Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1902, by Forest and Stream Publishikg Co. 
Terms, |4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. 
Six Months, |2. 
'1 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JULY 12, 1902. 
( VOL. LIX.— No. 2. 
] No. 846 Broadway, New York. 
The Forest and Stream is the recognized medium of entertain- 
ment, instruction and information between American sportsmen. 
The editors invite communications on the subjects to which its 
pages are devoted. Anonymous communications wWl not be re- 
garded. While it is intended to give wide latitude in discussion 
of current topics, tile editors are not responsible for the views of 
correspondents. 
Subscriptions may begin at any time. Terms: For single 
copies, $4 per year, $2 for six months. For club rates and full 
particulars respecting subscriptions, see prospectus on page iii. 
LONG-RANGE TESTS. 
The story of the preparations' for the series of inter- 
national victories in long-range rifle shooting, beginning 
in 1874, is being repeated in a quiet way just now. At 
the Bruce dinner last winter it was resolved by the old- 
time rifle shots that a renewed effort should be made to 
organize and maintain a long-range rifle club on the lines 
of the famous Amateur Rifle Club. It was to be a civilian 
organization, devoted to any rifle as distinguished from 
strictly military arms, and to be given up to shooting at 
the extreme open-sight ranges of 800 to 1,200 j-ards. 
Without much publicity being sought, the organization 
has been effected, and on selected ranges in New Jersey 
a great deal of very interesting work has been in progress 
for some time. Messrs. Bruce and Hyde, of the early 
American teams, have been acting as shooting masters 
for a very enthusiastic group of youngsters, and some 
of the spirit which animated the riflemen of a quarter- 
century ago has been aroused. The co-operation of the 
rifle-making and ammunition companies has been secured, 
and at every shooting day for weeks past some very deli- 
cate problems have been met, but as yet they have not 
been mastered. 
These marksmen pioneers have nothing to guide them 
ir the path they have worked out for themselves. All the 
old data when black powder was used must be laid aside 
now that smokeless powder has been taken in hand. So 
far it has proven to be a most uncertain article to handle, 
and despite the assurances of the manufacturers that it 
will act the same under all conditions, the marksmen 
And this to be far from the fact. 
A batch of cartridges is prepared and at 500 yards 
give very uniform results ; so on back to 800 ; but above 
this those perplexing "unaccountables" become so fre- 
quent that it is evident some definite cause must be dis- 
covered. That discovery is the current problem of the 
Bruce-Hyde band of experimenters, and to solve it they 
are determined if intelligent and persistent work can 
accomplish it. 
It must be borne in mind that the smokeless powders 
are nitro- powders — really of a common origin with nitro 
glycerine, dynamite, gun cotton and all that cla^ of ex- 
plosives, and prone to the vagaries which have always 
marked this group. With black powders the chemical 
action of the liberation of a great quantity of gas to 
create a pressure behind the bullet was governed by a few 
easily understood physical conditions. The size of the 
grain, the compactness of the mass and any moisture 
present were factors easily allowed for, but with the more 
powerful and far more sensitive mass of nitro powder, not 
only are these factors magnified, but there are apparently 
new ones which have yet to be detected. 
We suggest as a possible cause for some of the irregu- 
larity noted, the matter of temperature. A stick of dyna- 
mite on a frosty morning is practically inert. The care- 
less laborer who warms it up over the blacksmith fire 
proves what changes warmth works in the rather un- 
stable chemical mixture. May not something of this be 
working out in the metallic cartridges as they are slipped 
mto the breech opening? Early in the day, with the rifle 
barrel comparatively cool, the powder is in very much the 
same surroundings as in the cartridge case. When the 
longer ranges are reached the weapon is not only much, 
hotter, as every rifleman knows who has put in a day's 
shooting of from fifty to one hundred shots, but the 
tune taken for sighting, etc., is longer, and all this gives 
opportunity for the powder to absorb an appreciable quan- 
tity of heat from the metal of the barrel, and so lead to 
an entirely different form and rate of combustion with an 
accompanying variable evolution of gas with a consequent 
change in the initial velocity of the bullet, and a miss 
\vhere a bul|sg^| YfM beld for and expected, " 
BIG CATCHES AND THE BIG CATCHERS. 
As a rule, we do not print the notes which come to 
Us of tremendous catches of trout or bass, but now and 
then they are given place to show that the count fisher- 
men are still in the land, and are actively engaged in 
doing what they can to prevent the rest of the world 
from having any fishing after they have got through. To 
impute to such anglers any deliberate motive of this 
nature would be tO' do them an injustice. The man who 
snakes out his two or three hundred trout and tells of 
it Avith gusto, in all probability has no thought of what is 
to follow his own fishing. . The idea never enters his 
head that his intemperance will have any effect what- 
ever upon the fortunes of other anglers. This is illus- 
trated in the case of the correspondent who reported the 
other day the taking of several hundred trout at a Maine 
resort, and then recommended other fishermen to visit 
the same place. Such a person simply does not think. 
He is a good fellow who would like to have others share 
his good fortune, so after fishing to Ws own satiety, he 
invites others to come and take his place and have some 
of the great luck after he has departed. 
It is clear then that the remedy lies in education. The 
unthinking, foolish and improvident angler must be made 
to recognize the principle of the thing. He must be 
taught to apply to fishing the ABC axiom that you 
cannot eat your cake and have it too. The only way to 
accomplish the education is by everlastingly proclaiming 
the doctrine of temperance in fishing. The principle is 
accepted more generally now than ever before. It was not 
so many years ago that the success of a fishing expedition 
was conventionally reckoned by the score of the fish 
taken. But among the vast majority of intelligent anglers 
to-day, there exists no spirit of emulation in count fish- 
ing. The men who catch their hundreds and tell of it in 
public are individual personalities who are out of their 
place in history. They belong to an angling time which 
has passed. 
Camp keepers and hotel managers of fishing resorts 
are very often responsible for the count fishermen who 
herald their big scores to the world, for it is thought by 
them that other fishermen hearing of the great catches 
will hasten to get their share of the fun. The very reverse 
of this is quite as likely to be the case ; for your experi- 
enced angler who reads of big catches of fish reasons with 
himself that fished-out waters are wisely avoided, and in 
consequence he betakes himself to other scenes. The list 
is not short of fishing resorts once popular and capable 
of being judiciously farmed for an indefinite period, which 
-have been utterly ruined by the silly connivance of the 
count fisherman and the foolish landlord. 
In her "Florida Days" Margaret Deland paints a sun- 
set on the East Coast and makes the sun sink into the 
sea. This is matched by Tolstoi, who, in "Anna Karenina," 
when describing a snipe shooting on a spring evening, tells 
us that "Venus, bright and silvery, shone with her soft, 
light low down in the west behind the birch trees. 
4- * * Levin i-esolved to stay a little longer, till Venus, 
which he saw below a branch of birch, should be above 
it. * * * Venus had risen above the branch." Of 
the two manipulators of the heavenly bodies, we are so 
patriotic as to hold that the American woman who makes 
the sun set in the east is a greater wizard than the Rus- 
sian who makes the planets rise in the west. Moreover, if 
Tolstoi knows as little of snipe shooting as he does of 
astronomy, he would not amount to much on a jacksnipe 
bog. 
•t 
At Mammoth Hot Springs in the Yellowstone Na- 
tional Park on July 20 there will be a convention of the 
State game wardens of the Northwest. The meeting is the 
outcorae of efforts on the part of Mr. F. W. Scott, of Helena, 
State Game and Fish Warden of Montana. There will 
be a two days session, and the discussions will cover 
many subjects of interest in the work of fish and game 
protection. The Yellowstone Park is in peculiar degree 
an appropriate place for such a meeting of game protec- 
tors, for it is in itself a striking object lesson of game 
protection which protects and preservation which pre- 
serves. It has even some specimens of that great rarity in 
the twentieth century, the native wild American buffalo— 
a remnant bunch estimated to contain twenty-five in- 
4ividti^ls, T|je elk, it nee^ not be said, are, extremely 
numerous; they roam the Park and the country south 
of it by the tens of thousands. The deer are so plenti- 
ful and so tame that the delegates to the convention may 
get sight of them; or failing this, may at least have the 
satisfaction of seeing at close quarters the bears at the 
hotel garbage piles. The antelope, under the combined 
protection afford'ed by the Park and by Montana under 
the new game law, promise rapid increase. The beaver 
has built its dams in almost all the smaller streams. The 
Park supplies also a demonstration of successful fish 
stocking. In nearly all the waters visited by the tourists 
of to-day, trout fishing may be had, either for the native 
variety or for those which have been introduced by tftc 
United States Fish Commission. There are four trouts in 
the Park — the indigenous black-spotted, and the intro- 
duced rainbow. Von Behr, Loch Leven, and Eastern 
brook trout— and there are no restrictions on the fishing 
except that trout may not be caught for market. 
We conclude to-day the special report procured for us 
by Mr. J. B. Monroe on the Montana buffalo herds. The 
summary has special interest at this moment when the 
report comes from Washington that Mr. Howard F^ton, 
of Medora, N. D., has secured an option on the Flathead 
buffalo, which he has told President Roosevelt he would 
iTiake over to the Government, without profit to himself, 
if the herd could be acquired and added to the buffalo 
now in the Yellowstone National Park. The advantage 
which would accrue from such a disposition of the Mon- 
tana herd would be very great. It is recognized that the 
Park buffalo constitute so small a remnant that their ulti- 
mate extinction may be looked for. The accession of 
the Allard herd would proAdde not only the strength of 
increased number, but of much needed new breeding 
stock. The taking over of the herd by the Government 
Avould be an assurance that the day of the final passing of 
this interesting American mammal was to be postponed. 
The annual report of the Fishery Board for Scotland 
gives the results of the series of salmon-marking experi- 
ments which have been carried on on the Tay, Tweed and 
other rivers. Metal labels were attached to a large num- 
ber of captured kelts, the labels being numbered and the 
fish when recaptured identified thereby. The records 
show that the popular notion that a salmon always re- 
turns- to its native river has a basis in a rule with ex- 
ceptions. Of twenty-four marked fish which were re- 
captured in rivers after the lapse of at least one season, 
nineteen had come back to the river in which they had 
been marked ; five went to other rivers, but of these five 
only one went to a river very far away. The salmon 
which holds the record for long wandering was a Nor- 
wegian fish which, having been marked and released in 
the Aadsira River, was recaptured two and one-half years 
afterward on the Trondhjem Fjord, 500 miles distant. 
Executive Agent Sam. F. Fullerton, of the Game and 
Fish Commission, takes a rosy view of the prospects for 
Minnesota game. Since the State "has got Forest and 
Stream's Platform Plank securely spiked," the change in 
the situation has been strikingly manifest. Indeed if the 
progress in this direction now making shall continue, 
Minnesota game promises to be as plentiful as it was in 
the old days. The mildness of recent winters has been 
exceedingly favorable to the quail, which are everywhere 
reported in great abundance. It is a long look ahead to 
the time when the venison-consuming lumber camps will 
cease to be a factor, but just so surely as the forests afe 
to go, lumbermen must go with them, and the slaughter 
of deer for lumber camps will come to an end. 
We have studiously refrained from calling the horse 
mackerel a "horse mackerel," since the name "tuna" is so 
much more taking; and "leaping tuna" has in it something 
of the poetry of sport. But in Atlantic coast waters 
horse mackerel it is, and horse mackerel it will remain 
in popular parlance, until some angler shall follow the 
lead pointed out by Mr. Waddell, Commissioner Colliiis 
or Dr. Morris, and by bringing the big fish by capture 
with rod and reel into the category of game fish, giye ac^; 
ceptance to the name by which it is known on the P^cjfifl 
coast. ' ^ '- ' '"'"^ 
