FORES! ANfi .^tREAM. 
466 
Sliafpe place, feaehed by f of ding the. rmi. Tills "^as 
once a fine, old house, with great open fireplaces/ full oi 
odd nooks and corners, and the surrounding country was 
the delight of some artists who accidentally stuinbled_ on 
the place ten years ago. The building was at that time 
occupied by Mrs. McAuley. Since then it has reverted 
to the State for taxes. The place is at the entrance to a 
noted hunting valley, and nearby are several small lakes. 
North Hud.son has seen beter days in years past. All 
over the town are ruins of saw mills and forges and other 
forgotten enterprises. At Deadwater is a little settle- 
ment that but for the Canuck squatters would be a de- 
serted village. Last year when I passed the place the 
school house had been given up to pigs and chickens. 
J. B. Burn HAM. 
CHICAGO AND THE WEST 
■'Life in the Far West." 
Chicago, 111., Nov. 2. — My friend — and I shall call him 
my very dear friend — Mr. Horace Kephart, librarian of 
the Mercantile Library, of St. Louis, has sent me another 
book on the West, that great West of the old times to- 
ward which all Americans still turn with interest. There 
may be some news in the story of this book ; for the term 
news is an odd and contradictory one. Nothing is really 
news if it is more than a day old, or unless upon the 
other hand it is half a century or so old. In our busy 
to-day we are forgetting rapidly our different yesterday, 
and to be told of it sometimes excites surprise and 
interest. 
This particular book is called "Life in the Far West," 
and it was written by George Frederick Ruxton, pub- 
lished originally in 184S in Blackwood's Magazine, and 
printed in book form by William Blackwood & Sons, 
Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1849. Ruxton was a young 
English army officer, and he died at St. Louis, in Amer- 
ica, when he was but twenty-eight years of age. His 
life was in many respects a remarkable one, and he 
wrote one of the most remarkable books about America 
which ever was done by an Englishman ; so fair, so appre- 
ciative and indeed so lovingly enthusiastic a book that he 
might have been himself American-born. Indeed, Rtrxton 
was a man too great to belong to any one country. He 
belonged first of all to the great craft of lovers of nature, 
of observers of outdoor life — in short, the guild of 
sportsmen. To belong to this guild is indeed to be cos- 
mopolitan. Hence Ruxton's book is a very different affair 
from that of Sir Richard Burton, who once traveled 
across our Western country, and very different from those 
numerous recountals of wholesale butchery in the Amer- 
ican West with which other wealthy Englishmen have 
sought to place the laurel crown of glory upon their own 
shrinking brows. Mr. Kephart tells me— and Mr. Kep- 
hart's word on all books pertaining to the West I esteem 
to be the most valuable and conclusive of any in America-r' 
that he considers Ruxton's book one of the most faith- 
ful and valuable writings extant on early Western life, 
He deplores only the bloodthirstiness and crudeness in 
which Ruxton revels while describing his Western trap- 
pers, regretting that he did not find place in his pages 
for some of the gentler but not less courageous characters 
of the West at that early day. 
But Ruxton was young— very young to have done what 
he accomplished before his untimely death. He was only 
seventeen years of age when he left the military school 
of Sandhurst and joined the Spanish army in order to 
learn of practical warfare. Then he received a commis- 
sion in the Eighty-ninth Regiment of the English Army, 
and was sent to Canada. Now he was upon the Amer- 
ican frontier, and all the sportsman, all the primeval 
man in him went into mutiny. He quit the army as too 
tame, and drifted to the Missouri River as naturally as 
the Missouri River runs to the sea. This, we may remem- 
ber, was in the time of Kit Carson, of Old Bill Williams, 
and of Old Bill Hamilton, who was then Young Bill 
.Hamilton. Bent's Fort and Taos and Santa Fe were, then 
the salient points on the Western trail. The great Mor- 
mon migration had not yet begun. In short, all the grand 
old West was still the West, fitting country for such men 
as Ruxton, who understood and loved it. Nor did Ruxton 
ever forget the West. In 1845 he tried exploring Africa, 
making foot journeys in North Africa and Algeria, and 
later attempting a journey across Central Africa, which, 
however, failed. Then he explored Mexico, and wrote a 
brok aboDt that country. He contemplated a voyage to 
Borneo, and was asked by the Aborigines Protection 
Society of England to go to Canada to "organize the In- 
dian tribes." Of these many enterprises, Ruxton naively 
says, expressing a feeling which I doubt not many of us 
have shared with him, "For my own part and inclination 
I wish to go to all parts of the world at once!" Now 
observe, this youth had the whole world to choose from, 
and again, even as the Missouri runs toward the sea, he 
gravitated toward the Missouri, and toward that country 
which I conceive to have been the most estimable tor a 
man that the whole surface of the great round earth has 
ever seen. Here is what he says about it: 
"Although liable to an accusation of barbarism, I must 
confess tliat the very happiest moments of my life have 
been spent in the wilderness of the far West, and I never 
recall but with pleasure the remembrance of my solitary 
camp in the Bayou Salade, with no friend near me more 
faithful than my rifle, and no companions more sociable 
than my horse and mules, or the attendant coyote which 
nightly serenaded us. With a plentiful supply of dry 
pine logs on the fire, I would sit cross-legged, enjoying 
the genial warmth, and, pipe in mouth, watch the blue 
smoke as it curled upward, building castles in its vapory 
wreaths, and in the fantastic shapes that it assumed, peo- 
pling the solitude with those far away. Scarcely, how- 
ever, did I ever wish to change such hours of freedom 
for all the luxuries of civilized life; and unnatural and 
extraordinary as it may appear, yet such is the fascina- 
tion of the life of the mountain hunter, that I believe tnat 
not one instance could be adduced, of even the most 
polished and civilized of men, who had once tasted the 
sweets of its attendant Hbert}', and freedom of every 
worldy care, not regreiting the moment when he ex- 
changed it for the monotonous life of the settlements, nor 
sighing, and sighing again, once more to partake of its 
pleasures and allurements," , 
There is a very true ring to the above, nor is there any 
''.otiriieff'Mt or fif?ectatioti th-fotighout tlife bdok, neither 
any show of prejudice and superciliousness. The man 
is m love with the West, and the spirit of the West, with 
the environment and the cnaracters wiiich ihat environ- 
ment had produced. Giving up all his other plans, he 
headed once more for the Missouri and the Rockies, over 
the old Independence trail, writing thus from London 
just before he started : "Human nature can't go on feed- 
ing on civilized fixings in this big village, and this child 
has felt like going West for many a month. My route 
lakes me via New York, the lakes and St. Louis, to Fort 
Leavenworth, or Independence, on the Indian frontier. 
Thence I strike the Santa Fe trail to the Arkansas, away 
up that river to the mountains, wintering in the Bayou Sa- 
lade, across the mountains next spring to Great Salt 
Lake — and that's far enough to look forward to — always 
supposing my hair is not lifted by Comanche or Pawnee 
on the scalping route of Coon Creeks and the Pawnee 
Forks." 
This was written after he had completed his book, but, 
poor boy, he never saw the Rockies again. Taken ill at 
St, Louis, he died in the fall of 1S48. This was two 
years after Iowa was admitted to the Union, and it was 
six years before my own father moved out into Iowa, 
which has always seemed to me as having been a thousand 
years ago, and at the very beginning of the world. It 
was wild enough when my father crossed the plains to 
Denver, when Denver was a village, but how much 
wilder must have been the West-bound trail when Ruxton 
traveled it. Nowadays we cress that country by steam, 
and we pay a guide a thousand dollars to show us some 
footprints of game in the valley where Ruxton sat cross- 
legged before his fire! 
I have been so much pleased with Ruxton himself that 
I have little space left for Ruxton's book. It is a wild 
book — ^what we might call a woolly book. The dialect of 
the mountain trappers is something different from_ any- 
thing in American literature, and indeed I think it tinged 
with the English idea of what the American dialect 
should be, as see Charles Dickens and Sir Richard Bur- 
ton. The sturdy character of the American hunter and 
trapper is there, however, and I presume no better pic- 
ture exists than these descriptions of the Hfe lived by the 
white frontiersmen among the Indian tribes. It is noth- 
ing for a trapper to have an arrow pulled out from his 
body, to have the wound staunched with a pad of beaver 
fur, and then go on about his business as though nothing 
out of the ordinary had happened. Ned Buntline at his 
best, or worst, never imagined Indian fights more bitter 
and bloody than these which Ruxton's characters actu- 
ally saw. The kilUng of big game is a matter of course, 
and the whole action of the book is occupied with non- 
chalant big deeds. ; ! " 
Most of us can learn of the old West only through 
books such as these, and I wish the book were more com- 
mon, so that it might more easily be obtained. The 
plan of the book is that of a loosely constructed story, 
but the author declares that the characters are not ficti- 
tious. He mentions Kit Carson, but does not bring him 
into the story. Killbuck I do not know, nor La Bonte, 
but Bill Williams is introduced in his proper person, and 
this is what the author says of him: 
"Bill Williams, that old 'hard case,' had spent forty 
years or more in the mountains, until he had become as 
tough as the parfleche soles of his moccasins. He rode 
ahead, his body bent over his saddle horn, across which 
rested a long, heavy rifle, his keen gray eyes peering from 
under the slouched brim of a flexible felt hat, black and 
shiny with grease. His buckskin hunting shirt, be- 
daubed until it had the appearance of polished leather, 
hung in folds over his bony carcass. * * * In the 
shoulder belt, which contained his powder horn and bul- 
let pouch, were fastened the various instruments essen- 
tial to .one pursuing his mode of life. An awl with deer 
horn handle, and the point defended by a point of cherry 
wood carved by his own hands, hung at the back of the 
belt, side by side with the worm for cleaning the rifle; 
and under this was a squat and quaint-looking bullet 
mould, the handles guarded by strips of buckskin to save 
his fingers from burning when running baUs, having for 
its companion a little bottle made from the point of an 
antelope horn, scraped transparent, which contained the 
'medicine' used in baiting the traps. The old coon's face 
was sharp and thin, a long nose and chin hobnobbing 
each other, and his head was always bent forward, giv- 
ing him the appearance of being humbacked. He ap- 
peared to look neither to the right nor to the left, but in 
fact his little twinkling eye was everywhere. He spoke 
in a whining, thin, cracked voice, and in a tone that left 
the hearer in doubt whether he was laughing or crying." 
The foregoing is the fullest description I have ever 
read of Bill Williams, though I do not know how accu- 
rate we may call Ruxton's account of the death of Will- 
iams, regarding which I have understood there is some 
divergence of opinion. Ruxton described Williams as 
being found dead in a solitary camp, sitting upright 
against a tree, frozen quite stiff, with a wound in his 
chest which might have been the cause of his death. 
This he says was in a "wild canon near the elevated 
mountain valley called the 'New Park.' " 
He who reads Ruxton shall hear of the "Yellow Stone," 
of the "Soda Springs," of "Eustis Lake" and of other 
places which may be within the bounds of what is now 
Yellowstone Park. The South Pass of the Rockies, the 
desert trails of California, and all the famous localities of 
the Rockies, under names, perhaps, now forgotten, shall 
appear, and there shall be full story of the old-time trap- 
pers' rendezvous. Let me add what he says about these 
historic metings of the trappers: 
"Here were congregated many mountaineers whose 
names are famous in the history of the far West. Fitz- 
patrick and Hatcher and old Bill Williams arrived with 
their bands; Sublette came with his men from the Yel- 
low Stone, and many of Wyeth's New Englanders were 
there. Chabonard, with his half-breeds — Wah-keitchas 
all — brought his peltries from the lower country; and 
half a dozen Shawnee and Delaware Indians, with a 
Mexican from Taos — a fine, strapping fellow — one Mar- 
celline. Here, too, arrived the 'bourgeois' traders of the 
'North West Company' with their superior equipments, 
ready to meet their trappers and purchase the beaver." 
Those are names not familiar to all of us, though I 
take it they were engraved upon the history of the West 
more deeply than many of ours will be. 
I know I ought to quit quoting from this book, but 
it ia hard to break k\v^f ffbni it Perhaps t may be ^l?: 
cessful in the attempt to drop it after telling how the: , 
butchered buffalo in those days when there was buffalo t<- 
throw away. This is how Ruxton says it was done: 
"They turned the carcass on the belly, stretching ou 
the legs to support it on each side. A transverse cu; 
was then made at the nape of the neck, and gatherin^j 
the long hair of the boss in one hand, the skin was sep' 
arated from the shoulder. It was then laid open from thi-i 
point to the tail along the spine, and then, freed frouj 
the sides and pulled down to the brisket, but still attachc^i 
to it, was stretched upon the "ground to receive the diS' 
sected portions. Then the shoulder was severed, th<l 
fleece removed from along the backbone, and the hmvi 
ribs cut off with a tomahawk. All this was placed upor 
the skin, and after the 'ijoudins' had been withdrawn fron 
the stomach, and the togue, a great dainty, taken iron' 
the head, the meat was packed upon the mule and th(, 
whole party hurried to camp rejoicing. Far into tlni 
still watches of the night the fat-clad 'depouille' saw it: 
fleshy mass grow small by degrees and beautifully les; 
before the trenchant blades of the hungry mountaineers.' 
We do not butcher our buffalo in just that way to-day, 
A Good Game Season. 
Chicago, 111., Dec. 2. — We are having a mild and ven, 
late fall in this vicinity this year, and according to th( 
weather prophets we are to have a mild winter. At ih'u 
time last year the weather was cold and the ground fro 
zen, and all over a good part of the Northern country 
there had been heavy and destructive snow storms. Wi 
have hardly had any freezing weather here about Chi 
cago this fall, and the weatner continues mild and cloud; 
with more semblance 'of rain than of snow. Of coursi 
such conditions are very favorable to the small game o 
the country and make toward a good supply of gann 
next year, provided that we do not reach a season o 
crusted snow later on in the winter. Our quail stant 
cold weather pretty well unless the snow is very deep 
The worst thing for them is rain or melting snow fol 
lowed by a sudden hard freeze. It is to be hoped tha 
the weather prophets are correct, and that we are to hav' 
favorable weather this coming winter. Directly abou 
Chicago, we have had no snow as yet, but down in In 
diana two or three weeks ago they had a good tracking 
snow, and this fact was a very unfortunate one for thi 
quail. The local shooters turned out en masse, and it i 
reported that the slaughter caused by the flock hunter 
was very large. When Bob White leaves his record 01 
the snow, he is increasing his natural enemies and de 
creasing his natural resources of defense a hundred fold 
Some of our shooters who were down in Indiana jus- 
after the snow declared that the game over a large se<; 
tion of the country was pretty nearly cleaned up by thi 
flock shooters. 
The Deer Season. 1 
The general trend of advice in regard to the deer sea' 
son in Wisconsin and Michigan this fall is to the effec 
that the hunting was not very good. It was a dry fal 
and the still hunters had hard times. I do not think tb 
total number of deer kiled was up to that of last year 
and I am disposed to believe that the practice of houndi 
ing was not so generally followed in violation of the law 
Friends at Northern points tell me that the trains whicl 
formerly carried numbers of hounds, into the woods a 
the opening of the season, this year had almost no dogi 
at aU. I should think it fair to suppose that next seasoi 
will show the deer not very much cut down in numbers 
though of course less than annual toll of the rifle-bearin£ 
muscallonge fishers. 
If deer hunting in our pine woods has this fall beet 
less sanguinary than usual so far as the deer are con 
cerned, it has been fully up to the average of earlier year 
in disastrous consequences to the hunters themselves 
The story of the deer hunting casualties in the East ha 
been pretty fully made up, and the reports from Main' 
and the Adirondacks read as though they came fron 
South Africa rather than from America. Information o 
this kind is difficult to collect in the West, because wi 
do not have so accurate a system of check on our hunt 
ers as they have in Maine and the Adirondacks, and o 
course all news of this nature is kept out of the paper 
as much as possible by those most concerned in suci 
accidents. I see it stated, probably largely on hearsay 
or on guess, that twenty-three persons were killed m th^ 
Adirondacks. On equally loose authority it js stated tha' 
six deer hunters were killed or fatally wounded in Wis 
consin and that four men were killed in Michigan, A di&i 
patch from Marquette, Mich,, bearing date of Nov. 30 
reads as follows: 
"The deer hunting season just ended resulted in a tota' 
of eleven hunters being killed and seven wounded in th^ 
Michigan and Lake Superior sections of Wisconsin ant 
Minnesota. Most were mistaken for deer. A few weri 
shot through their own carlessness." 
Mr. George F. Winslow, of Eau Claire, Wis., tells m; 
that he heard of four hunters who were killed in uppc 
Wisconsin this fall. He tells me that sometimes the dee 
hunters go out in such numbers that it is more like 
company of soldiers than a party of hunters. He say 
the firing at all sorts of things was incessant, and it wa 
dangerous to be in the woods. He saw one party c 
fourteen hunters who went into camp, and he saw om 
railropd coach packed full of deer hunters who had com" 
up together from Indiana, While he himself was i 
camp shooting ducks there were three camps of dee 
hunters who came in and pitched their tents near hiir 
two parties of six each and another of four. He heart 
these hunters shooting a good deal, but did not lean 
that they killed any deer or men. 
Mr. Winsliow says that Eau Claire is one of the great, 
est entering points of the Northern deer country and ;' 
great many hunters pass , through that city on their wa- 
in and out. While he had no means of accurately esti 
mating the number of deer in the country tributary 1(| 
Eau Claire, he saw a great many loads of deer on th'' 
way out of the woods and shipped through Eau Claire 
Mr. Winslow says frankly that the Eau Claire hunters dt 
not use dogs any more in their deer hunting. They for 
merly did so, but a number of years ago a number of thv 
leading citizens of Eau Claire got arrested for huntin! 
deer with dogs, and it cost them each about $200 befor* 
they got through. They no longer counsel that inethof 
of kilUng deer. 
