L 3 T 
FOREST AND STREAM 
{April 5, igox 
Through the Parsonage Window* 
XI. 
Out through the window to-day the little stage of 
buffalo grass is stretching afar, for fancy rebuildeth that 
which has passed away. 
I had been on several expeditions after big game in 
the great West ; that is, in the inter-Missouri and Rocky 
Mountain country. Eighteen had found me chasing ante- 
lope over the table lands of east-central Nebraska, and 
my twentv-fh-st birthday found me chasing elk over the 
sand hills" in the Dismal River country. Hunting was 
by no means a profession with me. The intervals be- 
tween expeditions was filled up by the usual routines of 
life, and have no place here. 
Buffalo was by far the most common game of the 
great plains. Yet, after three expeditions, I had never 
seen one, and when a rambler from the buffalo ranges 
of western Kansas came my way and told me of his ex- 
ploits, I was ready for adventure in that line. 
Having reached the age of twenty-one, I was eligible 
to one hundred and sixty acres of Uncle Sam's domain. 
Reaching the furthest encroachment of settlement on the 
buffalo country, I secured a suitable quarter section of 
land on a far-reaching level of silver- white buffalo sod 
and had my entry recorded at the land office. A level 
plain of buffalo grass looks like a great timothy stubble 
after a frost has touched it under a full moon. 
This was preliminary to the buffalo hunt. After the 
hunt I would return there and make settlement, break 
that easily subjugated _sod and sow the land in wheat; 
and it would require only a pencil and a piece of paper 
to show just what I could do in five .years. Life would 
be a pleasant dream. I should "tickle the earth with a" 
plow, and it would laugh me a golden plenty." 
The first thing to be done, in making a settlement on 
the prairies, is to break a hedgerow all round the land, 
and sometimes to cross section it — that is, subdivide a 
quarter section into four forties. This I had done as a 
mark of good faith before starting out. These hedge- 
rows were seldom held in subjection after the first year 
or planted in hedge until the place has passed through 
first hands, but were left to take care of themselves. 
This they did by growing up to weeds and bunch grass; 
the buffalo grass seldom asserted itself after once being 
plowed up, or if it did come back was very slow in taking 
hold, and a marked characteristic of the country soon 
came to be these long, straight, dirty lines of ragged 
weeds or red bunch grass, running across the cleaner 
white of the buffalo sod. 
The virgin prairie of western Kansas was at all times 
a beautiful thing, whether in the buff coat of fall and 
winter or the emerald robe of June ; unbroken, it was as 
grand and inspiring a sight as God ever placed before 
the human eye. But, scarred by man, it became a deso- 
late waste or fertile fields, according as the scarring 
process was strongly or weakly directed. 
Fully one-half the entries made on Government land 
were made by people who never intended to settle, but 
just to block the way until other men came with a real 
desire ip cultivate the land, and paid them liberally to 
get out.' It was a common thing, even, for men to prove 
up on their claims without having spent a single night 
upon them. On such claims the improvements might be 
somewhat as follows: Seven acres of weeds, where 
the land had been broken to fulfill the demands of the 
-law, which required seven acres- under cultivation; a sod 
house without window or door, and perhaps with the 
roof falling in; a hole in the ground with a jug seven 
mches long, filled with water, at the bottom— the law 
requiring a well with at least seven inches of water in it. 
I have in mind a man who proved up on just such a 
claim. He was a lawyer and sold the claim for a thousand 
dollars. Indeed, the sale was all arranged before final 
proof was made. This man came to be a shining light 
and a teacher of men ; he attained to high political favor, 
and then the blight of time struck him and he withered 
and is gone. 
. With such work as this on a great many of the claims 
and the indifferent improvements made by the poorer 
settlers, the clean pra'Vie soon came to be desolate and 
disreputable. That which had been beautiful became a 
vexation to the soul. The name "Kansas" brings three 
separate and distinct pictures to my mind's eye. First, a 
vast reach of nearly level landscape done in silver and 
bronze, relieved here Snd there by valleys with dark 
thready of leafless trees winding from base to base of 
the hills on either sMe, and extending either way as far. 
as the eye can follow. Second, the same landscape with 
the pall of death cast over it, an endless black waste— the 
silver and bronze have been- swept away by fire, and 
ashes only are left. Again, the same vast field covered 
with a floss of green— unbroken, endless green. It is 
impossible for the human mind to imagine a sight more 
sublime. There are few flowers. The sensitive rose, that 
withers at the touch of the human hand, more like a 
i Ve Ii than a rose; tne common wild rose; the 
pale blossoms of the buffalo pea, and the purple of the 
mdigo flower, called buckskin flower by the Kansas 
settler, whose plowshare fails to cut it. These are the 
features, and none of the flowers are numerous enough 
for their presence to be noticeable in the solid spread of 
green. Some one suggests sunflowers, but sunflowers 
are not of primitive Kansas, and came only with man and 
hie machinations. 
The laying of the walls of my sod house was an occa- 
sion fraught with much interest to me, for here I was 
to lay the foundation of future fortune. There were 
several of us going out on the buffalo range for the win- 
ter, and while making other preparations, we took a 
day off and all turned to to help lay the wall. First we 
broke a small patch of ground, the sod being cut and 
turned over in long, even strios, the length of the fur- 
row. The strins were ait with a spade into pieces the 
proper length for use. Two feet was the width of the 
wall; the trimming of it inside and out reduced it to 
eighteen inches. The sod was laid up l ; ke brick only on 
a larger scale, with the sod side down; and after each 
layer the top was leveled off, the loose earth cut ^way 
filling all cracks between the sod. When a height of 
seven feet was reached all round, the work for the time 
being was done, it being necessary to allow the wall at 
least six months to settle before putting on the roof. 
Those walls stood until the elements dissolved them; but 
I never slept more than two or three nights within them. 
After a couple of years I built a house of stone, and that 
I did not live in to any great extent; in fact, it might 
be as well to state that my five years on a claim was 
mostly put in otherwhere — but of that more anon. 
By Oct. 15 our outfit was ready for the start. We 
had a good strong team of horses and a lumber wagon, 
with one rather heavy saddle pony for scouting pur- 
poses, which could also be used as substitute in the 
team in case of accident. We took 400 pounds of flour, 
plenty of coffee, baconj sugar and so forth. In the 
matter of provisions we were far better provided than 
most of the settlers we left behind, I think we were 
indebted to this fact for a great many visits from the 
settlements while in our winter camp. I am satisfied that 
a number made the drive of more than a hundred miles 
just to get a few good "square" meals. We, of the first 
detachment, were only scouts who were expected to lo- 
cate tlie best range and establish a winter camp, from 
which we could send out lesser expeditions in all direc- 
tions and into the very heart of the "enemy's country." 
Our guns were not the delicate and effective weapons 
of to-day, but clumsy, old-fashioned things such as the 
.56-50 Spencer and the Springfield breechloading musket. 
We also had one .45-120 Sharps hybrid, made by attach- 
ing a heavy, old-fashioned, muzzleloading rifle barrel to 
a Sharps breech and boring it out to suit. This gun 
would throw up a bigger shovelful of sod than any of the 
others when its missile missed the mark and hit the 
prairie, which it often did. It also had a decidedly more 
emphatic recoil; otherwise the guns were about on a 
par, all being equally hard to manage, as they were coarse- 
sighted, bad buckers and hard on trigger. We also had 
an original model Henry rifle, which was more accurate, 
easier managed, but a great deal less powerful; and a 
double-barrel. 10-gauge, T2-pound shotgun. These we 
kept in the pink of condition and loaded, the shotgun with 
eighteen buckshot to the barrel, in case of attack by 
Indians. Our ammunition consisted mainly of a 25-pound 
can of Dupont powder, 2,000 primers and about 60 pounds 
of bar lead. For the Spencer and Henry, we could only 
use fixed ammunition, both being rim-fire. The Spencer 
went out of action early in the game for lack of ammuni- 
tion, and the Henry soon followed suit from the same 
cause. We did not use the Henry for hunting at all, but 
brought it along exclusively fordefense, it being a maga- 
zine gun of sixteen shots. Hitting anything smaller than 
a buffalo with the heavy guns was an idle dream, though, 
and we fell back on the Henry, and before spring had 
fired all our defense ammunition at a large cottonwood 
tree that stood a hundred yards away and just opposite 
camp. 
It was with, to me, considerable excitement that we 
rolled away across the plains at last, for a long-cherished 
dream was about to be fulfilled. From the time of our 
starting out it was more than a year before I slept inside 
a house again. In that time I had grown familiar with 
the stars; I had learned to tell the time of night by the 
clock of stars through my own observation, never having 
heard of it before. A companion who slept beside me 
knew no more of the stars at the end than at the be- 
ginning of the campaign. How he could lie and look 
up at them for a year, and never find anything out, was 
a mystery, but he did. I never could make him under- 
stand my clock, and it was useless to try. He said it 
was arrant nonsense and impossible; that I was evi- 
dently "struck" on myself, that I knew a little too much 
for one and not quite enough for two; so we agreed to 
disagree, and let it drop at that. As to the results of the 
trip, they were not great, yet of much moment to a few 
families. Several there were who thus had plenty of 
fresh meat that otherwise would have had scant picking. 
As for myself, I had nothing in the form of luxury in the 
eye of the average human oddity, but the experience was 
a luxury which I have since been unable to parallel in 
any other walk of life whatever. E. P. Jaques. 
\n Outing in the Snow 
Easter Sunday, toor, when ladies were displaying the 
newest creations in millinery. and making the city streets 
a kaleidoscopic dream of spring, there was eight feet of 
snow on the northern slope of t)ix, one of the important 
though rarely visited peaks of the Adirondacks. To 
reach Keene Valley from Port Henry, twenty-five miles 
away, mails were sent a circuitous route of eighty miles 
by way of Au Sable Forks, solely because the last six 
nrles of the regular mail route from Underwood Post 
Office to Beedes was buried under a depth of soft snow 
that let the mail carrier's horses down out of sight and 
made progress absolutely impossible. The remainder of 
the way was good, but after thawing weather took the 
bottom out of this six-mile stretch, the eighty-mile way 
around was the shortest way home. 
I traveled with the mail carrier as far as Underwood, 
which is less than a dozen miles from the summit of Dix, 
reaching there in time for dinner Wednesday, April 10. 
With me were snowshoes, toboggan, rabbit-skin sleeping 
robe and camera, as well as several days' supply of provi- 
sions, and a rifle. My intention was to climb Dix and 
hunt bears. In the former object I was successful, but 
the large bears were not traveling, andthough I got onV 
the trail of a yearling twice in successive days, I could jft 
do nothing with it, as the bear soon found crust that w 
would support its weight, and there was no way ofj|j 
following it further. m 
Underwood is in a first-rate fishing location. Last year;* 1 
Prof. Seager. of the University of Pennsylvania; MV.fe 
Berry, Mr. Walmslev and myself caught 379 legal trout$j§|. 
in this neighborhood in a day and a half. It is not much 
of a town, however, and aside from the hotel and barns, 
one summer cottage is the only building in sight. Two 
miles away is the sawmill, presided over by Mr. Dave 
Stringham. and back toward Port Henry there is nothing 
much except a shingle mill or two till Stovepipe City is 
reached, ten miles away. The hotel at Underwood isf 
built in the clearing that Guy Brittell made, only to be ffl 
driven off just short of the period necessary to give him* 
squatter's title, ft is managed by Mr, Elmer Wakefield,' 
who is a gentlemanly and efficient hotel man. A few 
rods away a small brook crosses the road, and by follow- 
ing this up to some deserted lumber shanties and then 
swinging to the right through a notch between two hills, 
the South Branch of the Boquet is reached near the big 
bend. An old so-called military road once ran through 
this notch northward to. Keene Valley, said to have 
been used by our army in the war of 1812, but at present 
the largest forest trees grow in the" road, and it can only 
be located in places. Near the big bend I had a hunting 
camp, and here I counted on spending the night. 
It was late when I reached the spot, for the snow was 
very soft and the toboggan pulled hard, and when at 
last I climbed the knoll above the spring and came to the 
two great rocks between which the camp had been built, 
it was so dark that I could see but little of my surround- 
ings. The fallen hemlock which had served for a table 
was buried out of sight, and I walked above it without 
knowing exactly where it lay. Ten feet further should 
have been the camp, but not a sign of the roof could be 
seen. At first I imagined the deep snow had reached 
above the roof, but a little prodding sufficed to show 
that the structure had collapsed, despite the stout spruce 
poles which supported it. This was a cold dash to 
pleasant anticipations of a warm supper and cozy bed. 
Sleep here was out of the question, so I retraced my 
steps to a clearing where some lumber shanties had once 
stood, and finding a spot in the bank of the Boquet where 
the wind and sun had reduced the thickness of the snow 
mantle, I brought my snowshoes into use to clear the 
ground and cut and laid balsam boughs for a bed, and 
afterward cooked my supper, and despite the unfavorable 
conditions, passed a very comfortable night. 
It was while traveling up the bed of the South Branch 
next day that I first saw the tracks of the bear. His pin- 
toed trail led up the east bank of the stream, and it was 
evident from several side trips to the water he was look- 
ing for a good crossing place. Presently a deep pool, 
flanked by a ledge, barred further progress. To get by I 
had to go back to the last rapid and wade across through 
the swift water, half-way up to my knees, carrying the 
toboggan and making a second trip for rifle and snow- 
shoes. 
The bear had found an easier way. From the bank 
above a cedar tree had fallen, its inverted top almost 
reaching the level of the snow. The bear, which must 
have been about the size of a St. Bernard dog. had erected 
himself on his hind legs, and reaching up climbed into 
the tree, and so on up to the top of the ledge. The tracks 
in the snow and scratches in the bark told the story plainly 
enough. 
A short distance above the bear had at length suc- 
ceeded in gaining the west bank of the stream, and as 
he began climbing the steep side_ of Spotted Mountain, I 
left the toboggan and followed in light marching order. 
True to bear traditions, the little scamp selected the 
worst traveling available, and made through an old fire 
slash, where in summer he could hardly have been fol- 
lowed. In winter it was bad" enough, for though the in- 
equalities underfoot were smoothed over, the way was 
through a tangle of pin cherries and maples and young 
birches that slapped one in the face with tantalizing regu- 
larity, and made one realize the devilishness of the In- 
dian method of torture by running the gauntlet. 
Above the slash the trail followed a ravine tip among 
the silent spruces, and eventually reached the slides which 
give the mountain its scarred appearance and its name, 
ft was here that I lost the trail, for with the altitude the 
air had grown colder and the crust became strong enough 
to support the bear. Before leaving the trail, however, I 
made a discovery and settled a question which perplexed 
me. 
The question was, what food is there for a bear when 
the snow is deep in winter? The answer came in the 
shape of a quantity of partridge feathers scattered over 
the snow. No other track was near, and it was plain it 
was the bear which had feasted on the choice piece in 
the menu of woods' delicacies. It seemed impossible that 
the bear could have caught the partridge, as a fox does, by 
pouncing on it in its bed in the snow, and I looked around 
for some explanation as to how he had come by the tid- 
bit. About • the center of the circle of feathers was the 
form the bird had made in the snow, and which the bear 
had broken into. Above the snow was crusted, and the 
most reasonable explanation seemed to be that the par- 
tridge had been caught and imprisoned by a sudden freeze, 
and that the bear had been lead to the dead bird by his 
keen sense of smell. 
The day after following the bear's trail I climbed Dix, 
traveling sixteen miles on snowshoes on the round trip tc 
and from the lower still water on the North Branch. Near 
Mark Sherman's abandoned upper camp, which was at 
one time said to be the highest lumber camp in the 
Adirondacks, I came upon the tracks of a bear, which 
bore a strong resemblance to the tracks of the previous 
day. As the bear had crossed a part of Spotted Moun- 
tain, and come from the direction 1 had followed the other 
tracks, it is highly probable it was one and the same 
animal. 
The tracks crossed the single log, which is all that 
remains of the bridge over the brook at this point, and 
passing between the shanties went up on the mountain 
between the forks of the stream. Here the bear found a 
hard crust, and I lost the trail, this time for good and all. 
Above the camp Dix loomed in a way that the camera 
only faintly reproduces. To the rhythm of snowshoes 
the old lines on Mont Blanc recurred: 
"They crowned him long ago. 
On a throne of rock, 
'Neath a dome of cloud 
With a diadem of snow." 
The great lonely snow-covered mass certainly was 
regal, clothed in a dignity begotten of the calm of cen- 
turies. 
The northern face is seamed with slides, some of the 
greater part of a mile in length. One of these, of recent 
origin, has descended directly into the bed of the right- 
hand fork of the stream up which my course lay. The 
water had apparently been temporarily dammed, and then 
torn through the obstruction with terrific force, leaving 
in its wake in -places windrows of boulders twenty feet 
in height, and at other places shearing the surface rock 
clear away down to a smooth bed of native hypersthene. 
On the lower levels of the mountain the snow had 
settled, till in places it did not exceed a depth of eighteen 
