Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
■ Copyright, 1900, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
'''''''''^^^Jfto.ril^'-^''^''''-} NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 26,, 1900. {^o.sJBt.^lA-%^Yo.. 
NEBRASKA PRAIRIE CHICKENS. 
Nebraska sportsmen speak in high praise of Governor 
Poynter's attitude respecting game protection and his 
recent action in prodding the sheriffs to do their duty- 
is deserving of hearty commendation. As related in our 
Omaha correspondence, while the State has an abundant 
supply of law and adequate machinery for protecting 
prairie chickens, the market-hunters have actually been 
in the supremacy in certain districts and have had 
things all their own way. A vigorous campaign is now 
waging to suppress them, and in this Governor Poynter 
is taking commendable part. In this he is making a 
record worthy of emulation by other executives. 
The known attitude of the Governor of a State has a 
prodigious effect upon the way in which the game and 
the fish protective system is administered. When a 
Governor of Illinois a few years ago vetoed a measure 
for the protection of introduced game birds on the 
ground that it could not rightly be made an offense to 
k l] game birds, his stand had an immediate and ap- 
preciable influence to weaken the popular respect for and 
observance of all game and fish laws. In New Jersey 
to-day the well-known aggressive hostility of the Gov- 
ernor to game and fish protection has seriously weakened 
those interests. On the other hand, when the present 
Governor of New York recognized the importance of the 
protection of fish and game, calling attention to 
it in his message and promising for it his official support, 
that action was recognized as a distinct and effective 
impetus. The case of the Nebraska prairie chicken ap- 
pears to be a desperate one, but the citizens of that 
prairie State have no reason to abandon their game pro- 
tective activities so long as they have a chief executive 
who is ready to do his duty. 
WASTED DAYS. 
Not even the royal sportsman has all the heart desires. 
Ii is related of King Humbert that one of the unsatisfied 
•rishes of his life was to come to America for a Rocky 
Mountain hunting trip after mountain sheep. His busi- 
ness of being King held him too closely; and even had 
the assassin's shot not found him out, it is improbable 
that he v.'ould have resigned his throne before becoming 
too old to think of a mountain climb for sheep. 
On the other hand, there died at his Adirondack camp 
the other day an American railway king, who, with 
every opportunity for game, big and small, and game 
fish right at hand, had never paid the slightest attention 
to either. His Adirondack "camp" was a camp in name 
only, being one of those elaborate and luxurious sum- 
mer residences which mark the new Adirondack era and 
have about as much woods camp character to them as a 
."sportsman's "den" with pictures on the walls has to the 
lair of a grizzly. In it was not even the atmosphere of 
camp lite relaxation, for in his Adirondack camp this 
wonderful man of affairs kept busy a force of stenog- 
raphers and clerks, while he exercised that capacity 
lor continuous labor which made him a prodigy among 
the business giants of his time. 
With free access to all the well-stored game countri^ 
penetrated by his railroads, and with the choice fishing 
adjacent to his Adirondack summer home, C. P. Hunt- 
ington never knew what it was to sight a rifle or wind a 
reel. One of his boasts was that he had never wasted a 
day in fishing or hunting. It would be simply a matter 
of tallying to find a million people who might say the 
same thing, but who are not by virtue of having wasted 
no time with rod and gun any the nearer being Collis 
P. Huntingtons or railway kings. There are others, too — 
and it would be only a matter of tallying to count a 
million of them — who have made a life success which 
amply satisfied them, yet who have found time to get 
some of the pleasures of the fields and the streams as 
they have gone along, and have not by any means counted 
their fishing and shooting days as wasted hours. 
The doctrine of the merit of persistent industry is so 
familiar that we are wont to ascribe to continuous labor 
an inherent virtue which it does not possess. It is no 
credit to a person that he sticks to business so per- 
sistently that he never takes time for recreation. "Wasted 
days" — those days are wasted which a person who has 
enough already devotes to getting more. There is such 
a . thing as inordinate wealth getting, jtist as there is 
inor<3inate fishing for a score. The; young man is in less 
danger of wanting appreciation that he must hustle, than 
his elder is of not finding out that there is something in the 
world besides business. Everywhere about us we see 
the melancholy spectacle of old men holding their noses 
to the grindstone because they have never learned, and 
are now too set in their ways ever to learn, that there ai-e 
green fields and solemn forests and the open sea, not to 
mention the diversified resources of a dignified leisure in 
the town. We may count on the fingers of one hand the 
cases we know of those who have missed success in life 
because they wasted their time with shotgun or fishing 
line, while the city directory is full of the names of 
those who would to-day be vastly better off had they 
learned the art of rational recreation. 
THE DOG FOR PRAIRIE CHICKENS. 
In the good old years of long ago, yet years which 
are not so far in the past as to be beyond the memory of 
men now still alive and active, at this season of the 
year the members of the literary canine world were agi- 
tated from its center all around to its circumference over 
the momentous issue as to which breed of dog, or which 
individual dOg, was the best prairie chicken dog. Un- 
der the impulse of vindicating his own convictions and 
convincing or confounding his opponents,, each writer 
contended as nature best fitted him, thus the debates were 
vivacious to a degree; for, being participated in by the 
wise and learned, the witty and stupid, the men of peace 
at any cost and the literary gladiator of war as a pleasure, 
the discussions were conducted with that figurative nicety 
and directness of pen and pencil which is said to ma- 
terially prevail when the shillelaghs are swinging through 
the air and cracking every head in sight. Alas 1 have 
the glories of the chicken dog, as a matter of common 
debate, departed? Where now are the lengthy and in- 
volved theses of the dog, brindle in color and bob-tailed in 
expression, which w^s uncompromisingly held forth as 
the only true type which could run three days from 
sun to sun, and find more chickens the while than all 
the rest of the dogs in the country collectively? Where' 
is the contention that the native was better than the im- 
ported dog, the reds were better than the blues, the 
Irish were better than the English, the Gordon better 
than the Irish, and the pointer better than all? 
The glories of the shooting world have not been the 
le^st impaired; they exist to-day to a greater degree 
than ever, but the ignorance and the opinionated 
vehemence of the old days have gone. At the present 
day, -the sportsman knows that the right kind of chicken 
dog has a bob tail or a long tail, is red or white or blue 
or yellow or all combined, is setter or pointer, his merit 
resting on usefulness as a worker. The agreement which 
has been established came about naturally when left 
to the arbitrament of the true sportsman instead of the 
multitude who at that time were commercially crying 
their dogs for revenue as the huckster cries his wares. 
When we compare the literature of the canine world 
of to-day with that of the years some time since, we can 
congratulate ourselves on the greater knowledge, the 
tolerance of opinion and the decrease of the vulgarian, 
though there may not be so much raw enthusiasm. 
THE CAMPERS' CRIMES. 
If all men were what they should be, the camper would 
be a joy and a delight to all his kind. He, of all others, is 
the man whose life, while in camp, should be innocent 
and void of offense. He has left behind him the cares, the 
worries and the temptations of every day life; he has 
nothing to do but enjoy himself. He should be happy 
himself and a cause of happiness to others. 
Notwithstanding all this, the camper is sometimes an 
injury to his fellows, and a curse to the country, where 
his vacation is spent. The damage that he does is seldom 
or never willful, but is due to ignorance and thoughtless- 
ness, causes which may be as criminal and as harmful 
as if the blackest intent provoked hurtful act. 
To-day the newspapers tell us of terrible forest fires 
raging among the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado, 
which are said to have been started by campers. In the 
West the past winter was one of very light snowfall, and 
to many sections the spring and summer brought no 
rain. The forest floor has lost much of its moisture, and 
is ready for the spark. The match carelessly thrown 
away, the pipe knocked out, the half-burned cigarette 
dropped on the ground may any of them start a blaze 
which no human effort can control. Far more dangerous 
than any of these, however, is the neglected camp-fire, 
from which the live coals may be scattered by a puff of 
wind, or the fire from which, attacking some dry root, 
may eat its way along under the ground for hours or 
days, and at length, under favorable conditions, start the 
blaze whose results no living man can foresee. 
It is bad enough to witness the results of such a fire in 
the timber, to ride for days through what was once a 
forest of living green, abounding in life of plants, in-' 
sects, birds and mammals, now dead and barren of any 
living thing, a forest of naked sticks, charred black by 
the fire or weathered white by the winter storms, where 
the only sound is the humming of the wind through the 
treetops or wailing scream of two crossed and rubbing 
branches. All this is sad enough to behold, but in itself 
is only a sentimental injury. Besides this there are 
economic damages which we cannot measure in money, 
although we know that their cost is enormous. 
The neighboring range may be burned off and the live 
stock accustomed to feed there must be moved away or 
starve; the ranchman's hay, his buildings, even his stock 
or his family may be destroyed ; finally the water supply 
of a considerable area may be so diminished that its 
productiveness may be greatly changed and great loss or 
even ruin may result to the dwellers in the section. All 
this may happen because some man or boy — a camper — 
was too careless or too lazy to put out the spark of his 
tabacco or to carry a bucket or two of water to throw 
on the fire. 
The pleasure-seeking white man might profitably imitate 
the Indian whom he is so likely to despise, but who has 
been taught to care for himself and for others. Like 
the red man, he might well crush out with his fingers the 
last Sipark on the extinguished match, spit upon the 
burning end of his cigarette until it no longer burns, and 
pull apart his camp-fire an hour or two before leaving 
camp, so tliat for the most part it may have gone out. 
Let him think a little, and realize the injury that his 
carelessness may work for others. 
When Thomas Best issued the ninth edition of his 
"Art of Angling," he wrote in praise of the pasti'me: 
"Not only kings and princes, but even queens and ladies 
of the first rank, have taken a delight in this rational 
and pleasing recreation." And to give emphasis to the 
participation of the fair sex in fishing, he embellished his 
little book with the frontispiece which we copy to-day in 
our angling pages. Here she is just as she went fishing 
one April day in the year 1810, and a pretty picture 
she makes in costume quaint to modern eyes. The flies 
are interesting. Some of them are known to the present 
day; Best describes eighty-nine, and tells how to make 
and use them. The artist who drew this picture ^ad 
one trait well developed among his successors of to- 
day; he has given us a bent rod and a loose line, two 
things which are never found in conjunction in natttre. 
There were artists two thousand years ago who were 
more technically correct in those little details to which the 
sportsman's eye goes first. Here in outline is a fresco 
from a house in Pompeii. It is Venus and Cupid angling, 
and while Cupid has hooked a fish, the mother has made 
him her prize. There are no lax lines to the rods in 
this picture; its author had perhaps been fishing him- 
self in the Bay of Naples and knew that when the rod 
is bent the line is taut. This interesting example of 
Pompeian art is now in the possession of Mr. R. B. 
Marsten, editor of the London Fishing Gazette. 
Bob White is making his way around the globe. From 
New Zealand comes a favorable report of the work of 
introducing the American quail into that country. The 
birds were sent from Kansas via San Francisco, and 
after a long and tempestuous voyage, which proved fatal 
to a large number, 430 of the first consignment reached 
their destination, but the death rate then proved to be 
very high. Subsequent shipments were more successful, 
and lots of from 20 to 200 have been distributed at 
a dozen different points. In its fifteenth annual re- 
port the Wellington Acclimatization Society notes that 
the quail are doing well in their new home. One serious 
drawback to the enterprise is found in the poisoning 
operations which are carried on extensively for the sup- 
pression of the rabbit pest. Large numbers of the bird^ 
are known to have perished from this cause, 
