
from $1 to $1.50 a pound. The sellers had no scales and 
they guessed the weight of the food, and they did not al- 
ways guess it to our advantage. A small cup was con- 
sidered to hold a pound, whether it was beans or rice or 
flour, and it was always struck measure. It was surpris- 
ing how small some of the cups really were. A man 
could hunt through house furnishing stores a long time 
before he could duplicate those cups. 
To aggravate the high prices for the cheapest staples, 
we had insatiable appetites. Each of us ate our own weight 
in food in thirty days. Double the army ration would not 
have satisfied us. We were exposed to Arctic tempera- 
tures day and night and never thoroughly warmed, and 
an excessive amount of food for fuel was required. At the 
.start we tried putting ourselves on rations of 3lbs. a day, 
but the plan was not a success. We felt empty and tired 
and unequal to the work demanded of us, though earlier 
in the year a less amount had amply filled our require- 
ments. 
We craved fat more than anything else. I have seen 
men eating their bacon raw in order to lose none of the 
fat, and from freshening our bacon in water at the start 
and frying it to a crisp, we came to barely brown it on 
our- trip out over the ice. We could have eaten blubber 
or tallow candles. 
One of our greatest dainties was raisins dipped in the 
grease of the frying pan when it was about the consist- 
ency of butter. A raisin with a chunk of pure grease on 
it the same size was a tid-bit that made one's mouth water 
in anticipation. 
Supper and breakfast were eaten by the light of the 
camp-fire, which was the next worst thing to no light at 
all. We only saw what we were eating at one meal in 
the day, and at the others it was perhaps as well that we 
didn't. 
Haghy Day, the Mail Cafrier, 
At White Horse we made the acquaintance of Hughy 
Day. Day is the man to whom the honor for bringing 
out the first news of the Klondike is said to belong. Six 
weeks before that July day in 1897 when the Portland 
brought the first fortunate Eldorado and Bonanza miners 
to San Francisco, setting the world wild with their story 
of the great gold strike, Hughy Day poled uo the river in 
a Porterboro canoe and carried the news to Juneau. 
The first reports of gold strikes are always sensational 
and Day's news did not receive the credence to which it 
was entitled. It was one man's say so. and though Day 
was known to be sober and reliable, most men waited to 
hear the report substantiated from other sources. And so 
it happened that the world at large knew nothing of the 
Klondike till nearly a year after its discoverey. 
Day, though a young man, is an old-timer on the 
Yukon. He crossed Chilcoot Pass for the first time in 
'84. In 1885 he was one of the seventeen men who com- 
prised the entire white population of a vast territory on 
the upper Yukon. Of these, three were Indian traders 
^n4 the other fourteen miners. Day has ma4e nine round 
trips from Forty Mile and Dawson and three from Circle. 
He believes in shaving off the mustache in winter to 
facilitate eating and talking. It is neither pleasant nor 
safe to have-one's mouth frozen fast and to have the words 
locked in and the food locked out. Forty below zero is 
cold weather, and you can tell when it is ioxty below or 
colder by the white steam which the camp-fire gives off 
in place of smoke. In the winter of '96-'97 Day made 
three trips out from Dawson, and this, with one the fol- 
lowing summer and one the winter of '97-'98, comprised 
his experience as a mail carrier. 
Day said that the best time for traveling with dog team 
was in February. In the latter part of this month the 
sun begins to take effect on the snow and to form a crust, 
and the wind also helps pack the snow. With one man 
ahead on snowshoes to break trail and one to follow to 
hold up the sled fast time may be made. Day has aver- 
aged fifty-three miles a day traveling in this way, and 
covered sixty-eight miles in a single day between Miller 
and Forty Mile on the route between Dawson and Circle. 
Day's tent and stove were marvels of lightness. To- 
gether they weighed only 2iJ^lbs. The tent was a 7 x 7 A 
tent. The stove Would burn i8in. wood and weighed only 
6j^lbs., including the pipe. It was made from two coal 
oil cans riveted together, and though it had no oven and 
could not be used for baking, it was satisfactory in other 
respects and warmed the tent very nicely. The average 
Yukon stove weighs from 25 to 4olbs., according to size 
and whether or not asbestos is used as a lining. 
Day was traveling with Wm. Kinney, who owned the 
dog team and had just refused $1,500 for it. The team 
consisted of two full-blooded Malamoot, one Siberian and 
two other half-breed Malamoot and Siwash dogs. They 
fed the dogs on bacon, salmon and grits and rice. Day 
said that the bacon was first-class dog food, but heavy to 
pack. Salmon is better and very much lighter. King sal- 
mon are best. Dog salmon run late and are full of water, 
because there is no time to properly dry them before cold 
weather sets in. 
Day was only thirty-six years old at the time I saw him, 
but he had had adventures enough to fill several books. 
He told us some of his hairbreadth escapes, but afterward 
said he was afraid it would worry his mother in Jimeau 
if she heard of them and got the idea that his business 
was rislcy. and he asked not to have them repeated. As a 
sample of the hardships the pioneers had to put up with, 
he stated that in 1885 the miners on the Yukon, besides 
their flour, had only 3olbs. of bacon and what sugar could 
be held in a pocket handkerchief to last them during the 
winter. 
At White Horse Rapids. 
An ice jam at the foot of White Horse had backed up 
the water to such an extent that the rapids themselves had 
disappeared. It would have been hard to convince a man 
watching the oily black flow of the water between the 
basalt cliffs for the first time that the place was the famous 
rapid that had wrecked so many lives and fortunes. The 
construction of a dam and a lock at this point would make 
the navigation safe and easy. The neighborhood had 
changed a great deal since we saw it last. Work on two 
tramways was progressing, and already little settlements 
had sprung up at the foot of White Horse and the head 
of the canon. Mr. G. A. Kline, of Tacoma, was building 
the best of these tramways. Practically his entire con- 
struction force were professional men or men with spe- 
cialized training. Handling pick and shovel as_ day la- 
borers were two experienced physicians, one marine chitf 
engineer with papers of unlimited tonnage, two machin- 
ists, one Salt Lake City ex-police captain, two well- 
known caterers and restaurant proprietors from Salt Lake 
City, two expert bookkeepers and stenographers and an 
ex-mine superintendent. I believe Mr. Kline said there 
was only one man in his employ who had not left a good 
job when he came to Alaska. These men expected when 
they left home to handle pick and shovel, but they little 
thought this was to be their Klondike. It is to be hoped 
that some have dug to gold since then and found some 
substantial reward for their pluck and enterprise. 
Sailing Over the Snow. 
Mr. Kline believed that snow boats modeled after the 
plan of ice boats could be used to advantage for transpor- 
tation on the lakes at the headwaters of the Yukon. 
"Back on the prairie in Dakota, near the Minnesota line," 
he said, "we were once snow-bound fifty miles frorn home. 
No horse or conveyance could get through the drifts,_ and 
the prospects for walking were not particularly bright. 
In this emergency one of the party rigged up a boat 
just like an ice boat, except that in plarce of steel runners 
he used wooden ones 3ft. in length cut from the front part 
of an old pair of skees. The snow was hard packed and 
the wind high. We made a bee line for home and reached 
there in such a short time that you would hardly believe 
me if I told you. Lots of the farmers were living in dug- 
outs approached by a kind of otter slide where they went 
in. Once we sailed right over the top of one of these 
houses. 
"The wind here in Alaska is all from the south. Every 
tree is bent down stream. It is a fair wind for men com- 
ing in, and they should take advantage of it." 
Further on we saw sails frequently used on sleds with 
very good results, and Mr. Kline's suggestion often re- 
curred to mind as a practical possibility. 
Men with One Idea. 
We traveled from the carion to Marsh Lake in one day, 
but the day following we encountered a terrific wind and 
did not reach Tagish Post till forty-eight hours later. 
This was the headquarters of the Canadian Customs De- 
partment, and at that time the most important police post 
above Dawson. It is only seventy-five miles from Dyea, 
on the salt waters, of the Pacific, and in that seventy-five 
miles, includinig White and Chilcoot passes, from 40,000 
to 50,006 men were camped waiting for an opportunity to 
go through to Dawson. In view of the impatient spirit 
that characterized the majority in this waiting army, it is 
a significant fact that the number of men who actually 
journeyed down river into starvation land from the time 
the jams formed in November until the last of January, 
when we left the country, might almost be counted upon 
the fingers of one hand. First were the Government 
messengers, John Peche, Andr|^'? Fleft an4 ToissanV 
