•'"ID 
Serpeutine." Henry had told us to stick to the "height of 
land." We looked about us steadily, and could see nothing 
but a "height of land" anywhere we looked. The whole 
country was broken up into a series of steep, rounded 
hills, and it took no very experienced eye to see that to 
pull a toboggan across country over one of these hills 
would be something asking even more endurance and 
strength than our party could furnish. It was therefore 
a question of winding along the easiest way we could find 
by some valley, then scaling the top of the ridge which 
we must ultimately find, and feeling our way onward, 
tmtii we found water running in the opposite direction. It 
was our vague hope and wish that this water might be 
Miramichi water, but as to that we' could not in the 
least tell. 
It is one thing to write about a trip across the country 
in the winter time, and quite another thing to do it. It is 
one thing to look at a map, and quite another thing to 
look at the country which that map purports to repre- 
sent, Now, as a matter of fact, when we got into this 
journey we found that there was no guide, no map, no 
help whatever which proved of the least service to us. 
We were just as much adventurers and discoverers as 
was Columbus when he struck America, although per- 
haps on a slightly smaller scale. We missed Joe Ellis 
very much, for although we Avere not satisfied that he 
could take us through, any company is better than none 
in -a quest like this, provided that such company has the 
remotest idea that he knows what he is about and where 
he is going. 
Be that as it may, we left the Branch Camp, the men 
staring after us and jabbering in French about the crazy 
fools who were going into the woods with sleds when 
there was "so much frost in the air." We pushed up the 
riglit-hand branch of the Little Suuth Branch, climbed a 
big hill, found we were off the trail, and climbed it back 
again. We broke off to the left, followed an old and 
snow filled abandoned logging road, passed a dam made 
by beavers and a dam made by loggers, and pushed on 
up until we came to another trail, which we followed for 
a time. At last, two miles or so along, we came to a 
tree, and on this tree were sundry ax marks. 
The Mate Sign In the Wilderness. 
As I have said, any fool can cut a chip out of a tree 
with his ax, but few fools do that in New Brunswick 
without a purpose. Here was a tree upon which the 
ax marks were apparently many years old. Also there 
were fresher ax marks. Also at one side of this tree, 
at a distance of about so or 60 yards, there was another 
tree bearing a blaze. Now the question was: Were these 
blazes made by the Frenchmen who were running their 
sable traps near the lumber camp, or had we, without 
any advice or instruction, by good fortime located the 
old Louis Bear trapping trail along which Joe Ellis 
might, could, would or should have passed some time 
within twenty-four hours ahead of us or after us? That 
does not sound like a very serious question as one reads 
it, but I remember how serious it seemed to us at the 
time. It was very bitterly cold, Charlie and Jack had 
to take off their shoepacks to keep their feet from 
freezing. I had to kick my feet against a stump to keep 
them from following suit. Adam and Charlie went on 
ahead, but came back and said they did't believe it would 
pay to follow the old brushed-out road any further. We 
again swung around, 20 degrees to the south, and started 
out into untouched country. 
There was a trail, a trapping trail. This much seemed 
plain, but where it ran or whose it was no one could 
tell. We found no sable trap, nor had we found it 
could we have told who made it. It might have been 
Joe Ellis or any one else. 
When the thermometer is 15 below zero, and going 
lower, and when ycu have all your worldly goods on a 
sled, and when you reflect that a sled pulls frightfully 
hard up hill, and when you add to this the information 
that the view at the top of the hill only leads to another 
hill apparently just as hard to climb, then you may ob- 
serve that it was a grave question whether we should 
follow this faint and wandering trail of ax marks which 
presently we discovered leading on out into the wilder- 
ness. But at any rate some one had been through there. 
And it is at least some comfort to go where some other 
fellow has been, even if you don't know who the other 
fellow was. or where he was going. 
Adam and Charlie started out along the trail for a little 
■voyage of exploration. Jack and I, he in his stocking 
feet, started in to build a fire in order to keep from 
freezing to death. We had it ju5t nicely started when 
we heard the snowshoes returning, and Adam called out, 
"Come ahead. We'll just start in here, and chance it." 
HAiXFOSD BniT-DiNG, Chicago. 111. E. HoUGH. 
Save the "VJ^oodcocfc* 
Editor Forest and Stream: . , - . 
Your octogenarian humble .'^ervan^ lived in the days 
when woodcock, that most desirable of all game birds, 
nested in every bit of moist and bushy ground, and in 
the r.TlI could be kicked up in every wood or thicket. 
But few people seemed to prize the woodcock then, and 
being so selrlom molested they were so tame that, as a 
boy. I knocked one over with a stone. 
A little later on in 1 fe I began to hear of the "long- 
billed mud ducks" being occasionally shot as game, and 
now I find, with an amount of regret that could never be 
expressed by words, that I must live to see the passing 
of the woodcock— unless the legislators of the various 
States can be rou.sed to the importance of protecting laws. 
Pot and market hunters ought to be wiped out by legis- 
lative acts, and then if a close season for a few years 
could be brought about in every State we might see a 
cond tion of things that would gladden the life of every 
sport-^man in the land. 
l'oRE.=iT AND Stream must be credited with a va.st 
amount of good in its fights, on various points, for game 
protcfiiou. and now I want to see it buckle on its armor 
for a fight that I consider of greater consequence than 
ajivlliimg except the lynching of all the market hunters. 
One o( Fnr<EST AND SxREAii's contributors opened the fight 
ji few weeks ago hy a vigorous article, which ought to be 
followed up till the importance of saving the woodcock 
from utter extermination is drilled into the noddles of 
every legislator from Maine J-oitisiana. DiDYMUf, 
^ r, /VuuusTtHft^ Oct. Q, 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
October Mountain, 
J-rom the Springfield Republican. 
To the average man, a plaything seven and a-half 
miles long by five miles wide would be about all he 
would care to drag at the end of a string. William C. 
Whitney, politician, turfman and millionaire, seems to 
think dift'erently, and now and then adds a few hundred 
acres to his newest toy, beautiful October Mountain. 
Away up in the heart of the Berkshire hills, in Massa- 
chusetts, rests this vast estate of over 12,000 acres, where 
Mr. Whitney spends nearly $60,000 and two weeks every 
year. Wild with the wildness of the Berkshire hills. 
October Mountain stands as a rough shooting box of 
to-da3^ and a magnificent estate of to-morrow. . How 
much money has been fed into the open jaws of the 
hills Mr. Whitney alone knows, and it is doubted if he 
could give anywhere near the exact amount which he 
has expended to make October Mountain rank as one 
of the greatest estates between the two oceans. It 
stands even now with Biltmore and some of the great 
Pacific coast estates in size. Where the future will find 
it depends on Mr. Whitney, for no one else knows what 
his plans are for the future, or how much more money 
he wiU sink into the barrens and woodland, which, as 
far as his eye can see, are his alone. Doubtless he in- 
tends October Mountain for a shooting box, for already 
he has herds of buffalo, elk and deer roaming about in 
a 1,000-acre inclosure, and hundreds of English pheas- 
ants have been liberated in wood and field, and the clear 
lakes and rustling brooks stocked with fish. Yet tak- 
ing Mr. Whitney's well-known love of sport into ac- 
count, one can see underlying the whole vast plain in 
the mind of the millionaire, a clear cut touch of philan- 
thropy and the basis of the idea that his money must be 
spent so that a people who need it may derive a benefit 
which is still in no sense a gift of charity. 
For years the farmers of the town of Washington 
have said that they could get along if it was not for 
the drag which was put upon them by the western por- 
tion of their big wandering town. They prayed that 
something might be found there which would make the 
land valuable and worth the taxes levied upon it. They 
cut off the woodland in places to make money on the 
lumber, and they thought of many plans to rid them- 
selves of their burden, but one plan after another broke 
like a bubble, and with each breaking the tax rate went 
up a notch. Then suddenly Whitney came to Wash- 
ington like a bright angel and took the hated property 
from the people who had been land poor for generations. 
His agent bought farm after farm and paid a good price 
for each, fai-- more than most of them were worth, but 
he wanted them, and, as they say in Washington, he is 
a millionaire.' Slowly the estate spread its boundaries, 
and farm after farm was swallowed and dollar after dol- 
lar was added to his taxsiB, until now the great burden 
has been lifted and Washington can look down from her 
hilltop squarely into the face of the world and say that, 
by the grace of Providence and Whitney, she is as 
good as the next and better than Peru. This year Mr, 
Whitney will pay the Washington assessors $i,795 for 
his taxes, and his real estate in that town is valued at 
$75,520. But October Mountain has wandered into the 
outskirts of little Lee and close to the town line of 
haughty Lenox, and in Lee he must pay taxes, for the 
valuation of his property there is $5,181. 
It was six years ago that Mr. Whitney found Wash- 
ington. No one knows why he decided to start the 
October Mountain estate or how the plan originated in 
his mind. He could not want more ground for shooting 
or another country place, for he owned already a vast 
tract of land and a chain of lakes in the Adirondacks, 
and a beautiful country place on Long Island. But at 
that time rumor spread through the scattered farm- 
houses of little Washington that some one wanted to 
buy land in the western part of the town. This was 
followed by the report that options had been secured on 
many farms, and then the statement w^as made that a 
large number of places which joined one another had 
been bought by Thomas Post, of Lenox, for some one. 
Washington stayed up until 9 o'clock at night discussing 
the wonder and guessing at the name of the man for 
whom Mr. Post was acting. Finally some bright mind 
thought of Austin Corbin and his big Blue Mountain 
game preserve, near Newport, N. H. A town meeting 
was considered so that the matter might be solemnly 
discussed, but then Mr. Corbin was killed, and the Wash- 
ingtonians were at sea again. At last the magic name 
of Wiiliam C. Whitney came to their ears, and the town 
awoke one bright morning, after six months of vain 
conjecture, to the realization that the ex-secretary of_ the 
Navy owned one-third of their town. A few bright 
spirits had been sharp enough to see that some deep- 
laid land-buying scheme was on foot, and had invested 
in swamps and hillsides in the western section of the 
town, and great was their reward. The power and good 
of the Whitney millions had begun to be felt, and each 
year more and more checks have been cashed and their 
fruits put away in the family stocking. If the religion 
of their forefathers was not as deep-rooted in the hearts 
of the simple, kindly natives, it is an open question 
whether they would not be bowing down even now be- 
fore a golden idol. They wished to hand down the 
stamp of Mr. Whitney's features to their children on 
the town seal, but after giving his consent to this de- 
sire, and presenting the desired seal to the town, the 
New Yorker, after a more mature consideration of tht 
subject, recalled his gift. There is no danger of his be- 
ing forgotten in Washington for several generations, at 
least. 
The statement that October Mountain is in Washing- 
ton will not convey a vast amount of information to 
many people, but, nevertheless, the town is of importance 
and once in six years sends a representative to the 
Legislature. A section of the western line of the town 
serves as the eastern line of Lenox, and Pittsfield is only 
a half score miles or so to the north. The Boston and 
Albany Railroad runs through the eastern section, and 
at the little depot is the highest point of the road in its 
winding course over the Berkshire hills. The Whit- 
ney family, when going to October Mountain, do not 
go in from the east over vertical hills and rocky roads, 
from Lenox on the ^fcst, ai^d Uje roads we i^^ h^i- 
[OcT. 18, 1902. 
ter on that side. Mr. Whitney has already spent much 
money on road improvements, and the one from his 
estate to the railroad on the west is now in good condi- 
tion, while the one from Washington's town hall to 
October Mountain is bad with the badness which only 
a Washington road can boast of. Going into the estate 
from Washington the view across the eastern hills is 
beautifid and the scattering farmsteads of much interest, 
as one cannot see how these people eke out an exist- 
ence on their rocky, brush-grown farms. Near the town 
hall the warning white signs against fishing an(f shoot- 
ing begin to appear, and then a sharp turn to the west 
from the main road, down a rocky hill and into a tun- 
nel of green trees and one is on the October Mountain 
estate. No more warning signs are to be seen, they 
are all on the edge of the estate, and farmer as well as 
game-keeper sees to it that no poacher shoots Mr. 
Whitney's birds. For a long two miles the road tunnels 
through the wodds, where the silence is only broken by 
the whirr of a frightened partridge disturbed while 
dusting herself in the road, or the faint rustle of the 
underbrush as a startled rabbit goes to cover. Then 
suddenly the woods come to an end, one stands, breath- 
less with wonder, on the summit of October Mountain. 
Far away to the west, to the north, to the south, lie 
the fields and forests of the vast estate. Its enormity 
strikes one as an impossibility. It does not seem credi- 
ble that one man owns the valley below, the blue-green 
hills in the distance, the glimmering lakes, the many 
trim white houses and red barns, and the great shoot- 
ing box lording it over all from the crest of an oppos- 
ing hill a mile away. From the valley a faint buzz of 
mowing machines, stone crushers and many men at 
work floats up on the fresh breeze which forcibly brings 
to mind the fact that it is always cool on October 
Mountain. Far to the north a few black specks can be 
seen moving about on a hillside. They are buffalo. To 
the west are tiny little patches of white, half-hidden in 
the tall grass. They are the little houses of the pheas- 
anti-y. To the south are a cluster of barns, the winter 
quarters of big flocks of angora goats and. sheep. In 
the still woods roam elk, moose and deer, and close at 
hand is the warren of a large family of Belgian hares. 
Down the entire length of the valley winds a slender, sil- 
very string, a beautiful road running from the hunting 
box to Basin Pond, up in the heart of the southern 
hills. This road is only a forerunner of what is to come, 
as it is evident that Mr. Whitney intends to put in similar 
roads throughout the entire estate. Already there is talk 
of a new road to be cut through the woods to Washing- 
ton town, and many other changes are rumored, Mr. 
Whitney will never be able to close his estate to the pub- 
lic, for it is crossed and recrossed with county and town 
roads, which are thoroughfares. But it is doubtful if 
he wishes to do this, for the public have always been 
welcomed at October Mountain, and every courtesy is 
shown to the visitor by the employes upon the estate. 
The House Built in a Few Nights. 
The greater part of the visitors who go to October 
Mountain without an invitation are curious to see how 
the millionaire has provided for his comfort and where 
he lives while there. Some are disappointed in the 
house, or shooting box, as there is nothing about it 
which gives the idea of vast wealth. It is more like the 
ordinary cottage that can be seen at any fashionable 
watering place. It is not a large structure and is bu It 
of wood and painted a dark gray. On the southern side 
is a broad piazza and the view down the valley from it 
is most beautiful. The house is set in the center of a 
great, soft green lawn and at its rear are four Ad'ron- 
dack camps which can be used for guests if desired. 
If one is disappointed in the house he need only remem- 
ber the manner of its building and in that find any ex- 
cuse needed. In truly characteristic manner Mr. Wh't- 
ney decided to build the house in a great hurry. He 
had the plans drawn and then gave orders to have the 
house completed in twenty days. This staggered every- 
one, but Mr. Whitney wanted the house to live in for 
a few weeks at once, and as his bank account seemed 
able to stand the strain the work began. From New 
Y'ork came a force of men with great calcium 1 ghts, 
and these were placed about the fast-growing house and 
blinked and dashed on the carpenters as they worked 
all night. From far and near came the awe-inspired 
country people, and on the surrounding hills they stood 
with open mouths wondering if perpetual Fourth of 
July had come to October Mountain. Sad to relate, the 
house was not finished within the desired time, nor even 
twice the time, for the interior is elaborate and much 
work was done to make the house comfortable in every 
way. It stands now as a monument to money and 
energy, but in time it will doubtless be succeeded by a 
more elaborate house and one which is architecturally 
more suited to the surrounding country and the ideals 
of the place. 
A couple of hundred yards to the north of the house 
are the stables, and they are the genuine Whitney af- 
fairs. Mr. Whitney is known all over the world for his 
love of a good horse, and how many he owns would be 
hard to estimate. His racing stables in various parts 
of the world hold some of the fastest horses on the 
turf, and he races entirely for the sport, caring but little 
for the rich prizes he wins. The stables at October 
Mountain are built on three sides of a square, and there 
are stalls for fifteen horses. Like the house, they are 
now tightly closed, and big board shutters cover the 
windows. When any of the family are going to the 
estate, horses are sent there from^ some of the other 
Whitney establishments. It is the 'same with the car- 
riages; none are kept there when October Mounta'n is 
officially unhabitated. Hunters, cobs and polo ponies 
fill the stables when any of the family are in Washing- 
ton, and all of them are fond of horseback riding. "Mr. 
Harry Payne," as the men on the estate call the son of 
the owner, is very fond of riding his ponies through the 
woods and fields, so about twenty m les of bridle path 
has been cut over the mountains for his pleasure, and it 
is no small task to keep the brush and weeds from these, 
ctnd some of them will probably never be seen by either 
the owner or his son. Just across the road from the 
st.ibles is a tiny cottage, and in this Mr. and Mrs. Payne 
Whitney-^Mrs, Whitney was a Vander^ilt — passed a part 
