Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1902, by Forkst and Stream Publishing Co. 
^„ Si $4ay^|,a.coh,j NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MAT 10, 1902, { No . y ork 
SPORTSMEN IN THE WHITE HOUSE. 
Foremost among the Presidents, Mr. Roosevelt has 
brought to affairs of state the knowledge which he won 
when following with keen zest the sports of stream and 
fore'st. With what wisdom the President has drawn upon 
the store of the hunter's information is apparent to any- 
one who may have read in his message to the Congress 
the recommendations concerning forest reserves and the 
preservation of the big game .once so abundant in this 
land. Mr. Roosevelt, too, is the only one of the Presi- 
dents who has added to permanent literature the me- 
morials of his experiences afield. 
There have been others in the White House who are 
yet remembered for their practice of the woodland arts, 
and there are Presidents who are remembered for far less 
innocent occupations. 
The great white light that beats upon the throne is a 
mere candle in comparison with the journalistic calciums 
which are trained upon the Presidents. When the Wash- 
ington correspondents can only make the charge stick 
against any President that he fishes or shoots, the most 
will be made of it. It is a most inscrutable decree of 
Providence that the average newspaper man cannot seem 
to get into appreciative touch with the pleasures of rod 
and gun. Lack of veracity in stating the results is but 
the first and the lightest of the charges which arise in the 
secular press against the sportsman. It is strange that 
it should be so, for the very first mention of the sportsman 
in all history couples with the glorious name of Nimrod 
the reverential assertion that he was a mighty hunter 
"before the Lord." But with human perversity the sports- 
man has become game himself, and no better game has 
been brought to the journalistic bag than a fishing or 
shooting President. It may safely be said, however, that 
no President who is remembered for his sportsman diver- 
sions is remembered for that alone. There are not so 
many of them that it taxes the memory to recall these 
hunting and fishing Presidents. It is not every politician 
who is entirely worthy of enrollment in the livery of 
woodcraft, the devious ways of the one pursuit do not 
comport in all natures with the simple directness of the 
other. 
We may begin with Washington, though this is be- 
yond White House days. There was a degree of formality 
about the first President that rarely permitted him to 
relax from the attitude of dress parade, but like a Virginia 
gentleman, he rode to hounds, kept a pack of his own on 
the Mount Vernon estate until Martha made up her mind 
to draw the line somewhere, and drew it at dog. His 
diary is full of hard-riding fox hunts, once even the hunt 
swept on for no less than seven hours after a bobtail fox 
of which the Father of his Country makes due entry in 
the diary that they "catched" it. That he was thoroughly 
sound, however, appears from the directions which he 
gave to young Custis when about to kill a deer: "Recol- 
lect, sir, that you are to fire with ball, to use no hounds, 
and on no account to kill any but an old buck." Nor was 
the General content with the mere instructions, he ex- 
amined the carcass to see that his injunctions had- been 
complied with. There is a letter of Washington's, written 
while he was President for the first term, in which he 
details his success in fishing for bass off Governor's Island, 
the national capital being then in New York. That Gov- 
ernor's Island Reef was a famous bass ground until long 
after Washington's time. The first day he fished brought 
little luck, for the moon was against him and the tides 
were too high and too low and the wind was in the east, 
and not even a President can go up against that combina- 
tion, particularly the moon. But later on he killed fish in 
weight from one-half to four pounds, "though the latter 
are quite rare." It will be recalled that on an historic 
occasion he made a remark to his father that has become 
legendary. 
. After the first President there is a long gap in which 
we hear nothing of the sports of chief executives. Jack- 
son was bred in the land of the squirrel rifle, but he 
seems to have spent all his time in gunning for Nick 
Biddle and the United States Bank, game that was purely 
political. There were traditions in what used to be called 
the "old army," now doubly removed by two wars, that 
General Taylor was a consummate plainsman. It was 
no easy thing for a man to acquire such a reputation in 
those days. There was so much game on the prairies that 
a mere meat hunter did not count, it was skill that 
brought a man fame. However that may be, President 
Taylor seems not to have alleviated his term by the sports 
of which he was such a master. 
The first of the group of woodfolk Presidents who 
have looked from White House windows over the red 
Virginia hills to the pleasures of field and stream was 
General Arthur. There was not a secret in Long Island 
to which he did not hold the clue if it led to scale. He 
it was who first acknowledged himself a sportsman in the 
eyes of all the world, even though President, for his 
Yellowstone expedition with General Phil Sheridan was 
indeed the first public pronouncement of the now familiar 
fact that the President of the United States is entitled to 
a summer vacation as much as any department clerk, and 
that he has the right to spend it as he pleases. 
Mr. Cleveland, through a unique circumstance in poli- 
tics, occupies two places in this group, bracketing General 
Harrison. It is a poor memory that needs to be reminded 
of the branch of sport which Mr. Cleveland most en- 
joys. The true piscatorial modesty and the angler's 
recognition of untoward chances are quite apparent in 
the following extract from a personal letter written dur- 
ing Mr. Cleveland's second term. Mr. Cleveland was 
referring to some savage hooks in his collection of fishing 
gear, namely the halibut hook of the Haidatsa Indians 
of the north Pacific coast and the pearl-shell hook which 
is the universal lure for bonito in the South Sea Islands. 
He wrote : 
"I have always been a little skeptical on the question 
of actually hooking and saving a fish with that sort of 
rig, but your statement that you have really done it 
disposes of my doubts, and I fall back upon the theory 
that the fish must have been plenty and uneducated, and 
the man at the other end of the line very skillful and 
active. 
"A bad fisherman in the midst of fish is' apt to account 
for his non-success by cursing his tackle. This Samoan 
troll will be extremely useful in repressing such flattering 
self-assurance on my part and on the part of other bad 
fishermen with whom I associate." 
General Harrison, in connection with a temperament 
which to merely casual observers seemed glacial, had the 
sure eye, the steady hand, the experience of dealing with 
bolters, above all the instinct of shooting at a point in 
space where another object is going to be — simultaneously, 
which is the essence of the whole proposition. These, in 
fact, are the qualities which alone entitle a man, even if 
President, to set himself up in a campaign against the 
gentleman from Maryland whose diet is the celery of the 
Chesapeake and whose canvas jacket comes by nature. 
President Harrison, did not often go afield during his 
term of office, but when he could find the time for re- 
laxation it was as a hunter of the canvasback. 
President Roosevelt is a hunter of big game. That 
is a matter of temperament. Some people think that 
fishing is a lazy sort of a loafing job. That, however, is 
not the verdict of those who have hauled in off George's 
Shoal a cod weighing 500 pounds at the far end of a line 
no less than two miles long, these dimensions being an 
accurate measure of the feelings and not of such paltry 
things as scales and yardsticks. No more is it the verdict 
of those whose delight it is to wade the Northern streams 
with the water pouring in over the tops of waders at a 
temperature of precisely zero, it being a known physical 
fact that trout water is the only known fresh water which 
does not freeze at any temperature — that is to say, that 
does not freeze itself, it's sure to freeze other people. It 
is possible that there are those who think that to sit in a 
blind in the gray dawn is to be classed as one of the 
sedentary pursuits. That is a matter of opinion. But 
the big-game hunter is never in a doubtful position. He 
may be the butt of caricature, but even mocking caricature 
must represent him as at least doing something. The 
mountain lion is only a eat in the last analysis, but it is 
not every one who would care to say "Poor pussy !" to 
this cat. The grizzly stands for a reserve stock of energy 
which it is not every one who would choose to set in 
motion. When one goes in for big game "there is apt to 
be something doing pretty nearly every minute — it is one 
of those chapters in the strenuous life of which reviewers 
would write that there was not a dull page in it; it is the 
sport that fits this last Presidential sportsman. 
THE AMERICAN FUR TRADE. 
Perhaps no events of the history of America are in- 
vested with more romance and more strangeness than 
those which cover the expansion westward of the United 
States in the first half of the last century. From the 
close of the War of the Revolution to the beginning of 
the Civil War, no event had greater significance or a 
more important influence on our national development 
than the purchase of Louisiana from the French Govern- 
ment and the expedition of Lewis and Clark across the 
continent which immediately followed the acquisition of 
territory. 
Their journey opened up to the dwellers of what was 
then the western portion of the United States, the pos- 
sibilities of the great unknown region which lay toward 
the setting sun, and swiftly in the wake of the explorers 
followed the men who hoped to make money out of the 
country that had just been discovered. Yet for forty 
years after the purchase of Louisiana the people of the 
United States at large knew little or nothing of their 
new possessions. The settlements were moving slowly 
toward the west, and the Mississippi River was still the 
boundary line of knowledge of their continent for prac- 
tically air Americans. But between 1830 and 1840 books 
began to be written about the country vaguely known as 
the far West. It was known that this vast region was 
crossed by great ranges of mountains; was drained by 
mighty rivers; was occupied by Indians, and abounded in 
wild animals; but all this knowledge was so vague that 
it had but little meaning to the average citizen. 
Yet to one class of the Western, population the new 
country soon became very real. It was crossed by the 
trapper, who penetrated its inhospitable wilds, traced its 
streams to their sources, traversed its mountain passes 
and scaled its peaks. At first he went alone, but later in 
companies, which gradually increased in number. "The 
far West became a field of romantic adventure, and de- 
veloped a class of men who loved the wandering career 
of the native inhabitant rather than the toilsome lot of 
the industrious colonist." These trappers, and the traders 
who followed them, became typical of a life that lasted 
but little more than a generation, but which while it lasted 
was crowded with incidents so picturesque and heroic that 
its annals inspire an interest akin to that of the age of 
knight-errantry. 
The fur trade has constantly been alluded to by writers 
of earlier and later times, and its incidents have furnished 
the theme for many a graphic pen picture; yet until the 
present time it has never been systematically taken up. 
In "The American Fur Trade of the Far West" Capt 
Hiram Martin Chittenden, of the Corps of Engineers, 
U. S. A., has just made a most notable contribution to 
our knowledge of the early history of the West, which im 
interest, in excitement, in comprehensiveness and in 
value, as historical material, is second to no work of 
modern times. It stands on the same plane with the 
works edited by the late Dr. Elliott Coues, and has been 
produced by the same publisher who brought out Dr. 
Coues' works, Mr. Francis P. Harper, of New York. 
Capt. Chittenden's equipment for the work that he has 
done is -of the best. He has spent a dozen years in the 
country west of the Mississippi, visiting nearly every 
section once frequented by the American fur trader; and 
for a number of years was stationed in St. Louis, well 
known to be a storehouse of original documents which 
pertain to the early period of the Western United States. 
Fascinated by a subject which could hardly fail to be of 
the deepest interest to any one familiar with the old West, 
Capt Chittenden dived deeper and deeper into his sub- 
ject as he continued to study it, and the result is a work 
in three volumes, of absorbing interest to all students of 
America and American history, but above all, interesting 
to those familiar with the West of earlier days. 
As was to have been expected, the author has availed 
himself of all printed material bearing on the subject, but 
beside this he has had access to a vast amount of original 
manuscript never yet printed. Among these are many 
papers now in the possession of Mr. Pierre Chouteau, 
the early correspondence of the fur trader, Andrew Drips, 
and correspondence of Ashley Sublette, Campbell & 
Smith. He has .unearthed much valuable manuscript in 
the way of journals, essays, log books and letter books 
of the American Fur Company, and beside has had the 
oral testimony of the late Capt. Joseph La Barge, a noted 
pilot of the Missouri River from 1832, Captain Chitten- 
