good nature. But this is the time of the year when 
the camping microbe begins to make its presence felt 
and preparations are making for the summer sport. 
The medicine kit is usually left to the outfitter to 
supply, and not till necessity demands does the aver- 
age camper paw over his stock of drugs to discover 
what is good for a colic or a burned hand. Let us 
have some more articles like that of Dr. Moody's and 
we shall all profit by them H. Plympton, M.D. 
Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Shanty Boatmen and the Mississippi 
Mr. Raymond S. Spears' description of the shanty 
boatmen and their manner of living, is interesting and 
quite accurate, appealing particularly to me, who spent 
some years in camp on the Arkansas shore of the 
Mississippi, and had shanty boatmen as neighbors for 
months at a time. There are, as Mr. Spears states, 
all manner of characters ensconced in these 10x30 float- 
ing palaces — honest and dishonest ones, including fish- 
ermen, tradesmen, raftsmen, trappers, gunsmiths, 
photographers, dentists, quack doctors and whiskey 
dealers. There are others who have no apparent means 
of livelihood, and either sell whiskey or steal. 
The entire fraternity is nomadic. Tiring of one 
locality, the shanty boatman "casts off" and glides 
down-stream with the current, four miles an hour, 
until he finds new surroundings to his liking. 
A student of ornithology and taxidermy, from a 
northern university, was once met on a neat shanty 
boat. He was pursuing his temporary avocation of 
collecting specimens as he drifted southward by easy 
stages. 
Two desperadoes had wounded and robbed a citizen 
in a small river town, and were overhauled where 
they had tied up near our camp. The pursuing posse, 
in a gasolene launch, and the rivermen on the wooded 
shore, exchanged many shots, to which the campers 
were ear-witnesses. One desperado was killed, the 
other escaping to the interior White River swamps 
and leaving a blood trail, which was finally lost. 
Eye-witnesses and participants have described to me 
desperate encounters between whiskey boatmen and 
officers, the former being usually shrewd and deter- 
mined in evading and resisting arrest. The State 
authorities have no jurisdiction over them unless their 
boats are tied up to the shore, and many of them carry 
United States revenue license, which costs little as 
compared with State and county license. This puts 
them right with the Federal officers, and they risk 
arrest by the State officers rather than pay the high 
State license. 
An old rheumatic woman lives on a shanty boat at 
"Natches-Under-the-Hill." She is moored nearly 
under the place where the garbage from "Natchez-on- 
the-Hill" is dumped. Whenever a cart-load comes 
' tumbling down from the dizzy heights above, a re- 
markable scene is enacted. The old woman (stick in 
hand), several dogs, a drove of hogs and some buz- 
zards swoop down upon the prize. It is "nip and tuck" 
for victory. She sells the gleanings to shrimp fisher- 
men for bait, receiving a pittance therefor. 
Mr. Spears touches upon levees. It is a source of 
regret that he should have been led to give credence 
to that thread-bare myth about the bed of the river 
being continuously raised. The writer was, for a num- 
ber of years, a "Mississippi River Commission Sur- 
veyor," and contends misinformation or an attempt 
at romance on the part of the gentleman of that order 
interviewed by Mr. Spears. ±ie is probably only a 
"junior surveyor," who doesn't read the official reports, 
and merely repeats what he hears among uninformed 
persons. 
The question of whether or not the Mississippi levees 
tend toward the silting up of the bed of the river is 
of fundamental importance to river engineers, and one 
which has been closely studied by the Mississippi River 
Commission, as well as other able engineers, for the 
past twenty-five years. 
There is a concurrence among all the engineers who 
have thus studied the subject in the conclusion that 
such tendency does not exist; but, on the contrary, 
the lowering of the low-water plane, observed at many 
places in recent years, without a diminished volume of 
water flowing in the river, seems to indicate a lowering 
of the bed. . . 
The above conclusion is sustained both by a prion 
reasoning and observed facts. As Forest and Stream 
is not an engineering journal, this subject will not be 
further elaborated here. Tripod. 
John Doyle Lee. 
While looking over some book notices in a daily paper 
to-day, I ran across a notice of what purports to be the 
confession of John D. Lee, v/ho commanded the Mormon 
Danites, or Destroying Angels, at the Mountain Meadow 
Massacre in 1857. 
I had almost forgotten both Lee and the massacre, 
when this so-called confession of his (I don't believe that 
he ever made it ; he certainly never wrote it, as he could 
hardly write at all) brought him to my mind again. I 
first met Lee about four years before he was tried and 
shot. He was living then at Lee's Ferry on the Colorado 
River in Arizona. I was anxious to meet him, as I 
wanted to get his version of the massacre. Every story 
has two sides to it, and I wanted his side of this one; I 
already had the other side. I had been told that he would 
not talk about this affair to anyone except a Mormon; 
but he talked freely about it to me. There may have been 
several reasons why he did so. _When I met him I was^ 
wearing a pin, the mark of a society. He noticed it, and' 
told me that his father had been one of us, but that he 
was not. I knew that already. Had he been one of us, 
it might not have prevented him from being tried and 
shot for murder, but they would have seen to it that he 
was given a square deal. 
Then again I spent a night at his ranch, and we put 
in whole hours talking about the Mormons and their 
tenets, I telling him that I took no stock in their tenets, 
but had no objection to their having half a dozen wives 
FOREST AND STREAM 
each, if they could support them, as long as there were 
so many women lying around loose that nobody seemed 
to wanti 
Lee had several wives then ; one of them was here now, 
and she thought she could convert me to the Mormon 
religion. 
"No,'' I told her, "it cannot be done. I know all about 
your religion now, and have read the Book of Mormon 
(the Mormon Bible) ; it was written by Sidney Rigdon 
in the city that I come from; I even know the house he 
occupied while he wrote it." 
Lee was the most confirmed fanatic that I have ever 
met. He actually believed that if he were shot at any 
time for the part he had taken in this massacre, he would 
go straight to heaven. Brigham Young and the Church, 
after using him to carry out their orders, had disowned 
him, and he expected to be shot sooner or later. Although 
he did not say so, I came to the conclusion that he ex- 
pected his former friends, the Danites, to do the shooting 
whenever Young gave the order. 
The Mormons are not fools, and in some respects are 
to be commended. They have made a garden out of what 
was a desert when they first took hold of it, and all 
through that southwestern country, wherever they go, 
they turn the most arid land into a garden in time; so 
1 thought that there must have been some cause for the 
massacre. Lee said that from the time these emigrants 
first struck the country, they plundered the Mormons 
right and left, killing or driving off their stock and taking 
by force anything they wanted. "They were going to 
California," he said, "not going to stop in Utah, and had 
they acted half decent we would not have given them any 
trouble." 
The emigrants camped at the Mountain Meadows, and 
Led was ordered by Brigham Young to take his Danites 
and destroy all except the very young children. He took 
some Indians in the party, and it was these Indians that 
did most of the killing. He could not control them, he 
said, and their chief refused to spare the small children 
whom he was anxious to save. They killed about 125 
men, women and children. I had seen it stated that the 
spring at which these people had been camped when they 
were killed had dried up since; the paper gave it as a 
mark of God's displeasure. I had never been there, and 
asked Lee about this. 
"It dries up when other springs in the country do, and 
flows when they do. God had no displeasure to show us. 
He commanded me through our Church to destroy those 
people; they had plundered his saints." 
Lee was arrested, tried and shot. He had the option of 
being either hanged or shot, and he elected to be shot, of 
course. This was just twenty years after the massacre 
in 1877. 
I was agreeably surprised when I first met him at his 
appearance. A stranger knowing his history might ex- 
pect to meet a monster in human form. He did not look 
as if he were capable of hurting a fly. 
When I met him I was out with a party of Government 
surveyors from Washington who had been sent to report 
on this country and find out whether it could be irrigated 
or not. Some of the sites we examined then have since 
been used to build dams that furnish water to irrigate 
many square miles of the country; that dam in the Salt 
River is one of them. 
Grind the Sabres. 
I notice that President Roosevelt has given permission 
to the army officers and the men in the cavalry to grind 
up their sabres if they prefer them sharp. This is 
sensible; the cavalry sabre in the shape it is now in is 
neither ornamental nor useful. About the only use that 
we ever could find for it would be to use it to clear off 
cactus plants when making a camp ground. In making a 
right or left point the sabre could be made to hurt; but 
the edge of it would hardly cut hot butter. 
I at one time took a notion to grind my sabre, and got 
quite an edge on it, but it only remained there until the 
next Sunday; then at inspection I was told to file that 
edge off again. 
The only time that I ever knew those sabres to be 
ground was in the spring of 1873. We were then at Fort 
Clark, Texas. It is down near the Mexican line, and we 
were looking for a war with Mexico. What it was about 
I do not remember now; anyhow it did not come off. I 
put in two whole days in grinding up all the sabres in 
our troop, about 70 of them. I was told to only grind 
them about two-thirds of the way up from the point; 
I ground the others that way, but ground my own clear 
up to the hilt ; then finished it off on an oil-stone, and got 
it nearly as sharp as a razor. Had I ever been given a 
chance to execute a "right cut" on a Greaser, he never 
would have needed to "go to the rear and find the doc- 
tor ;" but the war failed to come off, and in a short time 
the edges of those sabres all came off; they were worn 
off by drawing them out against the steel scabbards. The 
last two years that I was in the cavalry we never carried 
the sabres at all, but kept them hanging up on the wall to 
look at. Cabia Blanco. 
The Penobscot Man. 
"The Penobscot Man," by Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, 
is the title of a book of ten tales whose themes concern 
the every-day life of the toilers in the Maine woods, 
stalwart men who labor in the logging camps, actively 
enduring the rigors and labors incident to their voca- 
tion, and round out the season by engaging in the 
fatigues and desperate perils of the river-drive, as things 
of moment only as they are a part of the day's work. 
The portrayal of the life and deeds of "The Pen- 
obscot Man" are true to human nature. Throughout 
the book, there is manifested a fidelity which could have 
its source only in a personal knowledge of the subject. 
Indeed, in her preface, Mrs. Eckstorm touches on this 
phase: "Here are stories of men, the kind we have 
yet a-plenty, who die unknown and unnoticed; and 
every tale is a true one — not the chance report of 
strangers, the gleanings of recent acquaintance, the 
aftermath of hearsay, the enlargements of a fading 
tradition; but the tales of men who tended me in baby- 
hood, who crooned to me old slumber-songs, who 
brought me gifts from the woods, who wrought me 
little keepsakes, or amused my childish hours — stories 
tApRlL 1, 190$. 
which, havmg gathered them from this one and that I 
one who saw the deed, I have bound into a garland 
to lay upon their graves." * * * "The events are j 
actual occurrences; the names, real names; the places { 
any one may see at any time. Yet each story is noti 
merely personal and solitary, but illustrates typically 1 
some trait of the whole class. Their virtues are not ! 
magnified, their faults are not denied; in black and 
white, for good or evil, they stand here as they lived-— 
as they themselves would prefer to stand on record, 
bo they acted, thus they felt, these were their thoughts s 
upon grave subjects; and it may be that the Pen- 
obscot man is a better, wiser, more serious man than i 
even his contemporaries have judged him to be." I 
t^^s are: Lugging Boat on Sowadnehunk, 
ihe Grim Tale of Larry Conners, Hymns Before 
Battle, The Death of Thoreau's Guide, The Gray Rock 1 
of Abol, A Clump of Posies, Working Nights, The ' 
Naughty Pride of Black Sebat and Others, Rescue, and 
Joyfully. 
T*ie first story recounts the deeds at the falls of So- 
wadnehunk, of Penobscot men, who refuse to be out- 
^ done m daring. The portage was laborious and the falls ; 
dangerous. A few exqerpts, while far from doing justice 
to the tale as a whole, will nevertheless give a hint of the 
style of the author and the thrill of the incidents: 
"Be that as it may, when Sebattis and his bowman 
came down, the last of the three boats, and held their 
batteau at the taking-out place a moment before they 
dragged her out and stripped her ready to lug, what 
Sebattis, as he sat in the stern with his paddle across • 
his knees, said in Indian to his bowman was simply 
revolutionary. 'Huh?' grunted his dark-faced partner, , 
turning in great surprise; 'you t'ought you wanted run 
It does e'er falls. Blenty rabbidge water does e'er falls!' 
"Thus at the upper end of the carry Sebattis and his 
bowman talked over at their leisure the chances of 
dying within five minutes. 
"At the other end the two boat's crews lay among the 
blueberry bushes in the shade of shivering birch saplings 
and waited for Sebattis. 
'' 'Holy hell! — Look a-comin'!' gasped the Yankee. 
"Man! but that was a sight to see; they got up and 
devoured it with their eyes! 
"On the verge of the falls hovered the batteau about 
to leap. Big Sebat and his bowman crouched to help 
her, like a rider Hfting his horse to a leap. And their 
eyes were set with fierce excitement, their hands cleaved 
to their paddle handles, they felt the thrill that ran 
through the boat as they shot her clear, and, flying out 
beyond the curtain of the fall, they landed her in the 
yeasty rapids below. 
"Both on their feet then! And how they bent their 
paddles and whipped them from side to side, as it was 
'In!'— 'Out!'— 'Right!'— 'Left!' * * * 
"Then the men all looked again at the boat that had 
been over Sowadnehunk, and they all trooped back 
to the carry-end without saying much; two full batteau 
crews and Sebattis and his bowman. They did not 
talk. No man would have gained anything new by ex- 
changing thoughts with his neighbor. 
"And when they came to the two boats drying in 
the sun, they looked one another in the eyes again. 
It was a foregone conclusion. Without a word they put 
their galled shoulders under the gunwales, lifted the 
heavy batteaus to their places, and started back across 
that carry forty rods to the end they had just come 
from. 
"What for? It was that in his own esteem a 
Penobscot man will not stand second to any other 
man. They would not have it said that Sebattis Mitchell 
was the only man of them who had tried to run Sowad- 
nehunk Falls." * * * 
"And they pushed out with their two boats and ran 
the falls. ' But the luck that bore Sebattis safely through 
was not theirs. Both boats were swamped, battered 
on the rocks into kindling wood. Twelve men were 
thrown into the water, and pounded and swashed about 
among logs and rocks. Some by swimming, some by 
the aid of Sebattis and his boat, eleven of them got 
ashore, 'a little damp,' as no doubt the least exaggera- 
tive of them were willing to admit. The unlucky twelfth 
man they picked up later, quite undeniably drowned. 
And the boats were irretrievably smashed. Indeed, that 
was the part of the tale that rankled with Sebattis when 
he used to tell it." 
Thus the Penobscot man, though far removed from 
the world's limelight, performed deeds of desperate 
risk, whose counterparts in the more spectacular set- 
ting of war by land or sea, are the credentials of the 
world's greatest heroes. 
"The Grim Tale of Larry Connors" has the breaking 
of a log jam as its chief incident. It abounds in 
thrilling incident. A single log, the key to the whole 
obstruction, was so dangerously situated that the boss 
decided he would not risk any nian's life in dislodging 
it. Instead he decided to use a tackle. Two rivals 
demurred, each anxious to demonstrate that he dared 
to go further into danger than his fellow. It was de- 
cided that they alternate in chopping in two the key 
log. To Larry fell the honor of cutting the second 
half. 
"And the logs they started, jumping and squealing 
and thrashing and grinding, like seventeen sawmills 
runnin' full blast of a Sunday. You never hearn any- 
thing in your life like a big jam of logs let loose. Yoii 
ain't no idee of the noise and hubbub one of them will 
make when she hauls." * * * "He was quicker than 
three cats, Larry was, but he wa'n't up to the gait 
them logs set him, just flyin' through the air and up- 
endin' every which woy. And o' course he had the wust 
chance; that's what he bid for. They tell the story 
different about Larry. Some say that he made a laidge 
all right, and a big log squirled and caught him, and 
they see a red streak just like you'd hit a mosquito 
there. But what I see was that he was on the jam 
a runnin', and a big pine lept an' struck him in the 
back. Head and heels met in the air as it flung him 
Glean. And he fell amongts the logs and they rid over 
him. But we never see no more of Larry Connors. 
He said he was going to break that jam if he went to 
hell for it, and he broke it all right enough." 
"The Penobscot Man" is published by Houghton, 
Mifflin & Company, Boston and New York. Price, 
$1.50. 
