Forest and Stream, 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1900, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co, 
Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. ) 
Six Months, $3. ) 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JULY 14, 1900. 
( VOL. LV.— No. a. 
1 No. 846 Broadway, New York 
The Forest and Stream is the recognized medium of entertain- 
ment, instruction and information between American sportsmen. 
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pages are devoted. Anonymous communications will not be re- 
garded. While it is intended to give wide latitude in discussion 
of current topics, the editors are not responsible for the views of 
correspondents. 
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particulars respecting subscriptions, see prospectus on page iii. 
The Carry is called two miles^ hut this is the 
estimate of somebody who had nothing to lugf. I 
had a headache and all my baggage which, with 
a traveler's instinct, I had brought with me. My 
estimate of the distance is eighteen thousand six 
hundred and seventy-four miles and three-quarters 
— the fraction being the part left to be traveled 
after one of my companions most kindly insisted 
oa relieving me of my heaviest bag. 
— James Russell Lowell. 
PLAYING WITH FIRE. 
The fire which destroyed the North German Lloyd 
piers and steamships at Hoboken, opposite New York 
city, entaiHng a loss of $6,000,000 and an unknown num- 
ber of human lives, is supposed to have been caused by 
a match or lighted cigar or cigarette thrown into cotton 
stored on one of the piers. The conflagration of the 
Standard Oil Company oil tanks, across New York 
Bay, with a loss of $2,000,000 and more, was caused by a 
stroke of lightning. 
We cannot control the lightning nor avert its flash ; but 
we can avoid throwing matches and cigarettes into cotton. 
There is not so much of the wilderness remaining in 
this country that we can afford to burn any of it up by 
letting our camp-fires get beyond control. Out of every 
hundred campers there will always be a proportion — say 
fifty — of those who are careless with their fires ; and be- 
cause of these creatures and their folly, there must be 
with each recurring season, as certain as doom, a vast 
destruction of the forest and the prairie. We might as well 
attempt to control the thunder storms and the lightning 
of the sky as to reform these fatuous idiots who set fire 
to the woods. But we may see to it, each one for himself, 
that we are not ourselves numbered with the fire-setting 
fools. 
With the coming of the camping season and the building 
of camp-fires throughout the land, it is not untimely to 
repeat certain cautionary rules given before in these 
columns as a code of conduct with respect to the camp- 
fire: 
Never build a fire where its flame can communicate to 
grass or brush or branches of trees. 
Never build a fire where the sparks can be carried to 
brush or trees, or leaves or grass. 
Never build a fire without first noting the lay of the 
land with respect to controlling it after it is kindled. 
Never leave camp for the day with the fire to burn un- 
attended. Extinguish it thoroughly. 
Under no circumstances, when moving camp, leave the 
fire to burn or smoulder. Put it out. 
To extinguish a fire built upon the ground where there 
is turf, the roots of trees or other vegetable matter in the 
soil, pottr water upon it until the ground is thoroughly 
soaked ; then dig around about and well outside the cir- 
cumference, throwing the earth in toward the center, and 
then wet it down again. 
The Treasury Department has issued a circular to col- 
lectors and other customs officers, instructing them that 
under the provisions of the Lacey law foreign wild ani- 
mals or wild birds from any part of the world may be 
admitted to the country only upon the showing of a per- 
mit for their importation given by the Department of 
Agriculture. The instructions are very explicit, and the 
only way in which they might be circumvented would 
appear to be by adopting the expedient of Thomas Wood- 
cock, who was the first to bring English skylarks and 
nther birds from Great Britain into this country in the 
forties. He had come as far as the lower- bay of New 
York harbor, Avhen, getting into a dispute with the cap- 
tain of the ship about the birds, he broke open their cages 
and liberated them to fly ashore, 
A NEW ELEMENT. 
We commend to the particular attention of game 
wardens the gangs of Italians who are engaged in such 
works as railroad building, reservoir construction and 
other Enterprises where, as a rule, the men live in tents or 
shanties and roam the neighborhood when they are not 
working week days and Sundays. No one would begrudge 
them this simple pleasure, were they not possessed of the 
characteristic small-bird killing proclivities which are 
common to the Latin races of Europe. They are here, as 
at home, industrious hunters of song and insectivorous 
birds. Every feathered creature is game to them; and as 
there are tens of thousands of them scattei-ed here and 
there throughout the land, the magnitude of their depre- 
dations is such as to demand consideration and repression. 
As we have pointed out before, it is this foreign element 
which in New England and elsewhere in the neighborhood 
of factory towns scours the fields on Sundays in pursuit 
of the small birds. Americans with generations of small 
bird protectors behind them cannot realize the way in 
which these foreigners regard the same birds. The 
Forest and Stream is not in infrequent receipt of leaflets 
and circulars distributed by well-meaning women, which 
depict the sportsman as killing the songsters, and hold 
him up to a popular reprobation which would be well 
deserved if the picture drawn by him were not fanciful. 
The sportsman in America does not kill the small birds 
save only in the fevered ithagination of the leaflet writers ; 
he confines himself to legitimate game — the birds which, 
if we may consider the adaptation of means to an end 
in the scheme of nature, were created specially to be 
hunted by man. The impulse, training and practice of the 
American sportsman as we know him and as he is, give 
the lie to the leaflets which represent him as a wanton 
killer of little birds. In some of the European countries 
different sentiments, conditions and practices prevail. In 
Italy everything is game that flies. In northern Italy 
"bird murder is epidemic," wrote our consul, James T. 
Du Bois, from St. Gall, Switzerland, the other day; "the 
willow wren, hedge sparrow, blackcap, swallow, night- 
ingale, and little singers of all kinds are victims of the 
trap, the net and the gun." They are taken by wholesale 
in the migrating periods : 
As the seasons come and go the Swiss birds make their pil- 
grimage south, and in going and returning across the land of 
northern Italy and the Swiss Canton of Tessin they are merci- 
lessly pursued by hunters of all ages and all classes. On Lake 
Maggiore it is estimated that at least 60,000 of the feathered song- 
sters are trapped or killed every year, and in the region round 
about Bergamo, Verona, Chiavena, and Brescia, many millions 
are indiscriminately slaughtered to satisfy the demand of the 
tables and of the millinery establishments of the world. 
One of the schemes is to cover the Hmbs of trees, the rocks, and 
even the telegraph wires along the line of the bird migrations with 
a certain paste of such adhesive qualities that whenever the birds 
stop in their flight for rest or food they are held helpless captives; 
hundreds are often captured in a very small space by this simple 
means. 
We read this with curiosity, because it is so foreign to 
our own waj^s; but we shall do well to remember that 
tens of thousands of immigrants are dispersing over this 
country, bringing with them small-bird killing proclivities, ■ 
and some attention must be given to them in making pro- 
vision for the protection of the birds. 
FROCK AND GOFHERS. 
The side-hill gopher mentioned in Forest and Stream 
the other day, whose legs on one side are shorter than 
those on the other, so that it can navigate a hillside suc- 
cessfully, must be a relative of the "prock," which with 
the gyascutus were known to our fathers as wandering 
from time to time through the funny columns of the 
newspapers. The fabulous creatures appear to have been 
an invention of a fun-loving Yankee, who got his hint 
from a description given in all seriousness by Capt. Jona- 
than Carver, who made a journey to the Rocky Moun- 
tains in 1765. In his book of "Travels Through the In- 
terior Parts of North America," published in 1778, he 
gave these descriptions: 
"In the country of the Osnobions (Assinaboines) there 
is a regular beast, of the bigness of a horse, and having 
hoofs, whereof two legs on one side are always shorter . 
than the other, by which means it is fitted to graze on the 
steep slopes of the mountains. It is of amazing swiftness, 
and to catch it the salvages doe head it ofJ, whereby it can- 
not run, but falls over and is so taken. I was also told 
of one which I did not see. This is like to a bear in size. 
but covered with shell as is the tortoise, with many horns 
along its back. It has great claws and teeth, and is ex- 
ceeding fierce, eating man and beast." 
The region referred to by our traveler has been ex- 
plored by naturalists, but science has yet to solve the 
mystery of the uneven-legged beasts. Carver may have 
invented them ; but it is much more probable that he was 
only giving a local habitation to mythical creatures which 
had place in the folk-lore of this day. For these strange 
animals of fiction were such as would most certainly ap- 
peal to the imagination and find a secure place in that 
unwritten literature which is handed down from genera- 
tion to generation and carried across seas and continents, 
being told about the hearth and the camp-fire, but only 
seldom finding a place in print. The "sand-hill gopher" 
of igoo is the "prock" of 1850, and that was the "regular 
beast" of Carver in 1765 ; it has taken on various shapes, 
but the essential quality of humor remains — this is what 
has kept it alive ancl makes it secure for the future. It 
will live in story after the other game in the country of 
the Assinaboines shall have been exterminated, just as the 
hoop snake is found in regions where no other serpents 
have survived. 
SNAF SHOTS. 
It is reported that the Messrs. Weisbrod, of Philadel- 
phia, who have a game preserve of 2,800 acres in Pike 
County, Pa., propose to turn out there a score of wild 
boars from the Black Forest in Germany, in order that 
they may have material for the sport of pig-sticking. 
There have been several importations of wild boars into 
this country: one lot was brought to the Neversink coun- 
try in Sullivan county. New York, and another to the Blue 
Mountain Park, established by Austin Corbin in New 
Hampshire. We believe that without exception the beasts 
have proved to be a nuisance and nothing more. They 
certainly are undesirable as additions to our wild fauna, 
and might legitimately come under the prohibitive control 
of the Agricultural Department in the regulations which 
it is to provide for the importation of foreign species. 
It is a suggestive commentary on the wild bird' supply 
of this continent that Chief Game Warden Tinsley, of 
Ontario, questions if a wild turkey is now to be found 
within the limits of the Province. If there be any of 
the birds in their wild state, he suggests that they should 
be captured and placed in the Rondeau Park, for the pur- 
pose of restocking that very suitable locality. The scheme 
of giving the wild turkey a new start in a protected 
region such as the Rondeau Park, the parent birds being 
imported from elsewhere, appears to be a more sensible 
and hopeful enterprise than the introduction of foreign 
birds such as the capercailzie or black game. The species 
which were indigenous to the land, and which the history 
of the past demonstrates would thrive if not pursued to 
the death by man, are plainly those which give the best 
promise of establishing. 
For it is not sO' difficult to restore a wild species if only 
the opportunity be given it to increase and multiply under 
natural conditions. An example in point is that of the 
beaver. In Maine, in Michigan and in the Adirondacks, 
three districts where the animal was on the point of ex- 
tinction, absolute protection has been given to it for a 
number of years, and the result is, as reported from one 
point and another, that the beaver is coming back to its 
old haunts and surely increasing. 
A New York millinery concern when arranging for 
the killing of sea gulls on the Maine coast, found at Bar 
Harbor a local agent in the person of a hotel clerk. It 
might be thought that an individual possessing the genius 
to be a summer hotel clerk would have more sense than 
to promote the killing of gulls in his neighborhood. The 
fool-killer should take a run down there. 
We have received and shall print next week the text 
of Judge Hanford's recent opinion rendered in the case 
of a Spokane, Wash., restaurant keeper prosecuted for 
having sold quail in the close season. 
In a communication elsewhere Mr. Wm. Wells predicts 
the starvation of larger and larger numbers of elk gener- 
ally, as. the winter ranges shall diminish. As he sees it. 
the game is doomed to retire before the encroachment of 
civilization, : m ^ 
