Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1906, ay Forestjand Stream Publishing Co, 
Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. 
Six Months, $2. 
\ 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER IS, 1900. 
J VOL, LV.— No. 11. 
I No. 846 Broadway, New York 
The Forest and Stream is the recognized medium of entertain- 
ment, instruction and information between American sportsmen. 
The editors invite communications on the subjects to which its 
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. 
Subscriptions may begin "at any tii»e. Terms: For single 
copies, .$4 per year, $2 for six months. For club rates and full 
particulars respecting subscriptions, see prospectus on page iii. 
The forest is nature's loveliest work. The 
ocean, lofty mountains and great rivers are sub- 
lime, but there is also something in them that is 
dreadful. We can go into the forest; we can 
handle it ; we feel invigorated by its air, solaced 
by its tranquillity, inspired by its majesty. Hence 
it is that the greatest poets of all ages have made 
the forest a favorite theme and source of illustra- 
tion. The forest is landscape and in some sense 
belongs to the public. C. C. Andrews. 
A GOLD MEDAL AT PARIS. 
The Forest and Stream has been awarded a Gold 
Medal at the Paris Exposition for its exhibit, in the 
Palace of Forestry and Fisheries, consisting of fifty-three 
bound 'volumes from the beginning in 1873 to the close 
of 1899. _ _ :'i'*n'iMiJf I 
In addition to the first prize of a Gold Medal, it has 
been awarded a Bronze Medal in Class 51 — Hunting 
Equipments, etc. ; and recognized with two Honorable 
Mentions, one in Class 49 — Scientific Forestry — ^and the 
other in Class 52 — Products of the Chase. 
This is the fourth international exposition at which 
the Forest and Stream has received recognition as a 
journal of high merit, standing and influence. Its awards 
now comprise — 
The Centennial, Philadelphia, 1876. 
International Fisheries, Berlin, 1880. 
World's Fair, Chicago, 1893. 
Paris Exposition, 1900. ' - 
A BOY EXPERIENCE. 
The thirteen-year-old son of a Baptist minister living in 
Brooklyn disappeared the other day. His father had 
obtained for him permission to fish in the lake in Pros- 
pect Park; and when night came he did not return home. 
A general police alarm was sent out ; and on the following- 
day the park lake was dragged, but no clue was obtained 
of the missing lad's whereabouts. Nearly a week after- 
ward, when the Coney Island police made a haul of 
vagrants, the boy was discovered among them; and a 
very miserable and penitent boy he was. "I'm hungry and 
tired and sleepy, and I want to go back home," he told 
the magistrate, between his sobs, and they sent him back 
lo his father and mother. 
The ready explanation of a thirteen-year-old boy's 
chasing away from home and taking up with tramps is 
that he has been reading things. It never enters into 
the heart of a healthy minded bo3'^ that there is joy among 
the outcasts of society until he has imbibed the foolish 
notion from some "boy's own paper" or from the story 
books of adventure well-meaning fiends are forever in- 
dustriously grinding out for publishers who are willing to 
print anything the law allows. 
There is something extremely pathetic in the discontent 
and the grotesque misunderstanding of his relations with 
his home and family which many a boj' from ten to 
fifteen has imbibed from this literature. He moodily im- 
agines that his father and mother do not understand 
him and are against him. and that the only thing for him 
to do is to leave home and go away somewhere where he 
A\ ill have appreciation and justice Just where this some 
"('•here may be is, of course, quite vague — as vague, in fact, 
as are the expedients hy which, when at large, he is to keep 
body and soul together. There is never anything want- 
ing on this point in the books and story papers ; there the 
hero always makes a shift not only to find bread and 
butter, but to perform deeds of valor as well, and to win 
distinction, which, if not honorable according to the. con- 
ventions of society, is at least, in his boyish eyes, glorious 
and enviable. ^ • "W^! 
Most boys who pass through the experience happily 
never get to the point of actually absconding; but even 
if it comes to that, there are many much worse ex- 
periences a boy might go through. This Brooklyn 
youngster had a hard time in his herding with Coney 
Island tramps ; but it may well enough be that the pathetic 
misery of those days when he was playing the star part 
of the boy's story paper hero will prove to be the making 
of hiin. The medicine was bitter, but for that quality all 
the more efficient. There is no reason in the world why 
a youngster who runs away from home, if only he gets 
back in time, may not grow up to be a successful man, 
an honored citizen and a father with a boy to repeat his 
own foolish escapade. 
PIKE COUNTY GRIT. 
A CORRESPONDENT, who writcs from Bushkill in Pike 
county. Pa., complains of the constant and open viola- 
tion of the game law which is practiced there. Under an 
old county law the season in Pike county opened on 
Sept. IS instead of on Oct. 15, as the State law now 
reads ; and although the county law was repealed 
so long ago as 1897, the local shooters have never paid 
heed to the change, but have gone on shooting a month 
ahead of time. Again, although the law expressly for- 
bids the hounding of deer, it is estimated that of the 120 
deer killed in the county last season, 90 per cent, were 
killed by hounding, and half of these were killed in the 
water. For the past ten years, it is said a party of deer 
hunters from Scranton have visited Pike county and 
killed deer in June; this year they went into oamp on 
June 5. killed two bucks at Rock Hill Pond, and carried 
them home through the back country. Game is shipped 
out of the State contrary to law, much of it passing 
through Port Jervis and Stroudsburg, where it might be 
intercepted by wardens if there were wardens to inter- 
cept it. 
To relate these abuses is one thing; to provide the 
remedy is another. The Pennsylvania situation is peculiar. 
A game commission is charged with the duty of en- 
forcing the laws, but has been given absolutely no funds 
to work with. As Secretary Kalbfus has explained in our 
columns, the Commission is powerless to do anything 
beyond what may be accomplished hy voluntary service 
or the use of funds given by individuals. It is beside 
the mark to complain that the Commissioners do not en- 
force the law; they are doing all that can be done with- 
out funds. 
The only hope for Pike county game, under existing 
conditions, is to be found in such voluntary personal 
activities as the right minded and law abiding citizens 
of the county may be moved to undertake on their own 
initiative. If there are three men in the county who have 
the time, the inclination and the grit, they can ma- 
terially abate September shooting, the hounding of deer 
and the exportation of game. A large endowment of 
grit would be required. We would be immensely gratified 
to learn of its existence; and to record some practical 
results of it. 
MINNESOTA FORESTS. 
Gen. C. C. Andrews; sends us his fifth annual report as 
Chief Fire Warden of Minnesota. The document if^ 
remarkable for the showing it makes of immunity from 
desastrous forest fires in 1899 ; only ten fires are recorded, 
with a total damage of $i,.'^4i ; and of the fires only one is 
credited to fishermen, and none to hunters, whereas in 
previous years these two classes of woods frequenters 
have been responsible for more fire damage than the total 
sum here recorded. The showing for the j'ear 1900 will 
be far different. The drought which prevailed for three 
months, up to Juh' T. was unprecedented, and in the 
oninion of many exceeded that of 1804, wh^n the terrible 
Hinckley fire occurred 
A. suggestive paragraoh of Gen Andrews' report i- 
one in relation to the reluctance entertained b5' the resi- 
dents of a district to inform upon or aid in the prosecu- 
tion of one who carelessly sets the forest or the prairie 
afire. "Communities often feel that a man is being 
wronged." says Gen. Andrews, "if he is prosecuted: they 
do not stop to think that the principal object of punish- 
ment is to deter others from com.mitting similar offenses. 
Very good people are liable to be careless, and when we 
punish a man who, in a heedless and careless spirit, sets 
a fire in very dry and windy weather, which he ought to 
know he cannot control and which destroys or endangers 
the property of others, he should be made an example of ; 
not for revenge or because we wish to injure him, but as 
a warning to many others to refrain from doing the same." 
The case is cited of a farmer in Chisago county who 
in dry and windy weather set a brush fire, with no one 
at hand to control it, which sprea,d and destroyed tWo 
thousand dollars' worth of hay belonging to his neigh- 
bors; and yet the chairman of the town board refused to 
make a complaint, and when at the instance of the Chief 
Fire Warden the culprit was prosecuted, the magistrate 
imposed a fine of only $15 and $3.05 costs. This Minne- 
sota apathy is of a piece with the prevailing indifference 
with which fire carelessness is popularly regarded outside 
the district of human habitations. Let a house burn 
down and we make a great ado over it; let a clump of 
trees go up in smoke and we give it hardly a passing 
thought. Yet the house ma}' be rebuilt in a month; to 
restore the trees would consume the span of years of three 
generations of men. 
THE CHANGES ON THE MAP. 
A REPORT comes from Canada that projected wood pulp 
mills threaten the fishing waters of the Lake St. John 
country. Engineers have already begun work on the 
Grand Decharge, where mills are to be erected at a cost 
of between $2,000,000 and $3,000,000 of American capital. 
If these enterprises shall go through, they will mean the 
destruction of a fisherman's country, which without giving 
it special thought we have all regarded as lying beyond 
the danger of invasion even by the consuming pulp in- 
dusti-y. But as one looks over the map of North Amer- 
ica, and reviews the immense areas which he himself can 
remember as once remote and hardly accessible wilderness 
wastes well stocked wifli fish and game, and compares 
their present condition with the past, he realizes how 
mistaken it is to think of any wild country, even the 
most distant, as safe from the invasion of modern en- 
terprise. Alaska was once regarded as an Ultima Thule. 
where the moose and the bear would have harbor for 
centuries; but the miner who discovered the gold of the 
Klondike changed all that, and changed it in a twinkling. 
The significant fact is that to-day we do not actually 
appreciate, even though we complain of it, the rapidity, 
extent and thoroughness with which the game and fish 
districts are being ruined, and how in one instance after 
another the "heart of the woods" is converted over night 
into an industrial center. We talk about this to one 
another and write about in Forest and Stream, but we 
realize it fully only when we are balked of our plan to 
visit some favorite hunting ground of the past, where now 
the steam whistle is heard where of yore' the elk bugled; 
or when we seek in vain some new range to make up for 
the old. And the pity of it is — for us and for those 
who are to follow us — that if more wisely taught we might 
have had all this industrial development without the tttter 
ruin of the game and the fish along with it. The de- 
struction of our native resources of wild life has often 
resulted from carelessness, thoughtlessness, criminal heed- 
lessness, instead of from any reasonable necessity. A 
wiser scheme of exploitation would have given us the 
profit without the loss. 
OHIO. 
Ohio has made a new start. At a meeting in Columbus 
last week a State convention of sportsmen was organized, 
the particular purpose of which is to bring order out of 
chaos, to get a sane game law, and to promote in general 
the interests of the man with the gun. 
The serious drawback in the Ohio game Gondition has 
been for years the antagonism which has held between 
the farmer and the sportsman. Whatever substantial 
basis for this there may have been on either side, one 
fhing is certain and true beyond peradventure, and it is 
this . Eliminating the ruffians and rowdies who are 
not representative sportsmen, and the churls and boors 
who are not representative farmers, there is no divergence 
of interest between the farmers, who own the land and the 
shooting rights that go with it, and the sportsmen who 
seek the privilege of shooting over the land. We shall 
look to this new Ohio Fish and Game Protective Asso- 
ciation to do much needed work in the direction of pro- 
moting a right understanding between farmer and sports- 
man, and the establishing of rel-atioris between thera!j 
cordial and furofitable to hoth sides. ' 
