24 
FOREST* AND STREAM. 
[Jan. to, 1903. 
in-law of Geyer's was going back home this morning, but 
he left his rifle here at her father's and asked me to go 
with him, and I went. I coiild cut across the country 
from Meyersdale to Cumberland, then go home by rail- 
road. 
I stayed two nights and a day in Meyersdale, then the 
second morning started for Cumberland on foot. I might 
have gone by railroad but 1 wanted to see the country. 
I only got about half way to Cumberland the first day. 
I was in no hurry. I stayed that night with a German 
farmer who had Kansas on the brain ; he wanted to sell 
out here and go there. I told him all I knew about Kan- 
sas, and when ready to leave next morning he refused to 
take any money from me — none of these farmers out 
there would — and gave me a pint bottle of "Schnaps," 
that is what he called it; it was moonshine though, "to 
keep the cold out." It kept it out and I had half of it 
left when I got to Cumberland. 
I was walking down a street in Cumberland looking 
for a second-class hotel where I would not feel like a 
fish out of water in a canvas shooting coat, when a man 
across the street called out. Column, halt ! Then calling 
me by name, said, "Come, over here and report, sir.'' 
Going over, I looked at him, then holding out my hand, 
said, "I am glad to see you, captain, or is it only Jim, 
now ?" 
"Only Jim," he told me; "I dropped the captain as 
soon as I had got home. I found more captains there 
than would patch a mile. The half of them could not 
tell you the difference between a platoon and a column of 
lours. They have never been nearer the front than 
Harrisburg." 
This man had been one of us boys who had hunted 
Indians in Smoky Island back in 1845. I had lost him 
after this and next found him in the regular cavalry 
during the "late unpleasantness." There he got a cap- 
tain's commission in the United States Colored Volun- 
teers. These commissions were going a-begging then; 
non-com. in the cavalry could get one if he wanted it. 
Some of us did not want it; we ranked a major of 
colored infantry now, or thought we did. 
I would have taken one in colored cavalry; but we had 
no colored cavalry then. When we did get our two 
colored cavalry regiments later on, I asked for a second 
lieutenant's commission and was told I would get it; 
but it probably got lost in the mail ; I never got it. 
When Jim's regiment was mustered out at the close of 
the war, he was a major. Then he Avas given a company 
in a new white regiment. In a year or two they began 
to reduce the army again, it was too large, though we 
have had as large a one since; but we were dangerous 
then, we might march on Washington some day, and 
"elect" a president of our own if the one we had did not 
suit us;. so the army was reduced to 25,000 again and 
Jim was out of a job again; he was offered a company 
in the new colored infantry that was then formed, the 
24th and 25th, but he would not take it, so he was given 
a year's extra pay and let go. I had not seen him since. 
He was a baggage master on a B. & O. train between 
here and Pittsburg now. I took supper with him, then 
got into his baggage car and in the morning was at home 
again. I had done considerable traveling in the last ten 
days and had only paid one fare, the one to Connellsville. 
Cabia Blanco. 
Erie, Pa. 
An Embarrassment of Literary 
Riches. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
Your Christmas number is simply a poem in prose, 
except Alma's contribution, which is certainlj' a poem 
indeed. I can unreservedly praise the Christmas num- 
ber from cover to cover because I am not in it myself. 
I am afraid had the editor forgotten himself and in- 
serted anything of mine it would have appeared much 
as a man does who attends a banquet at the Metropoli- 
tan Club in a business suit — out of place. Let us run 
through the number. 
As to the editorials. I think I once saw at the head of 
my writing copybook in school in fine Spencerian 
script, "What is perfect cannot be improved." So, Mr. 
Editor, will you let vour work go at that, and allow me 
to pass along on my way? 
If there ever should be erected a Temple of Fame for 
wild life photographs, then high up in a niche I want to 
see the bust of Jordan alongside that of Wallihan's. 
He certainly has put the atmosphere into the pages of 
Forest and Stream, so true and realistic that no flight 
of the imagination is necessary to hear the put, put, of 
the wai-y turkeys. I never stalked a turkey, but I'll 
wager that the man who has, will exclaim, upon looking 
at Jordan's photographs, "How the devil did he do it?" 
When Mr. Jordan ever prints a full-size copy, 8 by 10, 
or whatever it may be, of "The Evening Meal" and 
wants to dispose of it, there is a customer waiting for it 
right here. See the glint in the eyes of those foxy old 
birds! Whj' does he regret that his color values and 
actual tones are lost? I say not. They are all there, 
gun barrel, metallic lustre and all. The gloaming of 
those piney woods in the "Unsuspicious" picture is 
something superb. 
And I, too, with Von W., have ere this, 
many times lighted my pipe and dreamt of the 
shadowy brook that went rippling toward the sea, and 
have I heard the "woodcock's whistle" from the spring- 
side covert; and heard the "grouse burst forth with 
thundering wings." And when the rod and gun are 
safely stowed away, certainly there are pleasures of 
memory as you sit by the glowing grate fire, watch the 
frost-encased storm-windows, and hear the wind whistle 
around the corner of the house with a twang that means 
nothing more or less than twenty to thirty below. And 
you wonder what the partridge and quail are doing such 
a night as this. Sr^rdy the Lord must temper the wind 
to the shorn lambs. 
"The Wolf at the Door" was wisely selected, and Tim 
Mulcahy with his Irish bulls makes me think of the 
Irishman who requested in his will that he be not put 
into the frozen ground during the winter because he 
would freeze to death. 
Mrs. Churchill is always good, and that comes from 
writing of those things whereof one knows. If those 
who_ wield the pen would but follow the rule of truthful 
v/riting we might not have so many books "marked 
down to 39 cents after the holidays" staring us in the 
face on the bargain book counters. An observant eye 
and a fluent pen make a great and most pleasitig com- 
bination, and one appreciates that when reading of 
Samoa and vicinity in the Forest and Stream. 
Mr. Robinson impresses one as having spent day 
after day behind the yelping huskies, skurrying over the 
unbroken snow-clad prairies. Simply another case of a 
man knowing his subject first and writing afterward, 
instead of doing the other very common thing. 
If Coahoma does not, like the pitcher that goes for 
tlie last time to the well in a sound state, come to grief 
with those rattlers, I will be surprised. I may be 
prejudiced against rattlers, because I at one time came 
near cutting off the rattles of a live snake in the open 
(I was like the boy with the "unloaded" gun — I thought 
he was dead), and at another, in crossing over a snake 
fence all but stepped into the coils of a six-foot Crotalus 
horridus. So if T am nervous about Coahoma when I 
read of his stroking the necks of his rattlers — comatose 
or otherwise — I have cause. 
And here's Alma! What can a man do but just shut 
his eyes and walk the stubble with him. There is really 
nothing else to do. You are simply carried right along. 
In our country, where storm sash and weather strips 
and storm doors go on with the first blasts of Novem- 
ber, and do not come off until the yellow dandelion 
blossoms thrust their blooms from among the brown 
grass of last _yeai% it means an airtight house — and 
under such existing conditions I plead that furnaces 
taking in the cold, sharp, clear, microbe-free air, warm- 
ing it up and distributing it through the house, flooding 
the whole house with warmed oxygen, as it were, is the 
proper thing for a dwelling, as compared with hot water 
or steam radiators. But a furnace means care and 
attention; but then that is true of other good things 
beside furnaces. On cold mornings when the notes of 
the distant locomotive bells hum on the cold, still air 
like so many tuning forks, you turn out and "see to the 
furnace." 
Once up, say at 6:30, you remain up. And when the 
tribe comes down to breakfast the 70-degree mark is 
already reached on the mercury tube. 
But there's an interregnum, an hiatus, as it were, be- 
tween 6:30 and breakfast, and as a matter of fact I am 
at this moment filling up that hiatus with pen and paper. 
I once remember reading of a professor who wrote a 
book, putting in ten to fifteen minutes at it every morn- 
ing at the breakfast table while awaiting the comple- 
tion of his wife's toilet and her presence at the family 
board. And so do I propose to do; in fact, am now 
doing. It will be a book that will have some reference 
to quail and their wild life. It will be dedicated to my 
little boy, and illustrated by the son of the father who 
is leading his class of 600 in the art school in New 
York. 
And all this brings me back to Alma. If that book 
be ever finished and duly illustrated, its opening page 
shall be duly inscribed with that part of Alma's poem 
that begins "Since wild life ends in tragedy," and that 
ends with the life of the quail "By sudden burst of 
fiery hail." 
I do not know that Alma need fe.el proud over such 
a proposition, but then there are times when the spirit 
must be considered in conjunction with the act, and this 
is one of them. 
And I go along from article to article and page to 
page, finding nothing but readable stuff of the first 
order. 
I think the sentiment shown in that old French 
widow preserving her husband's fowling piece and 
seeing that for forty-seven years it was, spring and 
fall, taken from its case and cleaned, as he no doubt 
would have cleaned it had he lived, was simply ex- 
quisite. She loved, for his sake, after death the things 
he loved during his life, and his fine, hand-made flint- 
lock, silver-mounted, shotgun was, next to his good 
wife, the one thing very likely he most prized in this 
life. Am I right, good readers? 
And Capt. Bobo is no more! — gone to the happy 
hunting grounds. I met him once in Mr. Hough's office 
in Chicago. At first sight he struck you as no differ- 
ent from the other ten thousand lean and lank South- 
erners this minute whittling shingles and squirting 
tobacco juice from the front porch of ten thousand gen- 
eral stores. His clothes did not "make him"; they were 
good, yet weather stained. The brown slouch hat he 
twirled on his knee had no doubt ?done him good ser- 
vice for years," and if I mistake not, he wore an outing 
flannel shirt. The quotation from Shakespeare that 
"The apparel oft proclaims the man," I remember once 
seeing in a tailor shop, which might be balanced by the 
saying that "Fine feathers make fine birds"; but all this 
was set at naught in Bobo's case, for when you looked 
into Jiis face you saw the man and forgot all about the 
clothes. He impressed me as a man of iron will and 
determination, one of those kind of men who, when 
'following a wounded deer, will carry out the pro- 
gramme until one of them dies in his tracks. His clear 
eye and sinewy hand, both as steady as the earth itself, 
boded no good to the deer or bear upon which he drew 
a bead. He, I thought, would make a good and firm 
friend, but a bad enemy. It is easy for me to imagine 
the wave of his hand to those who tendered him a half 
dollar for the meal taken at his board. He has gone to 
join Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett and the 
scores of other mighty hunters who have crossed the 
silent river. Peace to his ashes! 
And now we come to the "Old Angler." Truly may 
the shadow of his pen never grow less, and may his ink- 
well, like the brooks he has fished, be supplied by an 
everlasting supply of limpid and free-running fluid. 
Some day the Forest and Stream may, and no doubt 
will, publish a book made up of the writings of the 
"Old Angler" like unto Mather's "Men I Have Fished 
With." I want right here to subscribe my name for the 
first copy of this book that comes from the press. 
I'liat's my way of expressing myself as to the writings 
of that gentleman — Mr. Venning, I think hig name is. 
I think his remarks about the Salmo fontinalis and Sal- 
velinus would rank in smoothness and polish with the , 
very best that ever came from the pen of Addison, and i 
they say he was a master of the art of expression. As ' 
free as the winds and as smooth as the flowing spring \ 
do the words come from "Old Angkr's" pen. But I 
will his friends, the alphabetically burdened scientists, \ 
fond of differentiation, heed, and turn their microscopes ' 
to other purposes and leave the Salmo fontinalis alone? 
I doubt it. But, like the Raven in Ingoldsby, roundly : 
cursed by the Bishop who 
"Cursed him with bell 
And cursed him with book;" 
******* 
Nobody heard such a terrible curse. 
"But what gave rise 
To no little surprise, 
^ Nobody seemed one penny the worse." 
So when the scientists have solved the Salmo-Salve- 
linus problem to their hearts' content, then will the 
Salmo_ fontinalis still be hatched, and still will he fight 
for his life and haunt the pools and swim the riffles ' 
and for and after all that may be said, writ and done, 
be not "one penny the worse." 
How easy to imagine old Father Izaak resting on the 
banks of a heavenly trout stream under the shade of a ] 
spreading hemlock over in the Great Divide, where, if 
things are well regulated, they have such things as 
trout streams and other things, and laughing at the 
alphabeticals! 
May you hve for many a year to come, "Old 
Angler," and may your pen continue to delight and 
enthral the readers of the Forest and Stream is the i 
wish of Charles Cristadoro. | 
Bears on Old Baldy. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
Noticing by the enclosed clipping that Mr. Terrell, of < 
the Austin Land Office, has invited President Roosevelt 
to a bear hunt in the Davis mountains of Texas, I am re- 
minded of my own experience with bears in these same 
Davis mountains in October and November of 1884. The ' 
clipping sets forth conditions as they existed at that day 
— probably they have changed but little since. It might 
be a good place not only for President Roosevelt, but 
also for some more lowly and humble nimrod of the 
Forest and Stream family who has an appetite that can 
be assuaged only by bear steaks cooked over a campfire 
amid mountain scenery. At the time of which I write I 
had not acquired the excellent habit of keeping a note 
book, so must now give my experience from unaided 
memory — we all know what a treacherous ally that can 
be._ My story, consisting as it does of rather trifling and 
unimportant details, will not trench upon the credulity 
of my readers, however. 
During the autumn above cited I was engaged on a 
military expedition in making a map of western Texas. 
Major W. E. Livermore, of the Engineer Corps, was in 
charge of the expedition, assisted by three lieutenants, of I 
whom I was one, and some twenty or thirty enlisted men 
and civil employes of one kind and another, such as 
teamsters, packers, blacksmiths and expert topographers, 
and six Seminole negro-Indian scouts. The latter were 
the descendants of the negro slaves of the Seminole In- 
dians. These negro slaves had lived with the Seminoles 
so long that they had in a great measure acquired their , 
arts and were expert scouts, hunters and trailers; by 
some redistribution of Indian affairs they had years ago 
been separated from their former masters and located at l 
Fort Clark, Texas, as enlisted scouts of the U. S. Army, 
and as such had, before my time, rendered service more 
or less valuable under McKenzie, Bullis and similar path- 
finders in expelling the Comanches and other marauding ' 
tribes from western Texas. Though there were no 
longer any Indian troubles in this part of the West, these 
simple negroes were regarded as a kind of ward of the 
Government, and still continued in service — useful on an 
expedition like Livermore's, but otherwise of little value. . 
Our system of operations consisted in separating into two 
or three parties, and, having established these several ' 
parties on the most commanding elevations, surveying the 
entire horizon with instruments, sketching the interme- 
diate detail and then occupying some new station at a 
distance of ten or fifteen miles. One can readily under- , 
stand that as our observations were conducted from the 
tops of the highest mountains in a virtual wilderness, we 
could not properly be complained of as "coffee cooling" — - 
to use the military parlance of the day — for a snug billet. 
We liked it, though; the scenery and mountain air was 
grand; our muscles soon accustomed themselves to an al- 
most constant climb, and we no longer noticed it, indeed 
some of the men laughingly used to say 'twas easier to ' 
climb than to walk on a level ; and as far as vigor and 
physical hardness were concerned we would have been 
fir companions for Bonneville or Lewis and Clark. 
On one of these occasions Major Livermore located me 
with a small party on the top of a peak he called "Old 
Baldy," named, as he said, after a general officer called 
Bald}' Smith. 'Twas the highest point in the Davis range 
— something like 8,000 feet, if I remember correctly. The 
extreme top of this mountain consists of a single bare 
rock, about the size of an ordinary dwelling house when 
you were fairly on it, but in the distance appearing little 
more than a dull point. We had a good climb getting 
there. Major L. had along a 22-inch Troughton and 
Simons theodolite that he employed for his most accur- 
ate work. When packed in its double case this instru- 
ment could be carried readily by four men over ordi- 
nary ground. Major L. now determined to use this one at 
the summit of Baldy, and he got it there, but only after 
an enormous effort. I had two six-mule wagons with ; 
me, and for quite a distance up the side there was an 
old trail where evidently logs had been dragged down 
the mountain side in times past. We concluded to take , 
the instrument in the wagon up to the end of this trail, 
if possible. I put the entire twelve mules on one wagon, 
loaded it with nothing but this instrument and took it 
as far as wheels could go up the trail, and I'm sure had 
the makers of that instrument been along they would 
have held their breath for its safety over a part of the ■ 
