Arwx 30, 1904.] 
FOREST AND STREAM 
8B1 
he had been associated during the days when traditions 
were made. One at least of these Jie cared for till ftie 
man died. 
In one respect old man Harris had an advantage oyer 
his opponents. Day or night, blow hot or cold, if a thing 
neededto he done, or could be done,, away, he went. He 
led his surveyors into the mud, the top of which was 
froeen, and to which there was no bottom. He plunged 
through with his eyes open for the old corners, or making 
for .the new. Over roads in which the wheels of a buggy 
-sank till the axles were out of sight, and water now and 
then splashing over the sides of the box, old Harris would 
gc to- attend his "business engagements." Perhaps the 
necessity, of having to keep such a dale with- him has left 
a- rankle or two among the associates of the . old man. 
About five years ago some sportsmen who had enjoyed 
dwck hunting on Reelfoot Lake, and noted that indis- 
. criminate hunting was thinning the countless flocks of 
wild fowl till they were becoming countable, considered 
the possibility of making a private preserve of the lake 
to shut out the crowd which all winter long sought the 
Reelfoot game. Also,- they contemplated- reducing the 
fishing on the lake to less devastating proportions. Chess 
Smith, of Louisville, Ky., organized the Louisville Outing 
Club, which began to buy on the lake the claims of the 
various claimants. They spent about $S,ooo in all, and 
to the various owners of the lake offered stock in the 
club and money. There were some who refused, and then 
the club consulted some smart lawyers to see if they 
couldn't- force the lake into privacy from the claims 
already in their possession. The result was that the club 
gave up, sold out, to old man Harris, who paid, it is said, 
$5,100, or $100 more than the club had expended. There- 
after the story of the lake became that of Harris as well. 
I he man who "lawed everybody to death" began with a 
scheme. "I'm going to drain the lake," he said, "and FlI 
make good cotton lands of some of my swamps." His 
opponents claim'that he boasted he had only a few poor 
fishermen to fight, anyhow. 
He went to work. He put a gang of men ditching, and 
then it was up to the fishermen to save their livings. 
They had to attack, and they did it, pledging 10 per cent, 
of their incomes to pay the lawyers. It began in the cir- 
cuit court. A temporary injunction was issued, and the 
lean gray man came into court, his eyes ominous. It was 
the old story of the courts — with money a plenty, wit- 
nesses by the dozen, old records accumulated and new 
ones contrived— a hard-fought, long-drawn battle, hinging 
on whether Harris had the right to make private cotton 
fields out of what had been always regarded as a public 
fishing and hunting ground. Harris was enjoined and 
the Supreme Court of Tennessee made the injunction 
permanent— Reelfoot Lake cannot be drained. 
'_ Harris found his titles defective. He did not have all 
the riparian rights. Those old surveys which showed 
certain claims bordered out in the overflow did n©t allow 
^him to uncover those claims without the consent of the 
^ owners. The fishermen had rights to their living, more 
or less defined. But the fact remains: it was a permanent 
injunction that stopped the ditching. It is claimed for 
the Harris estate now that the old man's idea was not 
t.3 completely drain the lake, but to take away four feet 
of the height by making a large canal, \yith a gate in it 
which, when the floods of spring came, would permit the 
lake tq be drawn down to its summer level, or low water, 
in time'for crops to be put in on the thousands of acres 
>vhich are noAv given t® cane and cypress brakes, "useless 
tc any one for anything." 
. "Thgre are about 28,000 acres in the lake," Judge Har- 
ris — his name is "Judge" — told me, "and of these 14,000 
or, 15,^000 acres could be drained off in time .to put in 
crops." 
The opposition says that to drain off this land, would 
leave a, mud hole instead of a lake, and, would make a 
miasmic, swamp that would make Lake county chills much 
more famous than, they are at present. The large water 
; at present "purifies itself." Less water would "become 
: stagnant.". However, the permanent injunction settled 
the question of drainage. It didn't, prevent some things, 
however. It did not settle the ownerships in fact,, the 
decision, by reference to the rights of others, seems to 
^ l!::tve implied an ownership. These rights Harris con- 
'.tinued to. .acquire as. fast as. possible. It was possible to 
make claims in the middle of the lake. , These claims 
were made when the Louisville club began to show that 
, such claims might be worth something. It is said these 
= claims lie four or five deep all over the lake — Smith's, 
Jones', and Brown's on both of them, the corners mixed 
and without regularity. Apparently an inextricable mess 
- v>'as formed. But und«r all was Col. Daugherity's claim. 
- ^-Daugherity was a soldier of ■ the Revolutionary War. 
■His claim antedated the New Madrid earthquakes, and 
what- happened after the lake was formed is still to be 
decided by the courts. Did Daugherity's claim lapse 
and the land become public once more, -or did it continue 
Ur be Daugherity's and that of his heirs? -The Daugherity 
claim had no. taxes paid on it; it took years to find the 
heirs, but when they were found, Judge Harris, his father 
having died, bought their claim. 
•Things were happening on the lake which promised 
trouble. Harris, with his pile of claims to back him, 
demanded that the fishermen acknowledge his right to the 
l.rke, as a piece of property. ■ 
One of the men who fought Harris in the courts to- 
' i.rcvcnt the drainage of the lake, and was the leader in 
thecpposition, was J. C. Burdick. For thirty years he 
iiad bought game and fish taken on Reelfoot Lake by 
■ jiot-hv.nters and market fishermen. ^ He saw his busi- 
r.(»3 taken away. The Harris claim gave another phase 
to iiis Irasiness. He had rivals in the trade, some of them 
viie men who had joined in to prevent draining the lake. 
It was announced one day that Burdick had leased the 
■ ]ff ivilegc of buying and selling all the g-ame and fish taken 
;n Reel foot Lake, paying J. C. Harris $1,500 a year ther^- 
■ for. He had a three-year lease, but it is said Harris 
■ v.anted him to take a year lease, and continue it from year 
to year, as Harris saw fit. 
'■■'i he terms of the lease are not understood outside of 
the iiijtercsted parties, but it is said that Harris agreed to 
stand all the expenses of any litigation that might result 
from the 'exclusion of buyers other than Burdick from 
" the" lake. It shook the opposition up a good deal to have 
- iiitrdick go over to Harris that way, and such men- as 
Frank Sparks, an active co-worker of Burdick's against 
"the plaii to 'make Reelfoot Lake private, are not dehcate 
in characterizing Burdick's action as traitorous. 
.However, it was a good business stroke on Burdick's 
p.irt. The fish and game sold from Reelfoot Lake's 28,000 
;,acres amounts to $70,000 a year, and Burdick got more 
than half of it in a hurry, for the panic of the opposition 
drove many out of business. Then the Obion Fish Com- 
pany was formed. John Shaw, Frank Sparks and a man 
itamed Pleasant comprised this company, and they went 
into business buying Reelfoot fish and game. , Down 
came a temporary injunction on them — "The fish belong 
If! me, and I have the right to delegate a buyer and 
seller thereof," .said Harris. The fish cornpany gave 
bonds, and Harris in turn had to give bonds in order to 
cover any . loss incurred by them during the interval till 
the trial of . the case. The. bonds were for $1,200 each. 
And then the fishermen were enjoined, from selling to 
any one except .Burdick. It was another process in the 
'."lawing to death process" against, which, so. much com- 
plaint is made by men who find litigation expensive and 
not within their means. To make, good the loss to 
Burdick, in case he has the right, under the Harris lease, 
to exclusive control of Reelfoot's wild booty, some. of the 
fishermen are still under bonds, some are not, the in- 
junctions being dissolved. 
Old-Man Harris died last spring in St. Louis after an 
operation. He left his son. Judge, a most faithful young 
man, in charge of the estate. Of Judge it is said, "Where- 
ever you seen old man Harris you'd see. Judge, holding 
an umbrella over, his father's head to keep off the rain 
or sunshine — and it wa'n't a fancy umbrella either, but 
like enough torn clear to the top on one side, but they 
didn't care for that^ law, no !" 
Judge ife a mild-looking, brown-eyed man, very active, 
with a fine manner and well-shaped head. "He's just the 
nicest man to meet you ever did see — but, in business, 
look- OUt!"'_ ; - - . 
Here, again, is a man looking after what he believes 
is his own. He collects his rents on the day, he keeps his 
appointments on the minute. He lays out his plans at 
night and next day sees that they are done. Saw mills, 
cotton gins, a bank, 12,000 acres of land under cultivation, 
the business of a great plantation and of a forest— zt4,ooo 
acres in all — is under his control, and he controls it. Not 
that alone, but he's head of the Lake County Levee Com- 
missfon, and knows that the levee will be built because 
he's there to see about it. That levee is a right interest- 
ing feature." It shows a man's readiness with expedients. 
Raymond S. Spears; 
Bias and continues almost to New Caledonia, not far 
from the Gulf of Darien. Its external features to one 
traveling the coast in a canoe' or stnall vessel, are of a re- 
markable beauty of which the eye never tires. The pe- 
culiar light green tints of the foliage give it a fresh and 
invigorating appearance, as though newly made and not 
yet seasoned. Numerous keys j lit out from the mainland 
which in places slopes up gradually to meet the Andes 
Mountains and again rises heavily wooded from the 'sea 
to the height of hundreds of feet. One accustotned to 
our northern coast scenery is struck by the invisibility of 
the soil. There are no bare stretches of land, no pro- 
jecting rocks, or wastes of sand, everything is clothed _by 
nature with a proft^ision of growth and foliage, of which 
the most important is the cocoanut palm, the fruit df 
which is the revenue and coin of the country. ' 
Owing to the distrust with which the natives regard 
strangers, there is but one way in which an American can 
The San Bias Indians. 
Among the hundreds of barbarous or semi-civilized 
tribes of tropical ' Arnerica it would be hard to find one 
wiiich is characterized by more unique and distinctive 
features of interest than the Sari Bias Indians, sole in- 
habitants of that portion of the State of Panama cOm- 
mdnly ■ kiiowri' a:s the Sari Bias" Coast. Scattered over an 
area of land greater than that of Massachusetts, having" a 
sea coast not less than one hundred and twenty miles in 
length, intersected by inriu'merable little rivers, bayotis 
and proriiontories and fringed by an almost coritinuous 
line of keys, big arid little, formed, one might almost 
imagine, to protect the coast frorii the ravages, of the 
beautiful Caribbean Sea, they'nufnber probably not more 
than five thousand men, women and children all told. 
Favored in many ways by a' bountiful nature, beyond 
contiguous parts of the country, it is not to be wondered 
at that Columbus, cast upon this coast, not fifty miles east 
from Puerto Bello and scarcely eighty from Colon, the 
eastern terminus of the Panama Canal, though accus- 
tomed to the luxuriance and beauty of the tropics, should 
have named it "The Garden." Consumed by his vision 
FIRST VISITORS TO THE SHIP. 
get close enough tO; thern to make any reliable obser- 
vations, and that is by shipping aboard a cocoanut trader, 
the only kind of vessels that ply the coast. Two New 
York firms, with a score of vessels, sloops and barken- 
tines, do the entire business and ship to this country 
almost fifteen million nuts per year, over one-Kjuarter ' of 
the entire production of the tropics. It was while on one 
of these vessels that the photographs which accompany 
this article were taken. 
The method of doing business with the Indians is a 
very simple one. In the employ of each cocoanut firm are 
some ten or a dozen traders, Colombians or half-breeds. 
Irhese men, either in small sloops or Indian dugouts, with 
a crew of two or three Indians traverse the coast, each 
in an allotted territory, and contract for the nuts, 'which 
are collected and stored in certain places easy of access 
for the larger vessels, and in them loaded and brought to 
New York. The cost to the trader is a fixed one, 
twenty dollars a thousand, Columbian silver, about eight 
dollars American gold, or goods to the same amount, and 
two dollars export duty, which is the only revenue that 
the Colombian Government gets from the land. The 
A SAN BLAB VILLAGE. 
of'discove'riffg'the priceless mines from which the gold of 
Solomon's temple was brought, of which there was no 
traCe here, Cdlumbtls stayed but a few days on the coast 
and has given uS but a meagre description of the natives 
and none of their purS'iiifs and customs. Nor have the , 
later discoverers been more explicit; the old' records con- 
tain practically nothing but accounts of the presence or 
absence of gold arid treasii'res." ' ' ' ' ' ' 
It' caiiiiot be doubtecl that this lack of plunder was the 
only reason which caused the old adventurers to' allow the 
people to live in peace, and it is most probable that the . 
sarrie reason has actuated Colombia in her later treaitment 
of them. 
- Their land,.by ancient grant, begins at the Gulf of San 
price in New York varies, of course, with the imports, 
from twenty to-, forty dollars a thousand, so that the in- 
dustry cannot be said to lack profit. 
My acquaintance with the Indians began one afternoon, 
when about forty-eight hours out from Carthagena, 
where we had called for the customs agent, the Rhoda, 
a barkentine of about two hundred tons, dropped anchor 
a quarter of a mile off shore, just west of Cape Tiburon, 
at the eastern boundary of their land. Numerous dug- 
outs, with one, two or three occupants, appeared putting 
out from shore. A pretty sight they made, as, with pad- 
dles flashing in the sunlight, each strove to be the first to 
reach the vessel.. When alongside the occupants showed 
much, reluctance about coming aboawi, contenting them- 
