142 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Aug. 24, 1901. 
• — « — 
The Appalachian Forest Preserve. 
BY CHARLES HALLOCK. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
I have been doing the Appalachian Forest Preserve 
since June. It is a big thing, embracing half a million 
square miles of mountains, crags and forest areas. Tops 
of some mountains are clean shaven, smooth as a lawn, 
with flocks and herds grazing, and on the higher eleva- 
tions, like Roan Mountain (7,000 feet up and more), the 
rhododendron and kalmia replace the stunted cedars of 
most mountain systems and suffuse the beautiful, rounded 
shoulders with a pink flush, like a senorita's mantilla. 
Down in deepest gorges, where the whiteness of the tor- 
rents shows against the blackness of the rocks, the laurels, 
azalias and honeysuckles are massed on either side, and 
banked up h'ke floral tributes in an Easter chancel, 
mingling with the galix, the phlox and the scarlet pinks, 
and often they bury the streams clean out of sight, so 
that we can hear only a murmur of suppressed delight. 
Fact! What I assert is a blooming reaHty in the month 
of June, and not a midsummer's night's dream woven out 
of fancy. Moreover, some of the laurel and rhododen- 
dron stems are a foot in diameter, and your Highlands 
correspondent, Henrj' Stewart, who runs a mountain 
saw mill, tells me that he has. sawed them into boards. 
Later on the forest trees are all a mass of blossoms, the 
chestnuts, chinquapin, tulip, sourwood and several others 
waAdng their fronds like giant plumes and filling the air 
with fragrance. 
Now I submit, in comm.on with all enthusiastic advo- 
cates of a national park, whose name is legion : Are not 
these rocks and waterways and eminences and cliffs, with 
all their garniture of flowers and foliage, not to speak 
of the feral fauna, au convert fit material for a national 
park commensurate with the size, pretensions and am- 
bitions of our country? Secretary of Agriculture James 
Wilson, who is as practical as he is enthusiastic, prefers 
to have this proposed magnificent segregation known as a 
forest preserve, and he is right, by all odds. He says : 
"The idea of a national park is conservation, not use; 
that of a forest preserve, conservation by use." Very 
true ! One is simply to please the senses ; the other 
revenue under systematic forestry and axe work. 
Official maps define the area which is thought to be 
immediately available for this reserve. It takes up the 
great backbone of the Appalachian divide, with its dim- 
pled flanks on either side; but there are contiguous tracts 
available, and even more desirable from an economic 
standpoint, and several of these already enjoy a conti- 
nental notoriety as summer resorts and private domains, 
the Biltmore estate standing out conspicuous and domi- 
nant among all others. Narrow-gauge railways, trolleys 
and turnpikes penetrate some of the most sequestered, 
weaving their upward way with sinuous aspirations to- 
ward the culminating summits, where all the kingdoms of 
the earth, the vegetable, mineral, arboreal and faunal, ap- 
pear at one grand coup d'oeil. Going to Sapphire, the 
carriage drive makes 423 turns in seventeen miles, and up 
the twelve-mile ascent of Roan Mountain in about the 
same proportion. In the five mountain ranges designated 
as_ the Smokies, Balsams, Blacks, Craggies and the Blue 
Ridge, there are forty-three peaks in all which are 6,000 
feet high and upward, and there are eighty-two others 
which exceed 5,000 feet, and closely approximate 6,000, 
while those which exceed 4,000 and approximate S,ooo 
are innumerable. 
From Observation Point on Overlook Park on the 
outer rim of Asheville, 660 feet above the town level, one 
can look across the intermediate valley and see the de- 
lectable mountains twenty miles away extending in an 
illimitable range to the right hand, and the left half-way 
round the circumference of the horizon; and well may 
the kindled imagination draw fantastic pictures of an 
allegorical heaven beyond, so soft are the tints and so 
delightfully splendid are the hues of pearl and blue and 
gray. It is hard to find its counterpart. Mr. R. S. How- 
land, of Providence, R. I., who has made this transcend- 
ent view more readily available by a trolley line from 
"the Square" in Asheville, has done the park, as well 
as the public, a notable service, and one which a very 
liberal patronage shows is greatly appreciated. This view 
is no baseless fabric of a dream, ne transitory vision, but 
an established fact. It has not to be created. It already 
exists. It only has to be enacted. The fiat has only to go 
forth from the national Capitol. Let Congress speak as 
the sense of the people dictates. Then all its forested 
areas, its catch basins, reservoirs, water falls and timber 
belts will be reserved and preserved secure from vandal- 
ism, and when the axe is laid at the root of the tree, it 
will be for the service of men and the good of the timber 
which is yet to stand. During July and the first two 
weeks of August there were twenty-five days when rain 
fell on the mountains, and some of these showers were 
torrents, which washed the bottoms out of the country 
roads in a jiffy. Had there been no forest blanket to 
retain the downpour, the damage that would have re- 
sulted would have been immense, while the quantities of 
soil and detritus washed down from the denuded rocks 
would have gone to fill the harbors and river channels 
of the lowlands, which all the dredging in the world and 
continuous appropriations from Congress can never keep 
from filling with the land wash so long as the uplands 
are disregarded. Let the headwaters be protected and the 
national reserve will be not only a beauty and a joy for- 
ever, but will save the country from droughts and 
freshets, and bestow upon a grateful land a plenitude of 
fruition. Then all "the hills will sing together for joy 
and clap their hands." 
Exempt from torrid heat and in perfect bodily com- 
fort, I passed the summer months within its winsome 
precincts. I have enjoyed its cooling shades, its beds of 
roses, and its rare exemption from mosquitoes, gnats and 
noxious insects. I have drunk its limpid waters, caught 
its speckled trout in mountain lakes and dashing stream, 
and heard its owls hoot at nightfall. Snakes there are, 
and wildcats galore, but they are seldom seen unless 
hWJ!?|;e^. Fox?s, be^rs and coons are very numerous, but 
those who have no coops or cornfields need not apprehend 
them. Turkeys and ruffed grouse are fairly abundant on 
the mountain sides, and deer in the coves and valleys; 
quail are all over the fields and household premises. 
Squirrels are seldom seen. 
Dr. C. P. Ambler, Secretary of the Appalachian Na- 
tional Park Association, a native of Ohio, and one of the 
Buckeye contingent set apart like the Levites to serve the 
people, seems to be the mainspring, pulse and motor. — in 
fact, the whole circulatory system, in these parts, of this 
important enterprise. He has already prepared and dis- 
tributed over 200,000 circulars in propaganda work, and 
secured favorable mention in hundreds of newspapers, 
and hopes to secure favorable legislation at the next ses- 
sion of Congress. A man so earnest and indefatigable 
ought to see success, and the project ought to crystallize, 
and Congress ought to have sense enough to see that it 
does succeed. Both the Doctor and his wife are accom- 
plished hunters of big game, and their beautiful home on 
the edge of Asheville is filled with superb mountain 
trophies of caribou, elk, moose, bear, alligators, wolver- 
ines, badgers, foxes, wildcats, wolves, and panthers from 
Wyoming, Florida, New Brunswick and remote wilder- 
ness regions in the Shoshone and Blackfoot countries. 
Both are superior riders, and it is but a few months 
since they made a tour of 450 miles on horseback together 
through the precincts of the Appalachian Park in the 
course of a six weeks' outing. 
Another staunch friend and promoter of the Appala- 
chian Park scheme, of even greater renown, is Capt. 
William Miles Hazzard, of Georgetown, S. C, who has a 
summer residence called Beaumont on the apex of one 
of the near-by knobs of Asheville. His house is filled with 
trophies of the chase, chiefly of deer killed in South 
Carolina, perhaps fifty specimens in all, of Avhich a large 
proportion comprises horns which exhibit strange .de- 
formities, and one most interesting pair of locked horns, 
the combatants being found alive, but greatly emaciated. 
Capt. Hazzard had the honor of taking President Cleve- 
land during his administration on no less than five duck- 
mg trips, under the auspices of the Annandale Club of 
South Carolina, of which he is a member, and I doubt 
not the incidents which he relates of the President's out- 
ings would have been nuts for the reporters coidd they 
have been obtained at the time of their occurrence. 
The Swimming Sisters of the Sea. 
Because the wind — the South Sea trade — for every 
month of the year but two followed a close schedule of 
time and compass point, all boat voyaging was one of 
two things, either a dreary drag imder a white-ash breeze 
or else a much more enjoyable dash to leeward wi.th a 
fair wind and an even keel. Owing to the geography of 
the chain of islands of the Samoan archipelago, which are 
strung out nearly in a straight line from east to west, there 
was never any need to go north or south in any general 
and long-continued course. Eastward when the trade 
wind blew, and that, for ten months on end, was from 
8 in the morning until set of sun, was almost too taxing 
a task to impose on the magnificent crew of the consular 
boat, and only to be justified by some sudden outbreak of 
revolution calling for immediate official intervention. To 
go eastward under less pressing conditions was an affair 
of the soft and silent night, when the foam on the barrier 
reefs shone like a friendly ghost of danger to be shunned, 
when the wind had gone to sleep,, when the Avonderful 
violet of the sky seemed to brood protectively on the 
summits of the mountains dimly seen through the ob- 
scurity. Then the crew could make good progress to 
windward in the calm, and taxed so slightly their brawny 
backs and stalwart arms that scarcely a mile of the open 
sea on which our voyage sped but did not echo the music 
of four strong voices in some ancient song which in by- 
gone ages had done like service for whole fleets of ocean- 
going canoes, and the time was set and marked by the 
clear click of the loom of paddles on the gunwale of the 
daring craft. 
It was fixed in the law of nature that half of every voy- 
age must be under the laboring oar, but with equal regu- 
larity half was the swift slipping from crest to fellow 
crest of the open sea, sheet and tiller entailing scarcely 
any responsibility on one sailor, the others lounging on 
the thwarts, half asleep in the bright sun, singing now 
and then love songs or interminable chants of dim legends 
of the past, recounting now and then experiences sug- 
gested by the vanishing sight of brown villages nestling 
under green boughs upon the glittering beach. 
Too much cannot be said of the boat in any recollec- 
tion of Samoan life. The land is so sharp set. the moun- 
tains are so jagged and pi-ecipitous, the roads are such 
constricted trails through dripping jungle, that it is of 
necessity that the boat is the only conveyance. It must 
replace the horse and the cart, and it gives the otherwise 
pedestrian greater speed upon his journeyings and cer- 
tainlj'^ far more comfort. Navy-built, at the Mare Island 
yard, there was surely no better boat than this from end 
to end of the South Sea. It was four-oared, 22 feet on 
the waterline, so light that the oarsmen could easily 
carry it on their shoulders, strong enough to take with- 
out injury many a sharp shock on coral reefs, and so 
fast that it was simply impossible to get a match race on 
any terms. Best of all, she was as dry as a bone whether 
under oars or sail, a quality of no little moment when 
it is recalled that all the voyages were conducted right out 
on the open ocean. It seems foolhardy in retrospective 
glance, this trusting one's self for long voyages at sea in a 
toy boat easily matched for size in the ornamental waters 
of city parks. Were one to launch stich a boat at Sandy 
Hook and propose an outside trip to Boston, or the Capes 
of the Delaware, he would naturally be considered a fit 
candidate for a Bedlam; yet in the islands it seemed the 
most natural thing in life to set out on ocean voyages of 
such and even greater length, and to regard stich a boat 
as amply sufficient. 
It surely is pardonable to dwell in a little fond thought 
on the boat, for in it I dashed through all the Samoan 
waters and learned to know every cape and headland, the 
mountain gorges where sharp squalls might be expected 
to steal out upon the voyager and try to catch him napr 
ping, the landmarks of reef and fishing ground. All of 
the Samoan sea and more than half the share I knew by 
means of this bo^t, therefor© it must serve the view 
point of most of the stories which I have brought back 
from the distant islands which, since that time, have been 
made a part of our national domain, at least so far as con- 
cerns all that is worth having there. 
The story of the swimming sisters came to me in the 
boat, and on a daylight trip, which, of course, means that 
we were under sail and running free before an eight-knot 
trade. We were coasting down the south coast of Upolu 
either on the way home or else directed to some visit of 
great ceremony, for in addition to the official tulafale or 
■•'talking man" of the consulate, I had a tulafale of my 
own, so old as to be purblind, but as cheery as a cricket, 
very wise in all things Samoan, and best of all qualifica- 
tions, he was almost the only Samoan who could get it 
into his head that, above all things, I wanted to hear 
the stories of the past. If only I let him have his own 
way in the telling, I was sure to get the whole of most 
stories from Ailolo, but it never ran straight, and it was 
always necessary to reconstruct it into seriatim order 
afterward. 
Tanoa was at the tiller, and I think he was asleep. At 
any rate that mattered not the least in such steady voyag- 
ing. But something woke him from his nodding pose, the 
scream of some bos'n bird overhead, the scutter of a fleet- 
ing shower of flyingfish, the leap and splash of some pur- 
suing bonito. He looked shoreward, a habit of the island 
navigators, drawn from the ancient days when the open 
sea was free from danger, the shore must be scanned for 
sight of hostile canoes ready to set out in pursuit to rob 
and kill. Just then there was thrown up into sight upon 
a wave crest a piece of roughly shaped timber adrift, and 
the rude crotch lashed to one end which we saw as we 
passed it close inboard showed that the flotsam was the 
simple mast of some sailing canoe that had gone adrift or 
had been discarded. 
"Tilafainga, Tama'itai," said Tanoa, as he pointed out 
to me the floating wood. So far as Tanoa was concerned, 
that was a good and sufficient explanation, and I knew 
by long experience that if there were a story behind the 
simple statement, from Tanoa or the other boys in the 
crew I could never hope to get it. But with Ailolo it was 
a different matter. He could not see the floating timber, 
but his quick ears caught the word and his chipper brain 
started to unreel a lot of stuff which it was hard to make 
sense of at first. 
"Tilafainga ! Do you know what that means, Tama'itai ? 
the mast was difficult, aue! it was hard, one end sank and 
her head went under water, and the other end sank with 
her and her head went under water, and that was how 
she came by her name. Panga, but that was a swim! 
And her sister, she swam, too, and found her name in 
Tutuila, Taenia the Glistening Beach. Aue, aue! Where 
are we now, Tanoa, for you are young and can see the 
shore, but Ailolo is grown old and blind, and all that 
he sees is but the things that were these many years 
ago; where, then, are we?" 
"Fanga Safata," replied the boatman j "we- liave left 
Siumu far behind ; here is the sand point where is Vaie'e- 
i-tai, and behind the point is Vaie'e-i-uta, and there yon- 
der is Saanapu, and between is Safata Bay." 
"Oi, oi, oi !" cackled Ailolo. "The spot of sea is right. 
It was off Safata that the girl found her name, Tilafainga, 
and in the same spot you find another difficult mast 
adrift, but the name was taken up ages ago and we 
are too late. Isa, what a swim that was! It began in 
Savaii and the swimming sisters swam far in all Samoa, 
to Fiji they swam, to Tonga they swam, and back they 
came to Samoa. And the king is of their family, and so, 
too is Mata'afa. Pongisa! There never was a swim 
like that from the beginning and coming down to these 
nights and forever and forever. But they were scared 
when the chief threw down the backload of oven wood 
which he had fetched in because his wife was sick, and 
they broke apart and jumped into the sea and swam. 
Aue, it is a hard thing to have a sick wife, and leads a 
man into many difficulties. Now let me tell who wa.s 
the father of the swimming twin sisters and who the 
mother." Then Ailolo began, as all the really old 
Samoan stories do begin, with the great gods in the 
ninth heaven, and thence by an unbroken chain of mar- 
riage down to date, a part of the narrative which may be 
readily omitted. But from the sample foregoing it will 
be seen that it is never easy to make out the sense of a 
Samoan story, and many repetitions must be needed be- 
fore all the elements can be reduced to consecutive nar- 
ration. In what follows we shall find the. legend of the 
swimming sisters set forth in as straightforward a man- 
ner as possible, but lacking the interjections and devious 
thoughts with which the account, as given by AilolOj was 
enriched. 
It was in Savaii, on its southern and most iron-bound 
coast, that the twin sisters were born and grew up to be 
quite sizable girls. Their parents are said to be of divine 
descent, probably they were as respectable as any of the 
elemental savages who the Samoans then were; but all 
this family history need not concern us. At birth, and, in 
fact, until the twins fell into the series of events which 
have made them historic, they seem to have had no names 
at all, a thing that M'ill surprise no one who knows the 
importance of the name in Samoa and the looseness of 
the tie by which it is attached to any given individual. 
But if in their early career they were anonymous, these 
young women are sufficiently distinguished to all time 
by the fact that -a deformity united them most intimately; 
in fact, at the risk of an anachronism, they are best to be 
described as Siamesed. This fact is so clearly brought 
out in all the legends as to lead one to the belief that 
there must be at least this historic basis, that in Samoan 
antiquity there must have been a pair of twins united 
more or less extensively by connecting ligaments. Not 
only is the fact of the junction clearly dwelt upon, but 
the manner of the attachment is no less distinctly stated. 
This was by a ligament connecting in each member of 
the couple a point on the spine high up between the 
shoulder blades. The sisters were thus brought back to 
back, when one walked forward the other had to step 
backward, when one bent over to pick up anything on 
the ground the other was lifted in the air and borne on 
her sister's back. In every account of the twins explicit 
mention is made of these inconveniences and without the 
omission or alteration of a single material particular. 
In the narrative it is expressly stated, and it will be 
seen in the foregoing quotation from Ailolo, that the 
mother of these monst-rotis twins was ill and unable to be 
