FOREST AND STREAM. 
[July- 23; 1904. 
aging. Dr. P. V. Carlin, of Denver, is just back with a 
glowing account of encounters with many big ones. He 
also backed up his yarns with material exhibits in the! 
shape of a trout dinner Thursday night. Several of the! 
exhibits tipped the scale at 5 and : 6 pounds.. Dri Carlin 
was accompanied by a number of Denver business men,' 
but I was unable to get their names.' All report excellent 
fishing both up and down the Laramie a distance of 25 
miles either way from Laramie City. 
It is regrettable that the mining interests of the State 
clash so frequently with the interest of the sportsman ; 
and it is doubly regrettable that in such cases the sports- 
man is the one to suffer. This time it is the pollution 
of the Rio Grande River in San Luis Valley, one of the 
finest trout streams of the entire West. Mining men are 
filling the main stream with mill tailings at Creede, and 
reports say that trout are dying off rapidly. The sport at 
Wagon Wheel Gap, where I had hoped to spend the sum- 
mer vacation, is practically ruined by the pollution, and 
only the south fork of the river remains for the pleasure 
of the health seeker. Reports have it that the mine 
owners are doing their work openly, probably due to the 
supineness of the State officials, whose commercial in- 
stinct far outweighs anything else. 
Here is a story told me by Charley Sloat, general 
agent of the Rock Island at Denver. Of course it is true: 
John Haney is the owner of a ranch on the Rio Grande.; 
He is a pioneer and has been in possession of his land for 
thirty years. He owns both sides of the stream a distance 
of six miles, and pending adverse decision by the 
Supreme Court of the State, holds that he owns all the 
fishing rights pertaining. Haney is a characteristic 
Westerner — rawboned, bronzed of skin, snow white of 
beard and eyebrow. . A dead shot, quick at resentment, 
simple as. a baby, hospitable as a Southerner, and just as 
jealous of his rights. A few days ago- a saloon man 
from Creede ventured on the Haney preserves without as 
much as saying "by your leave." When Haney came upon 
the man of ginslings and highballs the latter was busy, 
reeling in one of the big ones for which Haney's.' waters' 
are noted. . \ ■ 
• "Get out yourself," was the rejoinder of the Creede 
man to Haney's salutation. "No, it ain't your land. I 
did not ask you, and I ain't going to ask you nothing. If 
you don't like it you can go to h— or any other old 
place. Don't bother me; this is my busy day; . Who are 
you, anyway, you old chuffle-headed jimplecut.e you?" 
; "Get off," said Haney, from across the stream. ?~ 
"Go chase yourself," said the funny man from Creede. 
Haney's rifle snapped spitefully, and the Creede man's 
rod fell to the ground, cut off at the butt. 
"Say, you blithering old idiot, you, the next time you 
come to Creede I'll punch' your head off your shoulders 
for you. Just you remember that, will you?" 
Haney scratched his head thoughtfully a moment, and 
delivered himself thus : "I guess my scrapping days are 
about over, but if you are itching for a fisticuff, I can 
accommodate you. There. is a bridge a half mile above 
here. Just . walk along the bank till you come to it, I will 
wait for you, and when you get there you can begin your 
contract of punching my head, and get it through before 
you go back to Creede— if you ever do go back." 
But the Creede man did not accept. J. D. C. 
Fishes' Provender. 
I do not see why Dr. Piatt should feel nervous over his 
story about a frog climbing a tree and devouring the 
woodpecker, feathers and all,, that he found in the frog's 
gullet. - 
Up at Woman's Lake they told .me of a 38-pound 
maskinonge caught with the leg of a duck— a full-grown 
green-head mallard — sticking out of its mouth! Now, 
what excuse had this musky for striking at a spoon? It 
certainly could not have been hungry, for besides this 
full-grown mallard they found a 3-pound wall-eyed pike 
and a 2-pound bass in its "in'ards." 
Now, 'this takes me' back to the question of why a 
maskinonge bites at a spoon. I am, from my late ex- 
perience, inclined to think that, like a salmon rising to a 
gaudy fly, it does so either out of pure fun or out of 
resentment. Now, here's my experience. When I reached 
Kahekona Camp, I found that the bass were biting very 
poorly, those taken showing a presence of spawn in their 
sacks. So it was fair to assume that the fish were yet 
on the spawning beds. I tried them a day with a fly, but 
with poor success, and laying aside my fly-rod I rigged 
up my bass-rod, and for a. week, day in and day out, 
worked the bars and maskinonge weed beds through ram 
and shine, with no results. I did get some strikes, but 
they were" of a kind that set me thinking. Certainly my 
lure gave evidence of contact, and momentarily the rod 
bowed to the tension, but it was but a fleeting strike. 
Now, here's the way I figured it, namely, that working a 
bar or weed bed say a dozen times to and fro, the fish, 
exasperated to the limit, would butt at the shining, gaudy 
intruder over its domains as a bull would butt at a fence. 
In doing so, perhaps the hook would scrape the snout of 
the fish and make the strike, such as it was. 
Maskinonge shed their teeth as deer shed their horns, 
and when teething, so to speak, T presume they go 
through a forced hungry period. The fish caught at 
Woman's Lake- July 4, a description of the landing of- 
which I halve' just sent you, I understand its teeth were 
in process of shedding. . ' 
Well, the fact stands that from 7 A. M. until dark, with 
perhaps a couple of hours for an al fresco lunch under' 
the trees at noon, I patrolled these bars and weed beds' 
with a perseverance worthy of a better cause and better 
luck. However, I was so delighted with the fresh air, ' 
the warm sun, the clouds and trees and birds innumerable 
in the young second growth springing up where the pines • 
once stood,' that I took my luck good-naturedly. So 
much so that faithful Peter, nearly rowed his arms off to 
get me that maskinonge. I presume he thought me some 
strange being— a sort of piscatorial Mark Tapley— and he 
was bound to have me get something because I neither 
complained or damned my luck, but actually seemed as 
greatly delighted with the situation as if I had landed, 
daily a 50-pound fresh water wolf. 
Pie did not have much confidence m my landing a fish ' 
on my light lancewood rod -and tackle, as he saw nothing ; 
as a rule but steel rods, and. I think he. was patiently wait- . 
ing to see what would' happen if I struck a big. one. "May 
be," he said, " it will take you all night to land him, but 
I'll stay with you if it takes until sunrise." Peter is a 
Dane, and when young enlisted in the Russian army and 
was at the seige of Plevna when Kouropatkin— the same, 
I expect, who is now facing the Japs in Manchuria — won 
the day. _ I listened by the hour to his graphic descrip- 
tion of his army experiences, especially as to the taking 
of Plevna. 
Yet Peter was not a talkative guide, and I presume I 
made him talk. And that reminds me of a story. A law- 
yer came to camp one night and as he stepped upon the 
stage greeted the camp manager in this style: "Mr. So 
and So, I' have come up here tx> rest my weary brain, 
and I want to know if you can give me a guide who will 
not talk. I did not come up here for social ends with my 
guide; I have come up here to fish and rest my tired 
brain." And ' the manager, selecting one of the best and, 
if anything, the most taciturn guide in the camp, told him 
as to the desires of the man with the tired brain. "I'll 
row the— the gentleman," and what the outcome of the 
trip was I never learned, for the guide never told. 
Now to get back to what a maskinonge will do out of 
hunger or deviltry. I saw. a pair of wood ducks leisurely 
skimming the water's edge, when out of the weeds sprang 
a maskinonge, striking at, but missing, . his feathered 
quarry. It was a fish fully four feet long, and I plead 
guilty to. regretting that, he did not strike his duck. I 
think-, there would have been- an exhibition of -fin- and 
feather had the fish "sot" his teeth well into the leg of 
that- duck. Feathers would have flown surely, and' the 
outcome, no man knows. One night when up at Lake 
Ida on the Great Northern Railroad up in Douglass 
county, I was being rowed toward the camp. It was be- 
tween nine and ten o'clock, and we were, late because 
we had fished until dark at the upper end of the lake. 
There was no moon, and no sounds disturbed the evening 
calm but the splash of the oars and the ripple of the 
water against the bow of the boat. Out of the stillness 
came a frightful quacking of a flock of ducks offshore 
as they noisily left the water. A swish and a dripping of 
water, for a moment, and then a boom ! as the heavy body 
struck the water, and all was silence -again. The ducks 
may or may not one and all have escaped with a whole skin, 
but one thing was certain, some gigantic northern pike or 
pickerel was hunting for his supper, and thought he 
would vary his bill of -fare from whitefish to raw ducks. 
So after all that full-grown mallard that was swallowed 
by the 38-pound maskinonge may have had some truth 
in it. 
Just one more on Peter and I'll quit. They made -him 
deputy game warden. He was new at the work.- He had 
been cautioned particularly as to moose .poachers. • One 
day he heard the horn of a moose caller at noon, and away 
he went on a still-bunt for that poacher. Again at dark 
he heard the same call, and on he kept, faithfully search- 
ing for the miscreant. At sunrise after a careful survey 
of the woods, he, in the distance, heard that same moose 
caller plying his nefarious trade. It was the most baffling 
pursuit he ever took up. Three days and nights did he 
dodge through the pines and underbrush in the slashings, 
but to no avail. At evening he came up to the lumber 
camp, and when waiting for the supper at the camp he 
saw. the cookee come out from his shack and blow a long 
wailing blast on his dinner horn. Peter had. at last found 
his moose poacher. ,- Charles Cristadoro. 
Fish Stocking in New Jersey. 
From the Annual Report of the Board of Fish and Game Comthis- 
sioners of New Jersey. 
It is now nearly a decade ago- since the work of- 
stocking the waters of the State with fish not indigenous 
to them was begun with some system. As far as the 
angling fraternity was interested, the ponds of the State 
some fifty years ago were divided into "pickerel-ponds" 
and "perch ponds." The former also included pike, for 
no attention was paid to the difference between pike 
and pickerel. Although some of our larger lakes and 
streams contained both pickerel, pike and perch, there 
were many ponds which contained only the one variety, 
in addition, of course, to the sunfish, catfish, and the 
different varieties of small fish generally designated as 
"bait." , Perhaps the. first stocking that was done in 
New Jersey was the planting of pickerel in perch ponds, 
and of: perch, in pickerel ponds. The success , of this is 
at the. present day attested by hundreds of the smaller 
sheets of water in the State. Next came the black bass. 
Residents of New -Jersey in territory adjacent to that 
of New York had heard of the gamey qualities of the 
two varieties of the bass . and there was naturally a 
desire to see what these fish would do in New, Jersey. 
According to satemehts made by residents along the 
shores of Greenwood Lake, that large body of water 
was originally, stocked with fifteen black bass, seven of 
the small-mouthed variety and eight of the large- 
riiouthed. Five years afterward Greenwood Lake af- 
forded the best black bass fishing ever known there. 
It will be conceded that the early attempts at stocking 
in New Jersey met with gratifying success. 
The work ' of stocking our streams and ponds with 
adult fish from the Great Lakes has been in progress 
for nearly, a decade; time can only tell whether it has 
been a success; in the opinion of a great many people 
time should have told so long ago. Judged by the 
results of the introduction of the pickerel and black 
bass, the attempted introduction of pike, perch, channel 
catfish, calico bass, crappies, and other fish from the 
west has been anything but a success. Although there 
is ample evidence to show that some of the fish have 
multiplied, they have riot done so at the rate the pickerel 
and bass did. Your Commissioners have done all that 
can be expected of them. We bring the fish here, but 
we cannot compel them to propagate. Nor do we 
believe that a persistence in this work would be warrant- 
able at the present, time, both in view,, of the doubtful- 
ness of - the experiment and. the fact that our efforts 
can be directed in other ways less attended by experi- 
ment/ If 'the fish brought on from the' Great Lakes 
had found our waters as suitable to them as did the 
black bass, they would have testified so sin a very de- 
cided manner, just as did the bass in Greenwood Lake 
a* few' years after their introduction. There are in- 
stances^ in 1 fish distribution where the- introduced spe- ' 
cies did not assert - itself until many years after their 
first introduction; it is to be hoped that this will be 
the case in New Jersey, but the slight chance of- the 
eventuation of this proposition does not, in our opinion; 
constitute a valid argument in favor of a continuance 
of bringing fish on from the West. 
Why has the introduction of the fish from the west 
not been attended with more marked success? That 
question may, perhaps, be answered in the future, when 
fishculture shall - have made - more progress - than it 
has at present; to-day it is unanswerable. There may 
be something in our- water agreeable to the indigenous 
fish and the black bass but repugnant to the introduced 
species; the latter may find the food in our' water 
foreign to them, or there fnay be enemies in bur water 
destructive to the emigrants ; in any one of these of many 
other : events, the introduced fish fail to multiply even 
if their own existence were continued to the ordinary 
span of their lives. " Persistent attempts at the intro- 
duction of fish which decline to multiply here would 
be injudicious. (It has been suggested that perhaps 
an addition to the food supply of our fish might be 
advisable.) The origin of the sustenance of fish is in 
the fertility of the soil under the 'water. It' is this soil 
which produces the vegetation in the water; on this 
vegetation thrive the minute forms of animal life on 
which the small fish feed and these smaller fish are 
neeessary for food to the larger. If one link in this 
chain is' broken, all fails, and science has not advanced 
far enough to indicate what can be done in the case 
of such failure. The farmer, no matter how well versed 
he may be in agriculture, cannot tell you how. it is 
that one year he has an abundant apple crop and the 
next year not enough for pies for his own family; still 
the farmer has the trees, the soil and all the surround- 
ings before him; in the water its surface frequently 
constitutes an impenetrable veil, a veil at least which 
science has so far failed to "lift. 
• -The -axiom in -fishculture which is so frequently lost 
sight of is that a water's ability to produce fish is in 
direct proportion to the food supply in it. A farmer 
who' has a pasture field in which . ten sheep and their 
progeny can find sustenance for the season would be 
considered foolish if he were to. place five hundred 
sheep there; still this is just what some people imagine 
the Fish and Game Commissioners should do; if 100 
fish do not find food in a certain water, put in 1,000; 
if these .1,000 starve, put in 5,006. ' Attempts at the'dis- 
tribution of what is commonly called baitfish have been 
made before. The fresh water herring, so abundant in 
Lake Hopatcong, are also found in many other large 
bodies of water, and attempts have been made to place 
them in other waters. We know of no single instance 
in which such atteinpt'was successful in the measure 
we hoped for. In some instances the herring multiplied 
until, for lack of food, they were picked up dead in 
large winrows along the" shore;' they found the new 
water suitable to their domestic arrangements, but they 
and their progeny devoured all the food and by doing 
so not only destroyed themselves but also the other 
baitfish, and as a natural -consequence, the larger fish. 
In other cases the, herring were never heard of, just 
as was the case with the attempted introduction of trie 
fresh water smelts im Greenwood Lake and other 
waters of this State, an attempt which was made by the 
Fish' and Game; Comiuissioners some seven; of eight 
years ago. Although in the large waters of Maine, the 
State Commissioners do not introduce salmon, trout, 
and other of the nobler kind of game fish until the 
fresh water smelt of both .the! large and small varieties 
have been well established, their introduction in the 
waters of New Jersey proved an absolute failure. Any 
interference whatever with the admirable balance which 
nature has established in the animal kingdom is more 
apt to lead to failure or mischief than to success: 
There is, however, no reason why the distribution of 
the black bass, the pickerel, the pike and the perch 
should not be continued. The State's supply of these 
fish has been drawn from the Delaware and Raritan 
Canal and the taking of these fish from this water 
served the double purpose of continuing their lives and 
placing them in water where their presence would be 
of value to the public. If left in the canal they would 
be destroyed by the wheels at Trenton; if removed, they 
infuse fresh blood into the same kind of fish found in 
other waters. This, however, occupies comparatively 
little time and for a limited period each year. 
A New Jersey State Preserve. 
From the Annual Report of the Board of Fish and Game Commis- 
sioners.' 
The time and money which will be left at the dis- 
position of the Commissioners and wardens by the 
abandonment or curtailment of the introduction of fish 
from the Great Lakes we feel may be used with better 
results in looking after the supply of game, and this 
is not a question of experiment. 
The ever-increasing population of the State, . with 
the proportionate increase in the number of gunners 
and the continual reduction of the territory available 
for the propagation of game, have rendered legislation 
of a more and more restrictive character absolutely 
necessary. But the time is coming when even the most 
drastic of prohibitive measures will not meet the re- 
quirements and our game may be exterminated, no 
matter how short the open season may be. It is time 
we looked for replenishment in some other direction, 
and the only method we can suggest is the establish- 
ment of -game refuges in the State. At a first glance 
this proposition may seem a little too near akin to the 
establishment of preserves, something the people of 
New. Jersey would not take kindly to, but we believe 
that a plan might be devised by which the public may have 
all the benefits arising from preserves without any of 
the objectionable features. New Jersey, populous as 
it is, is a State admirably adapted to the preservation 
of indigenous fauna, for hundreds of acres of wild land 
may be. found within, an hour's ride of the great cities 
of New York and Philadelphia. 
The first , matter to be considered in the establish- ; 
ment'Of a game refuge is the probable cost. This need ' 
not necessarily be large,- and -your -Commission has no. 
