70 
FOREST^ AND j_ STREAM. 
[July 28, 1900. 
ingless misnomer and only possible of application to the 
sea trout of the British Provinces, which, like the sal- 
mon, winter in salt water. 
The Boston Herald a fortnight since spoke of the cap- 
ture of several large "salmon trout" in Diamond Ponds, 
where there never was a lake trout and which I can only 
interpret as referring to the descendants of the "win- 
ninish" which I planted in those ponds in 1881 and which 
so far have escaped public notice. 
I am trying to find out about it and if it is as I think 
will advise you. I know my plant of the same species 
in Connecticut Lake in 1880 has materialized satisfac- 
torily in the last few years. 
Von W. 
CHICAGO AND THE WEST, 
Movemets of Western Sportsmen. 
Chicago, 111., July 21.— This is naturally the dullest 
time of the year, as has been before remarked, yet not- 
withstanding bad weadier, bad luck and bad prospects a 
great many of our Chicago anglers are going out, and 
some of them are coming back with good results to 
show for their outings. Below will be found notes re- 
garding some of the catches made during the past week 
and the Httle trips of others who are now absent or jtist 
starting to leave the city. 
Mr. E. L. Peniston and Mr. C. C. Haskins have re- 
turned from Long Lake, Wis., where they put in a cou- 
ple of weeks under rather unfortunate circumstances. 
They got rainy weather for nearly a week of their stay. 
They caught nine Great Northern pike running in weight 
from 5 to IS pounds and fifty-five bass of good size. 
Mr. Harry Miner, whose uniformly good scores have 
been published from week to week throughout the sea- 
son, leaves again to-day for his regular weekly trip. On 
bis last week's trip he caught in Wind Lake, Wis., twenty- 
two bass whose average weight was 3 pounds certainly 
a very nice catch indeed. Mr. Miner has probably had 
better bass fishing this summer than any other Chicago 
angler. Wind Lake is east of Tishagon Lake, in that 
same country, east of Fox River and northeast of Bur- 
lington. 
Another good point this year on the Wisconsin Cen- 
tral R. R. is my own old country around Mukwonago. 
At Eagle Lake the bass fishing has been running extraor- 
dinarily good, and I learn that the little creek which 
J. B. H. and I discovered years ago has this year been 
turning out some verj"- heavy bass. Peace be with it. I 
shall never see it again, now that J. B. H. cannot go 
with me. 
Mr. William White has been having good fishing in 
that Waukesha countiy and he goes up there again to- 
day, taking with him Mr. R. B. Organ. They will prob- 
ably have success. 
Mr. Byron E. Veatch, of the Tokalon Vineyard, has 
returned from his trip to the Flambeau River and the 
Mason Lake chain. Mr. Veatch made another good trip 
this year and is pleased down to the ground. He took 
eighty-five bass, the largest about 4 pounds, seven mus- 
keliunge, four wall-eyed pike and one wildcat. What 
bait he used for the latter I do not know, but the cat 
was a very big one and his hide is much prized by Mr. 
Veatch. 
Mr. F. E. Schall has returned from Fox Lake, 111., 
where in three days he killed twenty-five nice bass and 
two pike. 
Mr. Thomas Ambrose, of this city, had a very pleas- 
ant little experience wading the Fox River this week. 
He killed nine bass and one very large wall-eyed pike, 
the latter weighing 10 pounds plump. Mr. Ambrose 
usually fishes with the fl)^ but I presume was using bait 
when he took the wall-eye. 
Mr. H. English has returned from his trip to State 
Line. He had a splendid time, but did not get very 
much fishing, catching only nine bass, seven wall-eyes 
and five pickerel. He took three days for a trip after 
muskellunge, and during the three days he got just one 
strike from a 'lunge, which he failed to hook. Mr. Eng- 
lish is of the opinion that the people up there know how 
to take care of themselves. It costs a city angler $1.50 
to walk a mile and a quarter. It costs him $2.50 to walk 
four miles and $3.75 to walk twelve miles. The Lord 
only knows what it would cost if one rode instead of 
walking. If you get a team you are not expected to 
ride, but pay for the privilege of walking behind the 
wagon. Mr. English is not so much grieved as puzzled 
over this tariff, but says he will knoAv more about the 
game next time he goes up there. 
In Minnesota. 
Out in Minnesota they are not satisfied with catches 
of bass which Avould seem pretty large to us Chicago 
people. I was talking with some Minneapolis anglers 
while at that city last week and learned of some very 
good takes made not far from there. Mr. J. C. Jocelyn 
and Mr. Chas. Lewis fished for six hours one day in 
Lake Sylvia, and during that time took 108 nice bass. 
Ihis was last week. A Mr. Melville, fishing at Shady 
Oak, in a small lake, caught eight bass which are said 
to have been the best in average seen in that countrv 
for a long time. The smallest of these fish weighed 
334 pounds, there were four which weighed 4^^ pounds 
each, one weighed 5 pounds and one sY' pounds It 
shou d be added that these fish were dressed as soon as 
caught and were weighed in the city some time after 
being taken and after they were cleaned. They must have 
been very big bass. 
• S. S Johnson, of Minneapolis, has not been hav- 
ing much fishing lately, but he told me of the famous 
sport which used to be had in Lake Martha and Lake 
Susan, above Minneapolis. Mr. Johnson said that when 
he first ran across these, lakes he was with a camping 
party They had no boat, but backed a wagon out into 
the lake so as to get nearer the deeper water Mr John- 
son stood in the back of the wagon while the other 
boys were fi^^'^^ the tent and getting camp ready, and 
before they had this done he took forty-six small-mouth 
bass. To-day we have but little idea of the number of 
bass which once swarmed in these Minnesota lakes 
Continual fi.shing has cut down the supplv in manv of 
these waters. In some parts of the State "the Scandina- 
vian farmers use gjl! nets every fall for cptchin^ whltefi^h 
Naturally these nets do not stop at whitefish. and in some 
of the farming settlements the lakes are now practically 
ruined for rod and reel purposes. 
Green Lake, near Taylor's Falls, is one of the waters 
tipped for good bass fishing now. Mr. Matson, of one of 
the local gun stores, reported some success there during 
the week just past. 
Modest Bullhead Story. 
Lake Calhoun, within the city limits of Minneapolis, 
has certainly been fished pretty hard, but even now it 
yields occasional very good catches of bass. It was on 
Lake Calhoun that Mr. John Nilsson, of Minneapolis, 
the champion performer on skates, once had a singular 
experience with bullheads. I seem to be continually 
falling across remarkable bullhead stories, but I will 
preface this one by stating that it is not a competitor of 
the Kekoskee bullhead story, though had it been prop- 
erly nurtured it might have grown up into a good story 
in a modest way. It seems that when Mr. Nilsson was 
a mere boy he used to go down to the boat house on 
Lake Calhoun and play around. He discovered a hole 
in the floor of the boat house and also discovered that 
the water below the house was frequented by large num- 
bers of bullheads. Not having with him any fishing 
tackle, but having discovered a large beefsteak on the 
table of the club house, he bethought himself of a scheme. 
Taking a length of good stiff wire which he found near 
by, he firmly bound the beefsteak to one end of this 
wire, and breaking off the wire to a length of about 6 
feet he attached a stout cross piece at the top for a han- 
dle. Carefully inserting the beefsteak into the water, he 
was surprised to find himself nearly pulled through the 
hole by the multitude of bullheads which seized upon the 
beefsteak. Bracing himself strongly he extracted his 
bullhead machine from the lake and found attached to 
the beefsteak as many bullheads as there was room for 
the steak to hold. To make the story short, he repeated 
this operation until he had the floor of the club house 
entirely covered to a depth of several feet with bullheads. 
He only desisted because the steak wore out. It is too 
bad that he did not have a boarding house article for 
his operation, in which case he might perhaps have made 
a bullhead record worthy of comparison, in a humble 
way, with those of really good bullhead stories. 
Minnetonfca Pike. 
I was stating that Mr. W. L. Wells and myself intended 
to fish a little on Lake Minnetonka. We did get ut 
for a couple of days with Mr. Carrington Phelps, of 
Spring Park. We did nothing very startling with 1' le 
bass, but raised some disturbance among the Minne- 
tonka pike. For some reason or other the pike, or pick- 
erel, as they are locally called, seemed to be very gacny 
in those waters, and I must say that we had several 
pretty stiff fights wdth them. I struck one which weighed 
8 or 10 pounds, and which had to be brought up to the 
boat seven times before Mr. Phelps could get a hold on 
him strong enough to get him in the boat. This fish 
had evidently fought once too often and had fought be- 
fore. One side of its jaw was nearly torn away, from a 
niix-up with some former spoon hook. I caught this 
fish on a little Skinner casting spoon about as big as 
my thumb nail, with a frog on the single hook. It made 
a rattling good fight and turned out to be the gem of 
our collection for that day. 
Regarding this particular pickerel, I must add a word. 
Billy Wells had come over to mv place that day from 
his cottage, four miles away, on his wheel, and when 
he started to go home at the end of the day I told him 
to take the big pike along, as I could not use so big a 
fish. The question was how to carry the pike, and in 
solving this problem Mr. Wells showed the genius of 
the real outdoor man. He lashed the fish firmly to his 
rod case with stout twine and then lashed the rod case 
fast to the frame of his wheel The old fellow was longer 
than the rod case and longer than the wheel, and when 
Mr. Wells started off astride of him through the woods, 
the pike was sticking out fore and aft in a rather remark- 
able manner. I imagine any one meeting Mr. Wells 
on the road must have been somewhat surprised The 
latter, however, .^^tates that he got the fish home safely 
and it proved very good, baked. 
On another day when we went out together Mr Wells 
was high hook. We had very heavy wind that day and 
ought to have caught some bass, but failed to do so. We 
had to have something to eat for lunch, and so started out 
to catch some humble sunfish. We must have anchored 
just above the original sunfish tabernacle, for we began 
to catch them, great big fellows, too, about as fast as we 
could drop worms down to them. We caught a minnow 
pail full and had to stop. After lunch we resumed our 
tro Img, and this time it was Mr. Wells who had all the 
luck. He took several pike— his largest about 6 or 7 
pounds, and I think this fish was the handsome<^t pike I 
ever saw. It was thick, fat, and nicely colored, and it put 
up a fight as good as any muskellunge of the same 
weight. It sprang clear of the water once, quite like the 
muskellunge, and it needed a great deal of care in handlino- 
to get It into the boat at all. We regretted very much 
that we had not caught this fish before lunch in^^tead of 
after, so that Mr. Phelps might once more perform his 
famous act of broiling cutlets of pike over ironwood 
coals. This feast we had had the day before, and found 
It mighty good. Mr. Wells and I fished together for a 
little while one rainy day in Black Lake, and though we 
had ten strikes, we succeeded only in landing three small 
pike. I got one nice fellow up bv the side of the boat but 
he stood up on his tail, shook his head and threw the 
spoon more than the length of the boat away from him 
We concluded that the pike was not such a slow fi<jh after 
all. 
The bass fishing is not good in Minnetonka now for 
the average man. The bass have left the shallows and 
are lying on the reefs in deep water. Unless one knows 
the location of the bars he is not apt to get very manv 
bass. Minnows are better now than frogs. A few 
parties of whom I heard had been taking twenty or thirty 
bass a day, still-fishing on the bars. 
A Boat Trip on the Father of "Waterg, 
Mr. J Edmund Strong, whom I have mentioned as 
ptartmg frir the north on ^ c^noe trip ^ith his friend, Mr, 
Selz, writes me very pleasantly regarding their experience 
in this the latest of their joint boating trips: 
"Mr. Selz and I returned home on Monday night of 
last week,'' he says, "after a canoeing cruise of ten days 
on the Chippewa and Mississippi rivers from Eau Claire 
to North McGregor. We had an exceedingly pleasant 
trip, but were disappointed in our fishing, having prac- 
tically none. It was our impression when we embarked at 
Eau Claire that we had a distance of something less than 
ISO miles to paddle, but we soon found that the distance 
was nearer 250 miles. We therefore made up our minds 
that we would 'plug' for the first three days or so and do 
our fishing and loafing on the latter part of the trip. 
Tuesday night, however— the night before the Fourth— 
we had some tremendous thunder storms, followed later 
in the night by a wind storm that was almost a hurri- 
cane. These stirred up the Mississippi and made it very 
muddy, and the continued rains and winds we had more 
or less for the ensuing several days kept it so all the 
way down, so that it was wholly impossible for us to fish. 
Had the river been in good condition we would un- 
doubtedly have had some very nice fishing, as we passed a 
great deal of very good fishing ground. 
"The Chippewa River we found most delightful; the 
Mississippi less so. From Reed's Landing down to 
Winona the stream and surroundings were interesting, but 
from Winona to La Crosse it was monotonous and tire- 
some, the stream being very broad, full of bars, channel 
very crooked, and we had a great deal of fierce head 
wind, with heavy seas. From La Crosse down to North 
McGregor we found the river more pleasant than any 
other portion of it we traveled over, the channel being 
narrower and -we being closer to the bluffs either on one 
side or the other all the way down. 
"We took with us from here our Peterboro canoe, tents, 
rubber beds, blankets and part of our commissary, com- 
pleting the latter at Eau Claire. We had previously hired 
at Eau Claire, through the very kind assistance of Mr. 
Geo. F. Winslow, of that city, a cook and a boatman, also 
a large skiff for the transportation of our two men and 
our outfit. Both the cook and the boatman proved most 
excellent men, and the frequency of towns all along the 
Mississippi enabled us to keep our commissary in good 
shape. All in all, we enjoyed the trip exceedingly, but 
the conclusion we reached after our trip over the Mis- 
sissippi was that the smaller tributary streams are much 
more pleastirable for canoeing." 
Wants Bigger Trout. 
Judge J. M. Kenyon, of Toledo, O., under date of July 
20, writes regarding trout fishing on the Au Sable and 
elsewhere. Judge Kenyon wants to find a place where he 
will get fewer trout and bigger ones, and he goes on to 
say : 
"I was much interested in your letter, 'A Michigan 
Fishing Trip/ as I had spent the first thirteen days of 
May on the Au Sable, a little account of which appears 
.n the same issue as an interview with my friend, J. 
Beebe. 
"I found the fishing excellent as to numbers, but small 
in size — at least two-thirds of the fish over 6 inches were 
under 8 inches — and while these small ones are delicious 
to the palate, and afford pretty good sport where one can 
only catch a few of them, they become a nuisance when 
they are so plentiful and one wants to get some larger 
fish. When I go fishing it is for out-door life and exer- 
cise, and I like to put in 6 or 8 hours each day whipping 
the water, at least, and don't care to do it when I catch 
so many fish under 8 inches. For that reason I am looking 
for 'new pasture.' For that reason I write to ask if you 
can give me any information as to the Jourdan, Pere 
Marquette or Manistee, where to strike the stream or who 
to write to. I want to put in about ten days the latter 
part of August. Will probably go alone." 
I have advised Judge Kenyon to try the Pere Marquette, 
and I hope Mr. John Waddell, of Grand Rapids, will post 
him on localities. Can any other good-hearted Michigan 
angler help Judge Kenyon with suggestions ? 
Some of the Saginaw Qowd. 
My industrious friend, Mr. W. B. Mershon, of Saginaw, 
seems to be still extracting a little fun out of life as he 
goes along. This week he thinks of starting with the 
private car of the Saginaw Crowd for a fishing trip in 
Quebec. There will be only four gentlemen of the 
"Crowd" along, all taking their wives, They surely do 
know how to live in Saginaw. 
Hough, 
Hartfoed Building, Qiicago, 111. 
In the Louisiana Lowlands* 
A SKETCH of plantation life, fishing and camping just 
after the Civil War, and other tales, by Fred Mather. 
Three hundred and twenty-one pages, with author's por- 
trait. Price, $1.50. Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
Sent postpaid on receipt of price. 
This new volume from the press of Forest and Stream 
Publishing Co. takes its title from the series of Louisiana 
Lowland chapters contributed by Mr. Mather to the 
Forest and Steeam. 
To the paper have come many requests for the story 
in book form. Here it is. As "Men I Have FisTied 
With" and in fact whatever came from Mr. Mather's pen 
deserves a more permanent form than the ephemeral 
vogue of current literature, to the "Louisiana Lowlands" 
have been added others: "On the Tangipahoa," "Fish- 
ing with Bow and Arrow." "On Bistineau," "Gabder 
Pull in Arkansas," "An Arkansas Turkey Shoot," the 
series around the camp-fire— "Frank's Story," "The 
Paymaster's Story," "The Major's Story," "Catching an 
Octopus," "Some Virginia Men and Fish," "Cooking a 
Trout in Camp." It is a volume which will hold a per- 
manent place in the list of books dear to sportsmen, 
A Large Vermont Bass. 
PouLTNEY, Vt, July 17.— A fine small-mouth black 
bass weighing over 6 pounds was caught here on Lake 
St. Catherine, by Mr, Mandeville B. Ladd, of Albany, 
N. Y. It is reported that this is the largest small-mouth 
bas,s ever eati|ht on T^ake St, Catherine. J. M. D, 
