April $, 
Forest and stream 
inches or two feet, but here the thaw had little effect, and 
before reaching the sitmrtiit I found new sriow, and flo 
si<%n of a crust. At this point, just above the camps, the 
snow was upward of four feet deep. On the basin higher 
up there were places where it was in excess of eight 
feet in depth. On either hand were thickly wooded ridges 
where the deer were wintering. This I knew from a 
previous snowshoeing trip, when I had followed the ridges 
and seen deer and deer yards in abundance. My course 
now was through the open, and as a result I saw no deer 
signs whatever. 
Just before leaving the large timber I passed through a 
blow-down of considerable extent, where hundreds of 
thousands of feet of merchantable spruce had been up- 
rooted by a tornado in the fall of 1900. The tree tops 
all pointed east, and not a tree of any size was left stand- 
ing. They had been bowled over like a row of children's 
blocks, and lay in lines as if the cause of each tree's down- 
fall had been the impact of its neighbor on the west. 
Leaving the bed of the brook a short distance beyond, I 
found myself among a sparse growth of cat spruces and 
gnarled birches. These trees were ancient moss-covered 
specimens, twisted by the high winds and scarred by the 
catapultic flight of rocks which had fallen from the 
heights above. 
I was in an amphitheater, surrounded on three sides 
by a narrow mountain rim, with a bowl-like curve closely 
approaching the perpendicular at the upper edge. The air 
was very still, and the sun shone brightly, but not a bird 
or animal was to be seen, and the thread of my snow- 
shoe trail, which could be traced for half a mile behind, 
was the only break in the white covering. The place was 
as wild and desolate as the Hermit Range of the Selkirks, 
yet it was not lonely. The deathly, forbidding aspect of 
distant rugged mountains is lost on a closer acquaintance. 
The personality of a mountain soon makes itself felt to 
the mountaineer, and with familiarity comes the restful 
sense of comradeship. It is like a little child petting the 
great friendly dog. 
The safest way of climbing Dix is to gain the crest of 
the northern ridge and follow that around to the sum- 
mit. The straight approach up the slides looked so 
simple and attractive, however, that I essayed that with 
the result that before I had gotten half-way up I found 
myself in difficulties, and before I reached the summit it 
was a desperate tooth and nail scramble up an almost 
perpendicular front. Fortunately, the snow was in the 
best possible condition, being neither crusted, nor, on 
the other hand, soft and snbstanceless. Much of the way 
I climbed with my snowshoes off, using them as pikes 
to drive into the snow and hang on to, while my moc- 
casined toes found a sure hold in the nitches thus made. 
Finally I stood upon the summit, a long, curving rock 
edge, so narrow in places that a carriage could not be 
driven along, even if level. Below in the sea of white 
forest were a score of lakes, and westward, beyond a great 
gulf, was the rugged range of Wolf Jaws, the Gothics, 
saw-toothed Resigonia and Marcy. Eastward was Lake 
Champjain and the Green Mountains of Vermont. 
It was cold there on the summit, and I did not stay 
long in the silent whiteness above the trees. The exertion 
of climbing had been severe, and I was stripped to my 
undershirt and not prepared for the cold wind that 
swept across the crest. So I followed the northern 
ridge back, running whenever practical, and soon was a 
thousand feet lower, warm and comfortable among the 
timber. J_B- Burnham. 
A Walk Down South —XXIII. 
On Monday morning it was still cold and freezing, but 
I started from Hick's at 8:45 o'clock. It was a hard day 
to travel. Ice gathered on the paddle, and my hands 
were soon so cold that I could not hold my pen to make 
notes in the little blank book that serves as my memory s 
mile posts. But it was a day that needed more than the 
one line it got in the note book: . 
"Jan. 13— start 8:45—3:30 stop"— the last word is a 
shivery scrawl. '. 
About 10:30 o'clock on that morning I came to Buz- 
zards' Roost, an island of considerable note among river 
men, because the buzzards flock there every night, and. 
discuss the ghoulish carnival of the days with many a 
poke and gagging thrust of their raw, reeking heads. 
Here Hick had said was a burial ground of the In- 
dians. He showed to me a pot in which an infant had 
been buried— it was made of ground mussel shells and 
clay, baked. When taken from the ground it crumbled 
in the fingers, but now, dried by wind and sun, it was 
hard enough to hold its own weight. It would hold a couple 
of pecks, nearly, as it stood. How large it had been 
was a question. . 
Across from Buzzards' Roost, on the mainland, 1 saw 
a little brook, and just below the brook gully, on the 
flat, were some of those red cobbles packed tightly in 
their circles and ovals. I took my five-pint graniteware 
pail and went up on the bottom, a rise of ten feet, say, 
and at the second step I found an arrow head, then an- 
other, a third. In a few minutes — say twenty, the bot- 
tom of the pail was covered with the flints. Meanwhile 
1 pondered on what those red stones had been used for. 
They were cracked and chipped by heat, from six to 
ten paces apart. The answer was simple enough when 
I knew it. They were simply tepee fireplaces. 
I found many tips, a broken stone knife handle, a lead 
bullet, flattened and encrusted with a white substance. 
Also a bullet the size of a buckshot, but with a faint trace 
of the knife that had trimmed, it on one side. The '''gem' 7 
of the lot was a dull red and yellowish-white tip nearly 
two and three-quarter inches long, and perfect from the 
point to the shank. On the island the "tides" had left a 
deposit instead of wearing the ground away, consequently 
the arrow tips, etc., were nearly all covered up, but I 
found half a dozen or so. Then, chilled to the bone, I 
entered my boat again and went hustling down the river. 
A few miles below some men were trying to turn a 
stray ferry boat over. They had a fire burning, and that 
was a chance to get warm. The fire was curious. There 
was a pile of drift a hundred yards long, ten or fifteen 
feet deep, with fifty cords of dry wood in it — tree trunks, 
twigs, planks, beams and boards. But it would have 
taken some effort to dislodge most of it. The fire was 
kept going with dry hay and weeds pulled from the mass 
of stuff. Three men were warming themselves in the 
V. 
smudge, while a fourth pulled the fuel and carried hi 
with one hand, warming the other in his pocket. On rayl 
arrival, however, three of them got some wood, and the p 
fire blazed up respectably. What they would not do 
for themselves they did for the stranger. 
I started on in half an hour, hoping to make Rogers- 
ville Bridge before dark, but night was coming on lone- ( 
somely, and there* was no sign of the bridge. At last i 
log house on the hill looked inviting. I went to it. 1 
could stay if I "could stand their way of living." 
Simmons is a Dunkard, a tall, lank man with long black 
hair, black whiskers a week or so long, and the mildest, 
sweetest, gentlest large brown eyes that I ever saw under 
a man's high forehead. A man of uncommon strength, 
with the real ham-like fists he handled his four babies 
as if they were cotton. We ate a supper of fried pork, 
over which a milk-and-flour gravy had been poured, apple 
sauce, sorghum, coffee and milk, hot bread (biscuit), and 
then at the moderate hour of 8 o'clock went to bed. Mine 
was fluffy and deep. c 
In the morning it was clear, and as soon as the sun 
came up, bright. After a breakfast similar to the supper, 
I went down to the boat. It was frozen in by a layer of 
ice along the bank. I broke it out with an oar, and 
Simmons shoved me out of the little rivulet gully in 
which the boat passed the night, and then I headed away 
southwest again. The river was a-sparkle with "mush 
ice," but not the sort I had seen on the Little Holston. 
Instead of being in flakes, this was in small cakes half an 
inch thick, and from three inches to four feet across. In 
a rippling shoal, just below Simmons, the ice danced in 
the sunlight, each piece flashing like a looking glass. 
The effect was blinding. I was glad to get my back to 
the stuff. ■ 1 
Only a couple of miles down the river I came to a 
creek— so inviting that I ran up it a few yards, tied up 
and took a walk on the bank. For the most part the 
bottom was covered with silt, but still there were many 
arrow heads to be picked up, one group of five all to- 
gether— big, biack war tips they were. I wondered if 
some warrior had not fallen there, and his quiver full 
marked the spot? Later I learned that the stream was 
Mink Creek, and that on the hill near the flat was an old 
Indian fort. 
Richer by a pocketful, I came away, and following 
the left side of a long ''eddy," or still water, really a 
mill pond, I passed two raftsmen building one of their 
crafts. They directed me as to the safe route through 
the Rogersville Dam, a mile below. I didn't know it, but 
we three were to meet again. The dam sluice proved to 
be swift, a little dancing and then the railroad bridge 
came in sight, high, black, with a long trestle on the 
left. At a house on the right, George Steel's, I left my 
duffle and my boat tied to a tree. 
I told Mr. Steel that I would probably be back that 
night, but that I might not be back for a week. Sim- 
mons had mentioned a feud, the Jones-Green "war," and 
I wanted to see a feud country. 
Rogersville was four miles away. I followed the rail- 
road to the Creek Valley town. At the, express office I 
got an express package with some needful clothes, espe- 
cially an eight-pound sweater, and then at the hotel met 
Proprietor Joe Spears. We couldn't trace any relation- 
ship to each other, but the name was something. 
I expressed my desire to see the feud country. 
"Don't you do it," he said. "They'll think you're a 
detective and bushwheck you sure." Jim Wright was 
especially dangerous. He had shot a man in November 
and had a fat record of murders to his account. Some 
realism to the badness of the country was furnished by 
a murder just below Rogersville, a couple or three days 
before. Also by remarks in the barber shop. A white 
man there was joshing the negro barber, saying: 
"Why, Davis, if you got mad at me you'd kill me 
quick." 
The white man gone, the tall yellow man said he 
had to "get his man," because "his man" had shot twice 
already. A thin line back from the corner of the bar- 
ber's eye, an inch long, showed where the victim's bul- 
let had burned. 
I went down to see Lawyer W. R. Gillen waters about 
the bad men. He said that Jim Wright was as fine a 
man as I ever met, when he wasn't afraid of somebody's 
"not minding their own business." On Wright's head is 
"a reward of $550, one for murder, one as an escaped con- 
vict, and one by the brother of one of his victims. Gil- 
lenwaters said he had defended in more than two hun- 
dred cases, and had not had a client hung, and could 
count the number of men who had got more than ten 
years on his fingers. The success of the criminal lawyers 
in the mountain country of Tennessee has made murder- 
ing easy there, it is generally admitted. 
I stayed in Rogersville two nights. One man stopped 
Proprietor Spears and asked him, probably, in a low 
voice : 
"Who's that man at your place?" 
"What man?" asked Spears, "pretending" he didn't 
know who was meant. 
"That big fellow with short pants on?" 
"I don't know much about him." 
"Well, I'll bet he won't get away alone when he starts 
away." 
This was used as an argument to keep me from going 
over to Sneedville, where the bad men center at the 
court of Hancock county. 
On Thursday, Jan. 16, I started for the home of Tip 
Jones, half-way to Sneedville, not yet certain whether 
it would be worth while to go to Sneedville or not. I 
stopped for dinner at a log house near Choptack, five 
miles out. The good widow thought I was a detective 
and said so. 
It was a rough country of narrow valleys extending 
northeast and southwest, with gaps through Which the 
road wound in oak and chestnut forests. I met one of 
the men who had been turning the ferry boat up the 
river; he was in a wagon, and we had a talk. He said, 
"Be kind of keerful over there" on parting. 
I eyed the steep hillsides and their many convenient 
ambushes with surpassing interest. 
I saw a bunch of twelve or fifteen quail in one valley 
clearing; then at a little stream sawmill they told me 
I. could make a short cut over Clinch Mountain and save 
two or three' miles to Tip Jones'. I took to the little 
Ipath and climbed the mountain side; steep and steeper 
it grew, but corners of stone, tree roots and other foot- 
holds made the ascent not too bad. I skirted a clearing 
unseen by the man and two women who were grubbing 
brush thete. 
Still on a path, I came to a tiny log cabin with a 
mud-and-stick chimney to the stone fireplace. Erne Hil- 
ton was the little man who lived there. He ^minded 
his own business." Curious to know who I was, he put 
the questions as far from the interrogation points as pos- 
sible. "A heap of strangers in the country?" for instance, 
i told him truthfully that I was a newspaper man. said it 
as convincingly as possible. When 1 had "warmed" by 
his fire, he pointed the way to me, after leading me to 
the mountain top. , 
Down the mountain was as steep as up it. Every step 
was followed by a slip and sometimes I threw my arms 
round a sapling, "like grape vine round a gun," and held 
on till my momentum was overcome. Far below was 
Cal Cope's store, white house and Tip Jones'. Along a 
cleared ridge back, through a barn down a hollow, over a 
fence, and, chewing my heart, perhaps, I asked for Tip 
Jones of a mild, smooth-faced, dapper, white-haired man 
in the white house — not knowing which was Tip's then. 
The man was Cal Cope. 
Tip was called in for me. So I met the first man who 
was liable to think I wasn't minding my own business. I 
told him who I was first, then asked about the feud. 
Tip's eyebrows lowered and the round lumps over each 
of his eyes seemed to swell a bit, and a little gleam came 
into his gray-blue eyes — just the breath of suspicion, 
which I allayed by repeating who I was after I got some 
answers to questions. But Tip was reluctant to talk. He 
had been shot at, had done some shooting himself, had 
been a fugitive from the courts, had hid in the moun- 
tains round about, and seen men hunting for him in the 
valleys. He had fled as far as the Indian Territory and 
come at the house of the Dick Green who shot his 
brother's son in a fight in which hundreds of shots were 
fired, a boy killed and several wounded. Ace Jones, father 
of Dick Green's victim, was the one for me to see, he 
said. Ace was the leader of the Jones faction, and "knew 
all about it." 
After a night at Cal Cope's I started for Ace Jones. 
Tip was going a few rods that way. . 
"I stood on that hill there once and saw five men come 
to my house looking for me," Tip said of a little round 
knob grown to fruit trees. As we separated, he said : 
"Just tell Ace what you be when you see him, so's he 
won't think nothing." 
Three miles away was Ace's house, and I tramped that 
way, feeling pretty much the same as the first time I 
ever went into the woods to sleep out alone. 
Raymond S. Spears. 
Floating on the Missouri.— VII. 
Crooked Creek flows into the Musselshell about two 
miles above the latter's confluence with the Missouri. It 
is a "dry" stream, water standing in it only in holes, and 
heads in some ridges bordering Armell's Creek, fifty miles 
to the west. Its upper course is through a broad plain 
and then it runs between high pine-clad buttes and ridges 
where mountain sheep, mule deer and antelope are nu- 
merous. I understand that a party of Lewistown, Mont., 
men who were hunting on the creek a year ago corralled 
forty deer in a cut wall coulee and killed every one of 
them, leaving the animals to rot where they fell. Of 
course they were pilgrims; no old-timer would think of 
doing such a thing. And they even went- home and 
bragged of the deed and their sportsmanship. Sportsman- 
ship, forsooth. 
Years ago, while hunting buffalo. on Crooked Creek, I 
ran across an eccentric character named Thomas Faval, 
better known as Skunk Cap. He was a north half-breed 
and spoke English with a broad Scotch accent. But that 
was not his only language; he spoke Blackfoot, Cree, 
Crow, Sioux, with equal facility. Wherever he went he 
carried a staff some seven feet long, to which were 
fastened various bits of fur and feathers and painted 
buckskin pouches, all of which he claimed was great medi- 
cine, and enabled him to cure all manner of disease. The 
various Indian tribes all believed in his mysteries, and 
his services and ceremonies were always in great de- 
mand. _ Consequently he was never short of robes and 
furs with Which to support his three wives, and purchase 
the rum he so dearly loved. Tom was about seventy-five 
when I first met him, but still sound and hearty. He 
was a member of the Sir John Franklin Relief Expedi- 
tion, and told many interesting stories of his adventures 
in the far North. He was death on beavers, getting 
great numbers of them by the aid of his dogs. These 
were two low, . short-legged nondescript fices which he 
had trained to the business. They would go under water 
into a bank beaver's hole, follow it up to the den, or 
living room, and either kill and drag out, or drive out, the 
occupants. If they were driven out, Tom and his women 
speared them. One time at our branch post on Flat Wil- 
low Creek we had been out of whisky for some weeks, and 
Faval, who was camping and trapping near by, was in 
despair because his large and ever-increasing pile of 
beaver skins could not purchase even a dram. But one 
day our bull train rolled in with supplies, and we were 
unloading it when Tom happened along. The first thing 
he noticed was a barrel of whisky standing on the ground, 
and with triumphant yells he ran up and embraced it, say- 
ing, "God bless the puncheon, me b'ys; God bless its 
generous gairth." 
The Musselshell country is a noted place for fossils of 
various kinds. I have often heard of a place some twenty 
miles above its mouth where "one can find almost any 
kind of an old bone," as our informant said. I once saw 
a fossilized turtle, found near its mouth by a "wood- 
hawk," which measured five feet in length. 
The island on which we camped is fast wearing away, 
the swift current cutting it on both sides. There are 
some deer on it, and several families of beavers have 
large caches of winter food at its lower end. May they 
escape the w_iles < of the trapper and increase. I "would 
that it were life imprisonment to kill one of them, for it's 
but little short of taking human life. Long as I have 
lived in this country, many as have been my opportunities, 
I never harmed one, and I don't understand how any one 
