484 
FQREsf ANb StHflAM. 
ftegro man, who showed his pride in being able to read 
the inscription on my rifle. He told me that the Shoals 
could be run safely as far as Lock Six, which is on the 
Government canal. So I went back to the boat, paddled 
back up stream till I thought I could go through an 
opening in the wing dam that shunted the water into 
the upper two locks (A and B), which are on the left 
side of the river. 
The water below the dam was all swift, and a-tumbhng', 
but it did not look too bad from the shore, being further 
away than it seemed. I ran out to it after hard exertion 
with my paddle and shot through one of the breaks into 
a mass of water that was jumping. I looked to see the 
bow of the boat go straight into the waves ahead, instead 
of over, noticing that on each side of me the froth — all 
yellow toothed — was as high as "my eyes. In a few mo- 
ments the water calmed into the drag of a mill race. I 
looked well ahead,' and there were piles of drift caught 
at intervals on towheads, but the towheads were all un- 
der water. The main land was half a mile'away on either 
side, while ahead, no matter in what direction I might 
glance, was the heaving rolls of undulating water through 
which I must go whether or no. I held steady for a 
few moments, and then I saw that one of the drift heads 
was coming at me like a steamship, with the froth curling 
up over the hung logs and sticks, and sweeping to the 
right and left with a wake a mile long behind it. 
I drove the paddle into the water and sent the boat 
kittering to the right, but I had little time to spare. The 
drift pile loomed up larger and larger. For a moment 
it seemed as if I would surely go into it, but at the last 
the boat ran the first great wave thrown from the drift, 
and I went tossing and rolling over the bow waves sent 
from the gray-boned mass and darted clear of them far 
below. 
The send of the current carried me close to the north 
shore, and in the quiet water below the First Shoal I 
had a chance to recover my breath. The current was 
swift compared to that twenty miles up stream, but it 
seemed slow in comparison to what I had just come 
through. I had little fear of the bad water that was 
below me, for the boat had proved its worth. But I de- 
cided that I would stop at the first opportunity for the 
night, as I was tired. Two or three miles below, on the 
right side, I saw two barrels painted white and stood on 
the ends of poles. It was the entrance of the main part 
of the canal. I came along the shore line — all the trees 
were up to their first branches in the water — and noted 
that there was a little opening between the two tow- 
heads to the left of the canal entrance. Once I started 
for it, but the sun was under a bank of blue haze, and 
so I ran into the canal, tied up to the bank, and went to 
a little shanty I found there. It was a trapper's and 
fisherman's camp with a great shell mound around it, 
left there by countless generations of Indians and mound 
builders. 
I carried my duffle up to the camp, built a fire m the 
fireplace, laid my boat canvas over the bunk sticks- 
there were two— round and around, so that when I laid 
on it I was in a bed that would have been perfectly com- 
fortable had the sticks along each side not slipped in 
and their edges cut me all that night, and I never thought 
to nail them fast! 
In the morning, after a good breakfast of potted ham, 
toast and coffee, I crossed the canal and went out on a 
wing dam to take a look at the water after it got into 
the little opening through which I came near going 
through the night before. Perhaps I would have got 
out somehow, but it was much worse than that I had 
come past the day before. I walked down the railroad 
to the lock, and M. B. Jones, the keeper, told me that 
perhaps one who didn't know the river could get down 
the shoals alive, but that I would better put my boat on 
the government train and be carried to the lower end. 
He telephoned to the superintendent, Captain Preston 
Curtis, who said that the train would come up after me. 
I had a meal to remember at Mr. Jones's, and then, 
after noon, my boat and duffle were put on the narrow 
gauge car, and away we went down the line. Not only 
was I walking in a boat, but I was walking in a boat on 
a railroad train. 
At Lock Six, the canal headquarters, I saw Captain 
Curtis, and he was the kind of a man that one likes to 
see. He told me that they would put my boat into the 
water at the lower lock (Number Nine) for me. The 
train went down and we unloaded. Then Captain Cur- 
tis said that it was late, and that I could find a pretty 
good place to stay up at Lock Six and come down in the 
morning, when I would feel more like tackling the river 
again. I took a look at the foot of Lock Nine and 
agreed that it did look hard for one to start out in such 
water. The river was very high, and trie water poured 
against the lower end of the lock inlet, thrust by a wing 
dam, built to fill the lock in low water. The only way 
for me to get out of the lock would be to tow the boat 
through and carry my duffle around. That would not 
be easy. Captain Curtis added that he would give me a 
tow out with the steamer, which would have to go down 
a hundred yards or so below the lock to get a barge 
in the morning. I had roughed it for a long while,_ and 
I was glad of the chance to sleep comfortably for a night. 
In the morning, on a hand car, the captain, several 
men and I went to Lock Nine, a fire was soon making 
steam in the '"Kingman," the boat, and after a little I 
loaded my stuff on the bow of the steamer, and with 
my boat "in tow by a line from the steamer's deck on 
which I was, we went backing through the boiling yellow 
turmoil at the foot of the lock. Below that the current 
went bounding down stream at ten or eleven. miles an 
hour. The Kingman had to put on a full head of steam, 
and my boat was overturned and sucked under the bow 
.of the big one. Still the line held and all was well for 
a few moments, then the tow line parted and away went 
the boat. The big stern wheel of the Kingman hit it 
a rap that must have split the sides. 
I had one wild thought of dismay— "what could I 
do?" But in ten seconds I was glad of it. The Missis- 
sippi River was a wide stream, and a big one. Now I 
would go and see it, but in a steamer. Captain Curtis 
was sorry about the boat, but I wasn't. The more I 
think of it the gladder I am that the boat went when 
it did. I was thinking about going down the thousand 
miles of the Father of Waters. I now looked to a speedy 
trip home. And I had it, and on the way I saw as much 
novelty as in any other similar length of time, though 
I went up the Ohio and have yet to see the Mississippi. 
One more "Walk," this time in the cabins of river 
steamers and in railroad trains, and then I get back home 
again. Raymond S. Spears. 
Elites and the Sportsman. 
In every sphere of action and in every domain of 
thought there are extremists, and the rule holds good both 
in the petty concerns of daily life and the larger, more 
comprehensive activities of society. In politics we have 
antagonistic parties ; in art, rival schools, and even in 
religion hostile cults, each of which claims to have a 
monopoly of truth and right. 
It is natural that sportsmen should find the same state 
of things in their realm, and so we have the brutal spirit 
of the pot-hunter who mercilessly slays everything pos- 
sible, and the absurd spirit of canting compassion which 
exclaims against the wickedness of taking any form of 
life. Now just as all decent people condemn and despise 
the human brute who wantonly kicks his dog or savagely 
whips his horse, so they despise and condemn the pot- 
hunter and any other savage who shoots merely to kill, 
and we may dismiss these with simple contempt and dis- 
gust. But there are people who, ignorant both of nature's 
laws and of the high ethics of true sportsmen, decline to 
make any distinction between classes which shoot, and 
who look upon all with a sort of affected horror. Those 
who are animated by this latter spirit are in truth largely 
women whose sentimental tenderness rests upon imperfect 
knowledge and supersensitive nerves, and that their com- 
passion is very largely theoretical is amply enough proven 
by the fact that it is directly to their vanity that the most 
unjustifiable of all slaughter of animals is "due. For years 
the killing of the most beautiful and useful song birds was 
carried to a most lamentable extent solely to obtain plum- 
age for the gratification of a vulgar taste in millinery. 
Appeals to the minds of most women on the ground of 
sesthetics in the loss of life and color and song, were 
of little avail, as were also similar appeals to their hearts 
on the grounds of unnecessary cruelty used in the obtain- 
ing of such decorations as distinguish savages. Though 
the most efficient good work has been done of late by 
Audubon societies, composed largely of women, yet it was 
only after scientists demonstrated that the decimation of 
insectivorous birds meant by necessary sequence, a severe 
loss to agriculture that any surcease of slaughter, through 
legislation, was secured. An appeal to the greed of men 
proved more effectual than an appeal to the compassion 
of women. I have seen horticulturists shoot birds from 
their fruit trees because they found a few cherries half- 
eaten, when it was only by the aid of these same birds that 
any fruit matured; and in the same illogical way I have 
known a lady who wore the plumage of three cardinals 
on her hat to shudder and even to weep at the recital of 
the story of a deer hunt. But all critics of sportsmen 
are not so inconsistent, if they are more or less misled 
and mistaken. 
Of late years there happily has been a very large in- 
crease of people who not only enjoy nature from an 
aesthetic point of view, but who have come quite rightly to 
think of wild animals as possessed of certain rights, and 
as entitled to human sympathy; but among these, there 
is that extreme class who regard all sportsmen as un- 
justifiably brutal, and as sinfully interfering with the sacred 
laws of a beneficent nature. Now, nothing is more cer- 
tain than that the progress of biology has shown our 
unsuspected kinship to animals, and so has emphasized the 
duty of kindness toward them. But at the same time 
it has revealed the fact that as regards all forms of 
life, nature's methods of development, selection and con- 
servation is such as, judged from the standpoint of the 
amenities and ethics between human beings, is unspeak- 
ably violent and cruel. Happily, it has further shown 
us the utter falsity of any such point of view. It has 
shown us that the seeming suffering of animals, even in 
the feral state, is probably much more fanciful than real, 
and that violent and calamitous as nature's processes ap- 
pear, yet, properly judged in the light of science and by 
the ends attained, they are less cruel than kind. At any 
rate, no humane and enlightened person possessed of the 
larger knowledge can for a moment suppose that the 
honest sportsman who hunts lawful game in a civilized 
manner and by legitimate methods, is at variance with any 
of nature's laws. He knows that, speaking comprehen- 
sively, civilized nations are more friendly to animals as 
a whole than nature herself. The cry of the sentimental- 
ist is ridiculous, and the soberer strictures of many who 
themselves lack the spirit and zest of adventure, are alto- 
gether unwarranted. We may sometimes even find inter- 
ested considerations behind much current criticism, and 
since we cannot ascribe to ignorance the wail of a very 
popular writer who moans over man's infliction of "such 
long and fearful agony on a fellow creature simply because 
that creature does not speak his language," we may as- 
cribe the lament to purely literary motives. 
But let us in the first place look briefly at the processes 
and economy of this beneficent nature. 
When Darwin published his theory of the origin of 
species through variation and natural selection, the nar- • 
row theological mind was scarcely more disturbed at his 
doctrine than the popular mind was amazed at his pic- 
ture of the keen and savage struggle for life. _ The fierce 
battle for existence in which the vast majorities in num- 
bers of all forms of life perished, seemed revolting and 
incredible. Darwin showed that flora and fauna increased 
in geometrical ratio, and but for this natural war in which 
the young and weak perished in myriads, there would 
result a terrible congestion upon every spot of the sur- 
face of the world. The tremendous waste of the vegetable 
kingdom does not much disturb the feelings, but there 
is the same rule in the animal kingdom, though here, be- 
cause of the propensity to hide and because of being de- 
voured by stronger animals, we are spared the evidence of 
the ceaseless tragedy, "We behold the face of nature 
bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of 
food ; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are 
singing idly around us mostly live on insects or seeds, and 
are constantly destroying life ; or we forget how largely 
these songsters or their eggs, or their nestlings are de- 
stroyed by other birds or beasts of prey. We do not al- 
ways bear in mind that though food may be now super- 
abundant, it is not so at all seasons of the year." A hun- 
dred animals are often horn where there is food for but 
one. Darwin estimated that a single winter destroyed 
four-fifths of the birds on his own grounds, and he says 
"This is a tremendous destruction when we remember 
that ten per cent, is an extraordinarily severe mortality 
from epidemics among men." Less than one-fourth of 
the eggs which I counted in the nests of song birds near 
the country place where I spent some time last spring, de- 
veloped into mature birds. The eggs were those of 
robins, vireos, orioles, catbirds, phoebes and song spar- 
rows, and of these some were .destroyed -by crow black- 
birds in spite of my efforts to protect them, some were 
blown out of their nests by storms, in one nest the eggs 
suddenly disappeared in a most mysterious way, a family 
of phcebe fledglings died of parasites, a robin's chicks 
were either deserted or the two parents killed by some 
animal, a warbling vireo's young fell prey to a hawk; and 
so after various catastrophies, less than one-fifth of the 
eggs became song birds. One catbird nesthold and also 
one red-eyed vireo family, succeeded in rearing all their 
young without mishap. The rate of natural increase 
necessitates this frightful mortality. Naturalists tell us 
that the elephant is the slowest in breeding among ani- 
mals, yet but for the savage struggle in which only the 
most favored survive, a single pair of elephants might 
have no less than seventeen million descendants in seven 
hundred and fifty years. "There is no exception to the 
rule that every organic being naturally increases at so 
high a rate that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be 
covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow- 
breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at 
that rate in less than one thousand years there will liter- 
ally not be standing room for his progeny." Huxley, who 
loved to bewilder the opponents of evolution, has drawn 
some ghastly pictures of the results of over-production 
and of the suffering of the countless millions of weak 
animals which "have been tormented and devoured by 
carnivores," and he has told us that were our hearing 
acute enough we should hear every minute of our ex- 
istence, thousands of the cries of the death agony of ani- 
mals. Direful as nature's methods appear, palaeontology 
tells us that she has known more tremendous cataclysms 
-in geological ages. Elephants were once indigenous to our 
continent, the horse seems to have been evolved here, yet 
neither left any record of their existence save in the fossili- 
ferous rocks. Whole orders, families, genera and species 
have perished. In the struggle for life the competition 
is obviously keenest among species nearest allie'd, and a 
slight advantage on the part of one is often the means of 
the extermination of another. Some have thought that 
here lies the reason of the loss of the so-called "link" 
between human beings and apes. The more brutish men 
would fall speedily before the more intelligent with whom 
they come into competition and conflict. The Iroquois 
wiped out tribe after tribe of less advanced Indians, even 
after the white men came; and it is a familiar fact that 
many savage peoples wither and die with frightful 
rapidity at the touch of civilization. A slight advantage 
sometimes allows slow-breeding animals to multiply enor- 
mously. The bison is a familiar example. The passenger 
pigeon is yet another. No class has lamented the tre- 
mendous slaughter of these more than true sportsmen, 
yet both, like many other animals, were doomed. It is 
perfectly evident that in settled agricultural lands the 
great depredations they would have worked made their 
wholesale reduction only a matter of time. 
But Darwin has told us how false any judgment of na- 
ture's methods from the human standpoint must be, and 
has pointed out that we may find consolation in the knowl- 
edge that nature's battle insured the survival of the vigor- 
ous, the useful, the happy and the healthy. Another 
great naturalist, the gentle Wallace, has endeavored to 
persuade us that after all, in the terrible competition 
among animals, the suffering may be insignificent. They 
are spared the agony we suffer in anticipation, and the 
vigorous exercise of physical faculties necessitated, is 
probably enjoyable. Even flight from would-be captors 
is actuated more by instinct than by dread, and the fre- 
quent sudden deaths are no doubt practically painless. 
Moreover, the lower the nervous organization the less the 
susceptibility to pain. It is not at no loss that man has 
gained his higher faculties. There are even many very 
low organized beings that may be divided, and each part 
will develop into a new complete whole. I may tell here a 
story of the Gettysburg battle ground once related to me 
by a Confederate colonel. He had occasion to cross a 
section of the field where a Union battery a few moments 
before had cut to pieces a regiment of Confederate cavalry, 
and even in the press of duty, in the surge of excitement, 
he was struck with the fact that horses with limbs torn 
off, and otherwise maimed, had calmly eaten all the grass 
about them that their supple necks would reach. But 
there is evidence enough that when death comes slowly 
and the ebbing of life is prolonged, animals do suffer 
acutely. The sportsman who shoots when there is no hope 
'of killing is open to the severest criticism, even though 
nature docs often suppress her superabundant life slowly. 
One writer exclaimed against nature, "Why is it ordained 
that bad should be the raw material of good? Pain is not 
the less pain because it is useful ; murder is not less mur- 
der because it is conducive to development," and some=- 
where between this pessimistic lament and Wallace's 
rose-colored palliation, as indeed is the rule between most 
extremes, the truth doubtless lies. 
By all this, man is certainly shown to be no violator 
of nature's law. On the whole, he is even, relatively, a 
friend of animals, and not the inflictor of long and fear- 
ful agonies upon them. On the contrary, where they 
have come under his protection, they are spared the war 
and starvation and most of the long distress and slow 
pain of the wild state. Science shows that those animals 
which have lived nearest to man and been under his care 
have in every way progressed. Man has aided nature's 
most beneficent moods, and the huntsman has been rela- 
tively a blessing. He has warred upon the .savage types 
that prey upon the innocent, he has protected lawful game 
in spite of pot-hunter and market-hunter; he kills legiti- 
mate quarry quickly and without pain, and is assisting and 
not retarding the law of life. 
The truth is, the humanizing, the idealizing of brutes, 
has of late reached a point where it ceases to have even a 
mediate moral force, and has become to all true students 
of nature, absurdly silly. We may read the adventures 
of rabbits which are great strategic engineers, of crows 
