AND Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1900, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co, 
RMS, $4 A Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. 
Six Months, $2. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1900. 
j VOL. LV.— No. 16. 
I No. 346 Broadway, New Yor 
ROBINSON— OGDER 
The present number of Forest and Stream will bring 
sadness to many a heart. Richard L. Ogden and Rowland 
E. Robinson, two of the oldest, the dearest and the ablest 
of the correspondents of Forest and Stream, have passed 
over to the great majority. The pages- that once knew 
them so well will not again charm the reader with their 
delightful pens. The loss to Forest anq Stream and to 
its readers is as wide as the continent, for Ogden died 
on the shore-s of the broad Pacific, while Robinson passed 
away among the green hills where his boyhood days were 
spent. 
Captain Ogden was a sportsman of the old school, ener- 
getic, virile, hospitable — himself a lover of pleasure and 
delighting to give pleasure to others. He was devoted to 
sport, in its theory and in its practice, and to him sport 
meant what it would be expected to mean to such a man, 
and had none of the meanings which in these later days 
have often come to degrade the word. He was -an honest, 
cheery, loyal gentleman, who possessed the gift of telling 
frankly and most charmingly his beliefs and his experi- 
ences,' and it is not too much to say that some of the 
letters from his pen that have appeared in Forest and 
Stream have been as popular as those of any writer. 
Robinson on his part was a lover of nature and familiar 
with all her varying moods. He possessed unequaled 
powers of description. Keen eyed as a trained naturalist, 
he recorded his observations in language so tender, grace- 
ful and poetic that the reader not only saw what the writer 
saw, but shared the writer's high thoughts. Nor was 
it nature alone — as we understand the word — that Robin- 
son studied ; for in the characters in his books, with 
which we are all so familiar, he has revealed to us types of 
manhood and womanhood which exist: to-day, as they 
have existed for more than a century, among the moun- 
tains of Vermont an4 New Hampshire. Uncle 'Lisha, 
Sam Love!, Antoine and Cap'n Hill are characters that 
will not die, and to many readers all over this broad 
land, and, indeed, in other climes — for where has New 
England not sent her sturdy sons? — they. are as real as if 
we had seen them in the flesh, grasped their hard hands 
and heard their drawling speech. .' 
It is the personality of the men that at this time moves 
us most;. We recall their kindliness, the large hearted- 
ness that put them in close sympathy with their fellow 
men; and so with their readers; the joyous fondness of 
"Podgers" for the irrepressible small boy, and the delight 
with which he narrated his mischievous adventures; the 
tenderness of "Awahsoose," the heartiness with which 
he threw himself into the lives of his characters, the 
sweetness of his description of nature, and the kindly 
humor which bubbled from his always cheerful spirit, and 
which made him as dear to the friends and neighbors of 
his home as he was to the most distant friends made 
through Forest and Stream^ in China, or Japan, or merry 
England. We reprint— for we shall all be glad to read it 
again— the pleasing picture of Mr. Robinson in his home 
as Mr. Buriiham found him on a visit to Ferrisburgh two 
years ago. 
May the earth rest lightly on the frames which held 
these genial souls. 
ROWLAND EVANS ROBINSON. 
Tuesday morning of this week brought a letter jidst- 
marked Ferrisburgh, Vt., Oct. 15, and bearing the word 
"Urgent." The endorsement told what was within, even 
before the seal was broken and the contents were read : 
"I know you will grieve with us when you know that 
father died this afternoon. He seemed just to go to 
sleep, and we were all with him. Even now we cannot 
help being thankful that he i.s out of pain at last. He 
had failed very fast since last Wednesday night, and 
suffered greatly." 
So the end- has come; and Robinson has passed away. 
We of the great Forest and Stream family may mourn 
for a loss which is very real and very personal to each one 
of us, and we may grieve with those who are to-day sor- 
rowing for their dead ; but for him we cannot grieve. 
For to him. after long suffering, patiently borne, peace 
ftrjd rest have come at last. 
Mr. Robinson "Was widely known and beloved as a 
writer, and his books have an assured and permanent 
place in the literature of New England. But that which 
is best worth recording of him and holding up to the ad- 
miration of the world and cherishing of him in this, that 
in the face of difficulties which would have dismayed and 
discouraged one of weaker fiber, and under the ever 
present stress of constant physical suffering, he was 
buoyed up with a courage, a fortitude and a triumphing 
of spirit over body, which were as admirable as they were 
marvelous. In these days of heroes self-proclaimed over 
the land, this man. in his retired farmhouse in New Eng- 
land, was living a life whose every day and hour partook 
of the heroism of which humanity stands most in need. 
Mr. Robinson was born in 1833 in Ferrisburgh, Vt., and 
with the exception of a brief period spent in New York 
city, he had always lived in the old homestead. He came 
ROWLAND E. ROBINSON. 
of Quaker stock, and was a farmer, as his father had been 
before him. Of his youth we all know, for he has written 
of it :n many a reminiscent chapter in the Forest and 
Stre.\m (we printed one only last week) ; and we have 
always liked to fancy that in Sam Lovel, as painted by 
Robinson, there was much of Robinson himself. We 
know that the boy had a keen eye for the things of 
nature— the leaf and the flower, the fern and the forest 
moss, the lichen and the fungus; all these, the thousand 
and one phenomena of day amd night, the ways of the 
wood folk, were observed and learned with a thorough- 
ness which were an abiding comfort to him in those after 
years when sight failed and he could see them only as 
fixed in memory. When total blindness came, as it did 
more than ten years ago, it seemed doubly pathetic that 
one who took such keen delight in seeing things and 
studying nature's ways should- thus have had the world 
shut out from him. But as we once told him half-play- 
fully, but trtily,. .he. had seen more of the outdoor world 
in his seeing years than the average person would though 
living with sight unabated far beyond the allotted three 
score years and ten. And as he had seen, so he ra.ade' 
others see through the magic of his pen. It was a con- 
tinual marvel that this man, propped up in bed, and in 
the 4ark, could, picture the woods and the marsh and the 
skies so vividly that by a graphic, illuminating touch he 
could bring before the eye of the reader the thing as it 
ffZSj and as author and reader both had s^efi i^:, 
R. L. OGDEN. 
Captain Richard L. Ogden passed away at his home in 
.San Francisco on the 3d of this month. The end came 
peacefully; it was, they said, practically the sinking away 
of old age, the pai'ting which comes when the earthy 
tenement outworn and weak can no longer contain the 
spirit. 
Captain Ogden was the "Podgers" of Forest and 
Stream. To the readers of this journal the news of his 
death will bring pain, as it has to those in this office whose 
privilege it was to have known him personally and to 
have enjoyed his friendship. 
R. L. Ogden was born in Otsego county, N. Y. His 
father was a lawyer, and among the men whom he knew 
in his boyhood was Chancellor Kent. Young Ogden had 
all the enterprise and activity characteristic of a healthy 
bodied and healthy minded American boy, and he had his 
full share of youthful experiences, which were charmingly 
related in after years in a series of reminiscences pub- 
lished in the Forest and Stream. Once, drawn by the 
glamor of the ring, he ran away from home to join a 
circus, in due time to return to the parental roof, cured 
for the time of wandering, but with no daunting of that 
spirit which in after years prompted him to see the world, 
and caused him to know so mu:c^ of the ways of men who 
make up the world. At fourteen he entered the office of 
his elder brother, Major E. L. Ogden, Assistant Quarter^ 
master U. S. Army, stationed at Buffalo. In 1852, going 
to California, he entered the office of Major Robert Allen, 
Quartermaster U. S. Army, as chief clerk and cashier. 
Here he remaimed until the increase of the army, when 
he was appointed First Lieutenant of the Fourteenth U. S, 
Infantry. A few months later he was promoted Assistant 
Quartermaster of the Department of the Pacific, a position 
which he held for about ten years. This was during the 
Indian wars in Arizona and the Northwest, when supplies 
for the army for California, Arizona and Washington 
were provided from San Francisco, and Captain Ogden 
handled many millions of Government funds. It was 
while occupying this position that he came into contact 
with General Grant, and an incident occurred which 
formed one of his favorite reminiscences. 
During this time he was sent by the Government to 
South America in a charter ship for a cargo of commis-. 
sary and quartermaster supplies, and while waiting the 
slow movements of the contractors he improved the op- 
portunity to make an extended trip on mule back into the 
interior and along the south coast, meeting with manj* 
interesting adventures. At the close of the war he re- 
signed his commission and went into business with W. C, 
Ralston, president of the Bank of California, engaging 
with him in extensive mining operations and industrial 
enterprises until the death of Ralston. At the time of 
the failure of the Bank of California much of Captain 
Ogden' s fortune was lost when the Kimball Company 
went down. 
Captain Ogden organized the first company and opened 
the first mine on the Comstock ledge, with J. D. Winters 
as superintendent, and was afterward largely engaged in 
operating the mines of the great Comstock ledge, being 
associated with Flood, O'Brien, Latham and other 
prominent mining people. 
During his residence in California, for a period of 
twenty years he was special correspondent of the New 
York Times, and at a later period wrote to that journal 
form Europe, China and Japan. Among the many enter- 
prises in which he was engaged in a long and busy 
life was the building of a schooner for trade in the Pacifie 
Islands, on which he sailed, his own supercargo, and he 
used to tell how he had been made king of one of the 
islands, and was perhaps the only American eitizen wliq 
could lay just claim to royal prerogatives. He used to 
say jokingly that at some future day he should shakft^>ff 
the shackles of civilization and go back to assume a mild 
sway over his loyal subjects. 
During his long army experience he met and was in-- 
timately associated with nearly all the officers of the old; 
army, including Generals Grant, Hooker, Sedgwick, Mc- 
pherson, Sheridan, Custer, Sherman, Cro<)k and. others. 
Not many year& ago, while living in this -city,, he 
comipleted the manuscript of a book of reminisceiicfis' of-- 
the old army, and one day he promised to bring this down 
to .the Forest and Stream office. At the appointed time 
he appeared with the intelligence that a chambermaid, 
mistaking the manuscript for waste paper, had thrown 
