Nov. 22, 1902.3 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
40d 
ing stiow. I was also to make a couple of turns neaf 
the end of the ci'oss-forest walk. 
Well, the snowing increased; the track Was iio longer 
discernible; here had I been almost a couple of hours 
plowing through the white carpet; yet no evidence of 
a "turn" to make or house in sight; nor the odor of one 
(in Cibiria, the sense of smell in the pure air becomes 
so keen, you can "sniff" houses, by the burning fuel, 
from a couple of verstas' distance) ; nor even the friend- 
ly bark of a dog was heard. The snappish howl of the 
wolf is another matter! 
I did not like the looks of things! A lusty siren- 
shriek from my pocket-siren produced no response. Nor 
to repeated blows. The sounds died off in the eternal 
forests; but I heard something — a tantalizing something 
— ^yet nothing: the peculiar sound of "ringing nothing- 
ness" (to coin an expression) which falls on the ears 
when you find yourself alone in dead silence. 
Had I passed the "turn?" Better, in any case, I 
thought, retrace steps, dispiriting as it is to have to do 
so — that would be better than continuing further into 
the unknown. 
After five minutes' cogitation I turned to retrace steps, 
proceeded a few hundred yards, when, lo! if the falling 
snow and moaning winds hadn't completely obliterated 
my recent footsteps! Another couple hundred yards 
"probing" here and there, and I had lost all sense of 
direction. A pretty mess! Now commenced that mo- 
ment of anxiety which distresses the entir? physique. 
But I did not lose my senses, nor start to run off, 
first one direction, then another. I had a pocket com- 
pass with me — ^not for traveling purposes, but the nat- 
ural component of a surveying engineer's kit. Out it 
came; the cap-glass had been broken and lost some 
weeks before; and the needle fell out on to the snow. 
Supposing I had not observed it fall, and it had disap- 
peared in the soft snow! Probably I should not be here 
to-day writing this! 
The cold was so trying, and my fingers so numbed, 
I could scarce replace the needle. But I soon got bear- 
ings; knew that if I struck across forest north, the 
building railroad would be reached; but the difficulty 
was to penetrate the virgin forest for- three or four 
miles — the assumed distance to the route of the now- 
completed railway. 
Those Cibirian forests are a sight! I had read about 
them before proceeding to the country, and regarded 
the description given of them as another of those "trav- 
elers' yarns." ["All travelers are liars," — Asiatic pro- 
verb.] But now for months I had been among them, and 
thought otherwise. 
So densely timbered are the forests, the eye cannot 
penetrate more than a dozen feet. The trees stand up- 
right like so many poles, arid so close together that the 
agricultural college-reared forester would be disposed to 
exclaim "impossible ! they could not get sufficient nutri- 
tion from the soil." At noon the "light" in that forest 
is only equal to twilight; for the sun can never be seen 
except from the treetops. A man can dodge the trees 
through those forests, but I doubt if a horse could. 
So it was this kind of fopQt (pronounced forgt) that 
I conjured with for an hour, with an almost sweating 
— despite the cold — anxiety as to errors of compass in 
this northern latitude; the chance of having to negotiate 
almost impassable barriers and crevices (leaping or 
rounding the fallen timber was exercise enough!). Every 
ten minutes or so I referred to the compass, despite its 
inconvenience with the broken glass. This prevented my 
attaching it to lapel of coat, for fear of losing the 
needle. 
After an hour of this, with, fortunately, no meeting of 
prowling big game — which would easily have made game 
of me in my unpreparedness — the forest became clearer. 
I knew what that meant, and in the distance could be 
seen the railroad embankment earthworks. Welcome 
sight! 
A "short cut" indeed ! Half the day had passed with 
only a real progress of about three miles; and the 
enervating anxiety seemed to knock me up for the rest 
of that day. 
"Short cuts" in an unknown country are best if sacri- 
ficed to the "long way round." It was a prospective 
"short cut" on the Rigi, in Helvetia, that almost cost 
me my life in the fall of 1890. That particular short 
cut led down a steep slope, and I did not perceive 
through the undergrowth the brink of a precipice. Ere 
I knew anything, I was shooting like a log over the 
ledge; but "with that instinct of self-preservation innate 
in us all, I grasped at something. These were the roots 
of the shrubs on the bank. They held! As the earth 
was disintegrating about them, I worked myself up and 
grasped the branches and pulled myself on the bank 
again, "in a twinkling." 
Some human bones in some rotting clothing might 
have been found at ,the foot of that precipice by rare- 
flower gatherers a couple of years later. Coroner's in- 
quest: unidentified. 
Sleigti Driving— A Lovable Little Cttstom of Etfqwet. 
Whenever you are invited out to a sleigh drive with 
a lady friend in Cibiria, don't forget that propriety re- 
quires that you, being a masculine, and a supposed pro- 
tector, should, once in the sleigh, and seated, proceed 
to slip your arm round your lady friend's waist; and, as 
the sleigh whirls along over the snow ice, and sundry 
jobs are experienced, you encircle your arm more and 
more, with an occasional half hug as the sleigh lunges 
more than usual in its rapid flight on the wings of the 
wind. That protective waist-encircling arm is to prevent 
the lady rider being thrown out — of course, of course ! 
Roads la Cibiria — ^Ttie Longest Made Highway on Earlli. 
As already pointed out by the writer in "Roads of 
the World," in the Manhattan Automobile Magazine, 
and "Cibirian Roads" in the New York Good Roads 
Magazine, the longest made highway on the globe is 
the great Russian-Cibirian posting road stretching from 
the heart of the labloni range, in eastern trans-Baikalia, 
to the Vistula, on the old Polonia republic frontier. 
Total distance: turning 5,000 miles. 
In parts the road is accidentally good, due to the 
firmness of the binding materials which happened to be 
there, and rarely to the efforts of the road builder. It 
Is not in a Russian to build a good road. They had no 
original ideas as to how they should build first-class 
roads, so their engineers read up about and copied the 
French-made roads. France possesses the best chcmins 
in the universe: that I know personally by long, tours 
over them, especially the great highway of central 
France known as the route de Toulouse, and extending 
(officially) from Paris to the capital city of the south. 
In parts it is actually "smooth as a billiard table" al- 
most, and you nearly feel disposed to try to take a slide 
on it, as on ice. I described at length this and other 
highways in Municipal Engineering, Indianapolis, in one 
of the summer issues of '92. 
But unfortunately the Russian dopora (pronounced 
doroga) builders followed the French system in slip- 
shod fashion. When Telford and Macadam (who orig- 
inated nothing, or little) copied French road la3'-ers — 
to which their names erroneously cling — they faithfully 
"followed instructions"; hence the success witli which 
they perpetuated their names as if they were the original 
inventors. The Russ, on the other hand, sacrificed 
the roads to the exigencies of the contract system, in 
which every interested party thought, not of the road, 
but of his pocket. Even the "kontrolers," who were 
officially deputed to see that the_ contractors did not 
skimp their work, accepted the bribes of the latter, and 
passed the work. In .Russia there is no such thing as 
patriotism; they give a cynical smile when the word is 
brought up, and, slapping their pant pocket, exclaim: 
"Here is the extent of my patriotism. This is the 
limit of our 'patriotism' [another slap]. We Russians 
spell it 'kapmahicm' [lit., 'pocketism']. Since we are 
badly paid, we steal all we honestly can." 
Singular how this entire world is a question of pocket! 
Those Slaf "kohtpaktopc" (pronounced "kontraktors") 
in Cibiria are not isolated cases — not at all! And I 
could not help respecting them for the openness with 
which they admitted there was no patriotism in money 
matters; that they drew the line of patriotism at and 
including "kapmahicm" (which they pronounce "kar- 
manism") — ^i.e., "pocketism." 
It will be noticed that I continue to give instances of 
the difficult Russian spelling, and the examples (in 
parentheses) where the pronunciation is often totally 
different from the spelling. Tliis is not an original idea 
with me: it is a copy of the plan sometimes followed 
during the publication of George Kennan's "Cibirian 
Prisons and the Exile System" in the Century. The 
editor thereof received so many inquiries how the Rus- 
sian words should be pronounced, that he requested 
the author of the papers to, here and there, interpolate 
examples of Russian pronunciations. 
The Good Results of the KeQaan-*'Centory** Mission. 
Dozens of times have I pointed out in different class 
papers, in special articles on Cibiria (particularly in the 
N. Y. Medical News, the Manhattan . Book-Lpver, Rail- 
way and Locomotive Engineering, etc.), the good, re- 
sults of the Kennan-Century mission on Cibirian pris- 
ons and the exile system. Now I will repeat the in- 
formation for the benefit of the readers of this journal. 
The Kennan exposures did a lot of good — although, of 
course, you will not get a Russian official to admit that 
it was due to the Kennan expose that the prisons have 
improved. I v}as through various of them, and did not 
fail to notice the scrupulous cleanliness of the places. 
Even the old time-stained etanc (pronounced etaps), or 
half-way prisons, were as clean as old buildings can 
be made by a- vigorous application of bass brooms and 
buckets of water. Why, in some instances, the floors 
were even cleaner than the interior window sills — which 
ledges the inmates had found useful for the reception 
of cigarette stumps, lemon peel, bits of bread, etc. 
Your correspondent was through the prisons without 
any permit, so the expression "saw him coming" cannot 
be applied. In this wise: Putting up in the villages with 
the prison medicos, they naturally wanted to "show me 
the sights." So isolated are they, so few their visitors, 
they are glad to have somebody stay with them a couple 
of days. In the aggregate, during the trans-Cibirian 
journey, they almost forced me to be out of schedule a 
couple of months in reaching the Ural mountains, due 
to pressing me to "stop a day longer" in their "ruf- 
and-tuf" but hospitable log houses. 
And not alone did Kennan's writings spring a little 
shame into the prison authorities, and cause thern to 
adopt some of his suggestions : the military authorities — 
knowingly or unconsciously — "saw they were good." and 
actually introduced some of the Kennan ideas into the 
military transport service. Example: The most salient 
one -was the American writer's showing how prisoners 
could be more economically carried by telera _ (pro- 
nounced telega), or wagon, to their destination in Ci- 
biria, than being made to "foot it." And the writer 
actually saw able-bodied young soldiers — who would 
have been better for pechkom (walking)— being trans- 
ported across Cibiria to their respective stations in 
telegas. 
Kennan is a faithful pen portrayist, unsensational in 
the extreme, although writing (as on the Cibirian pris- 
ons) on what was then a matter often revoltingly sen- 
sational where the truth had to be told. If anything, 
things were even worse than Kennan made them out 
to be. My informants were prison officials who had 
perused the Century articles (circulated clandestinely), 
and found their envoy had understated matters. Nat- 
urally, some care was taken that the Yank investiga-. 
tor should not see everything — and that, of course, cer^ 
tainly not the best. • 
It is pretty safe to say that more educated Russians, 
have read the Kennan writings from beginning to end, 
than have done as much with the Bible. The reason for 
this was, it goes without saying, because the writings 
were suppressed. 
There is a Franco-Russian official excusist named de 
Windt, whose apologetic effusion on Cibirian prisons 
can naturally circulate all over Russiadom, but I only 
met one Russian who had ever perused it — and that only 
a perusal of a few chapters. This wind('t)y ivrite-up has 
remained as dead as ditch water— ^lilte^the'-vSporings of 
another imaginative juvenile tenderloin, th'e- notorious 
Landor (known as "the little Munchaiis^n"), whose 
Tibetan "horrible cruelties and atrocious tortures" were, 
with their precocious originator, effectually pilloried re- 
cently in one of our critical literary reviews tinder the 
title of "The Landor Imposture." 
I wrote to the Century at the time from Tomck, west- 
central Cibiria, offering a paper on the improved state 
of prison conditions, and received a courteous reply, 
declining. Queer that a magazine should negative the 
offer of an article showing the good results of its own 
mission ! 
Some Hints for Possible Future Sportsmen in Cibiria. 
Take along a pocket French-Russian and Russian- 
French lexicon, bound in two vols., not in one. Or, for 
second choice, a German-Russian or American-Russian, 
one, according to the language with which you are most 
familiar. Thus equipped, you have no need of an inter- 
preter. 
Have plenty of patience. Remember the officials who. 
ask you for your papers, and cause you delay, are only 
carrying out their instructions. Impatience will do you 
no good. Humor the Russian a bit, and you will find 
him a good-enough fellow; be just to him, but don't be 
"generous" — i. e., don't tip ! Once you begin the tipping 
business, you will have to go through a whole lot of tip- 
ping. For my own part, I never "tipped" a single konek 
(pronounced kopek) or cent between the Paaific Ocean 
and the ancient Polonia republic. How did I do it? By 
not beginning, 
Cibirian society and dinner parties imbibe overmuch 
of bodka (pronounced fodka) — 67 per cent, alcohol. As 
you value your self-respect, avoid it, except possibly a 
sip after meals. The native way is to gulp down a 
small glass of the ardent stuff before the repast, conse- 
quently on an empty stomach. Even if you are used 
to alcoholic drinks, that fodka, taken a la Russe, will 
do you harm both physically, intellectually and socially. 
The Russ may take offense at your refusing his 
schnaps — but never mind! Which is most important — 
your health or the opinion of your host? Be firm, and 
inform your acquaintance you are a temperance man. 
He will understand this, since he is accustomed to peo- 
ple whose religion forbids the use of intoxicants. 
A Bankrupt Empire. 
Russia is the nearest approach the world has to-day 
to a banlcrupt empire. Everything is run at a losa. The 
only money coming in is in the form, of loans raised in 
France, Germany, etc. Even the gathering of the taxes 
is performed at an economic loss. Although, under the 
guise of military service, the government extracts five 
years of servitude from the able-bodied male popula- 
tion, still the service is had at a heavy loss — since nat- 
urally every unwilling slave tries to do. the least he can. 
The population literally live on each other — two-thirds 
being consumers, and the other third (the submerged 
tenth) producing and existing merely. The observant 
tourist cannot but fail to see how the whole empire is 
run at a heavy loss. The curse of officialism and pater- 
nalism and poverty is everywhere rampant. 
And so things will go from bad to worse, till Russia 
exercises the "divine right" of hard-up nations — i.e., re- 
pudiation. 
Quite right! L. Lodian. 
[to be continxjed.] 
Tales of the Frontier. 
VI.— Jim'Morehead's Military Expedition. 
Not in the pages of Motley or Bancroft will this 
record be found. Gibbon is silent concerning it, and 
the reports of U. S. Army officers may be vainly 
searched for any mention of it. 
And Jim was not the commander-in-chief, either, but 
only a private in the ranks; yet this shall be known as 
Jim's expedition, for he was the only one of this band 
of frontier warriors known to me; and though not gen- 
eral-in-chief of this prairie army, he might well have 
been, save for the native modesty so strongly character- 
istic of him. 
Dear, brave, kind-hearted old Jim!_ Long since gone 
to his reward; a truer Leatherstocking of the frontier 
never crossed over the Great Divide! 
By the light of the open fireplace in the lonely trap- 
pers' cabin near the Great Bend of the Dcs Moines 
River, we finished up the evening's work of dressing 
fur, while Jim poured into my willing ear one of the 
many tales of savage slaughter, the recollection of which 
renders it difficult even at this distant day for an old 
timer of the frontier to think charitably of the villain- 
ous Sioux. 
The Minnesota frontier seemed peculiarly unfortunate. 
Only with the greatest reluctance did the savage Sioux 
relinquish their hold upon this best of all their hunting 
grounds, and for years of its early occupation by the 
white-race strong war parties raided the comparatively 
defenseless border, and a ferocious baptism of fire and 
blood awaited many of the venturesome bands of pio- 
neers' as the infant settlements crept further and further 
into the debatable country between the hostile races. 
Amon'g other tales of similar suffering and sorrow the 
legends of the border told ©f the Spirit Lake Massacre; 
the Norwegian Massacre, and the Great Massacre — or 
Sioux War. 
Along the left bank of the Des Moines River, south- 
west of Fish Lake, a colony of Norwegian people es- 
tablished their homes in the then wilderness country, 
and by patient industry had become comfortably inde- 
pendent. 
For years of -peaceful occupation the little settlement 
slumbered in security and peace. Other colonies along 
the border struggled for existence, but the happy valley 
of the Norwegian colony slept secure! although for years 
this was the furthest out in the wilderness of any on 
this part of the border line. 
ArOund Spirit Lake quite a number of settlers were 
estabfished, and along the Des Moines River, near the 
presetit town of Estherville, a strong colony was located. 
My old friend Jim lived a few miles north of Estherville 
on the west bank of the Des Moines. 
The time was just before the great W-ar of the Re- 
bellion, but the precise year I have forgotten. Suddenly 
as the rush ©f the Bengal tiger, the peaceful valley of the 
