FOREST AND STREAM. 
[June 24, 1905. 
island for a time, and finally located Bruin up a tree. 
He shot, and the bear came down and began to swim 
for a canebrake not far distant, with Sibley padding 
after him. In the cane, the bear was troubled by the 
stufif, and his wounds, and he stopped on a log there. 
Sibley came through the cane, pulling himself hand over 
hand. Suddenly, the bear plunged at him, and Sibley 
threw up his gun and fired. The bear landed on the 
dugout and turned it over. The man managed to hang 
on to his gun, and the boat, too. The bear went to the 
bottom of the water, the jump having been his last 
effort. Sibley never did find the animal, for the water 
was ten feet deep, and the cane so thick that it was im- 
possible to get it. 
Big Island is the great tract of land which White, 
Arkansas, and the Mississippi rivers surround. It is 
upward of eighty miles around it, and the place has 
long been notorious as a cabin boat resort, and for its 
game. It is said to be one of the thickest of thick 
places along the river, and all men who venture into its 
shades do so at their peril. Sibley has always liked it 
for the game he found there, and in the days when he 
rode to the hounds he hunted the island pretty much 
from end to end at one time and another. He some- 
times hunted on foot when he wished to penetrate the 
thickets, and on one of these hunts he found himself 
to be a lost hunter. He was in the cane, which grew 
to the height of 25 or 30 feet, and though he traveled 
in what he believed to be a straight line, he came back 
to a tree which he recognized as one he had left some 
time before. He tried repeatedly to go in a straight 
line, but failed, there being no sun to guide him. Night 
came on, and he slept in a hollow cottonwood. Morn- 
ing found him tired, hungry and thinking hard. He 
thought to some advantage, too, for he cut the largest 
and tallest cane stalk he could find. It was 30 feet long 
at least, and holding the butt of this stalk under his 
arm, and his gun under his other arm, he started. The 
cane stalk was stifif, and it served precisely as a rudder. 
He .could not turn to right or left without feeling the 
prying strain caused by the cane — thus he was steered 
through the field of giant hay, and came out some miles 
from where he had entered the stuff, but he did get out. 
Sibley knew a woman, of whom I had been hearing 
ever since I left Illinois. It will be just as well to call 
the woman Mrs. Frank, as most people on the river 
do. Probably Mrs. Frank is the most notable person 
among the cabin boaters. It is certain that she is 
most eminent of them. Mrs. Frank's first husband was 
Frank. Accounts differ as to his fate. Sibley remem- 
bered him as being a pretty good sort of man who 
worked part of each year on the Sibley plantation be- 
fore the levees caused its ruin. In those days Mrs. 
Frank was a small, lean, determined and hard working 
woman. Her hair was red. She had corne down the 
river from Evansville, Illinois. Two children were 
born, a boy and a girl. The family took to cabin boat- 
ing, and thereafter its members were less regular in 
working, and Sibley saw them only occasionally. He 
believed Frank was killed by a man named "Windy 
Jim" somebody. Windy was hanged up at White River 
for some other meanness. I heard elsewhere that Mr. 
Frank fell from Mrs. Frank's grace on account of an 
episode in Ozark Bend. Mrs. Frank claims Ozark 
Bend as her own fishing spot, but four men and a 
woman came to the Bend and went to fishing. This 
was years ago. Mrs. Frank sent Mr. Frank up to the 
boat to order the men away. Her husband did so and 
the five ordered him elsewhere. He went back home 
and told his wife, who upbraided him for not shoot- 
ing them up then and there. She went up to the boat 
herself, and the five merely laughed when she told 
them that was her bend, and they'd better go. Al- 
though she had her Winchester besides her, they did 
not take the hint. That night, while the claim-jumping 
fishermen were eating supper, the lamp was shot off 
the' table. A fusilade of other shots was fired, and the 
five lay down behind the gunwales of the boat, and 
flattened out on the floor. It is said nearly two boxes 
of .38-40 cartridges were fired at the boat in the course 
of an hour or so, all from one weapon. When quiet 
came, a man on the boat ventured to crawl to the lines 
and cut them. The eddy-current swung the boat 
around, and it floated out into the main stream. As 
no shots were fired, two of the men seized the splintered 
sweeps and pushed themselves far from the bank on 
which Mrs. Frank had stood while enforcing her claim 
to the Ozark Bend. Thereafter no one ever treated 
Mrs. Frank's claims with disrespect. 
Mrs. Frank was indignant on account of Frank's fail- 
ure to assist in driving the men out, and he disappeared 
from view. Some say that Mrs. Frank got a divorce, 
and some that he was killed. Anyhow, Mrs. Frank 
married again, and still again, and still again, until 
it was impossible for me to find any one who could 
give a consecutive list of them. The first man to tell 
me about her had known two of them personally. 
Sibley recalled five, and once in a while I would hear 
of another man who had been married to the woman 
—really married, and by a preacher. The marriages 
were _ legal ones, too, for the previous husband was 
invariably dead, with the possible exception of Mr. 
Frank. 
Mrs. Frank's husbands died with their boots on. It is 
said that seven of them are in one graveyard, but this 
is probably an exaggeration by several as to the grave- 
yard. A store boatman told of one husband's fate. 
After she had had some experience, Mrs. Frank warned 
her intended, before the ceremony, as to he future: 
"I tell you. Nelson," she is reported to have said to 
one man on the wedding day, "you all's got to treat 
me white. If you-all gets to cutting up, and 'busing 
me when we's married, you-all's bound to git the worst 
of hit — you shore is. So long's you-all don' git 
drunk, and don't whup me, we'll be happy." 
This was the sixth or seventh marriage, and it hap- 
pened four years ago. The store boatman, who was 
well acquainted with Nelson, told me how he talked to 
Nelson about the woman when he heard of the engage- 
ment. "I tole him he wouldn't las' long," the store 
boatman said. "I laughed at him, an' he laughed, too. 
He said he knowed what he was adoin', an' I 'lowed he 
didn't. Well, sir, it happened just like I told him. He 
had been married eighteen months, when he got drunk 
and fell to mussing on a whiskey laoat, and they drove 
him off. He went home and told her about hit, and 
she sent him back with a gun, and, 'course, when the 
whiskey boaters seen him' coming with a gun they jest 
plumb had to kill him up. I don't know who Mrs. 
Frank's married to now — I hearn it's to a bank chap, but 
I don't know. Generally, she marries a river man, bein' 
off the river herself." 
Sibley was living in a house on stilts. It was a small 
building, 20x24 ^eet, the floor of which was 12 or 14 
feet from the ground. A stove, in a similar building, 
was an attraction for many river people, for Sibley is 
well known to the cabin boaters as a "good man" who 
"minds his own business." He took great interest in 
our adventures, and told of the time when he used to 
see fifty cabin boats drift past in one day. Now there 
was not one cabin boat to forty of twenty years or so 
ago. For some reason, the river people were being 
driven from the stream. Of the suggestions made as 
to the cause, the fact that so many bank stores had 
been established as to prevent store boats finding a 
good trade was one. In the old days a man could sell 
anything anywhere, but now there are dozens of land- 
ings which are forbidden to river people, because the 
river men have a bad name, and because bank men have 
stores there. 
Sibley said that nearly all the murders along the river 
were due to river men fighting over whiskey or women. 
No law reaches the river man. Uncle- Sam gives him a 
marine liquor license for $25, and with that he can run 
a gasolene ferryboat or a two-by-four cabin boat into 
the paths of prosperity, regardless of "dry" States, 
counties, or what not along the way. 
Mr. Sibley said that on the river. Government con- 
tracting was then profitable. He told of men who came 
to it with a wagon and two horses from down east, 
hvmg in tents. They took contracts, and now are 
worth more than a million dollars. He, himself, had 
had a chance to run the commissary of a contractor. 
"But I didn't like the commissary business," he ex- 
plained, "I'm an honest man." 
In the morning we drifted down to Rosedale, Miss., 
and Ihere we heard that the ice was coming, and we'd 
better watch out. I was glad to know that I would 
see a "run out" of the ice. The drift and ice, and the 
flood are the two culminating natural features of Mis- 
sissippi River characteristics. Raymond S. Spears. 
The Mississippi Cabin Boatets. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
Mr. Raymond S. Spears need not be disturbed by criti- 
cisms of his interesting series of narratives. Not long ago 
m a small southern port I was informed that two other 
New Yorkers were in town. I hastened to find if they were 
Mr. Choate and Mr. Rockefeller, and took my card case 
along. One of the gentlemen informed me that he was 
'off of Coney's Island," and the other lived at "Seek 
Stave In Ye and Fort Street." Coahoma's commendable 
civic pride is appreciated, but there are fringes on every 
town. 
One day at the Central Hotel, in Berlin, I happened to 
see an old Western acquaintance who had struck it rich, 
and was taking a cooked-up tour. He had just come from 
Pans. ^^I asked him what he thought of Paris, and he 
said: "Say, they've got a post office in that town.,' To 
which an English friend sitting near responded in a tone 
of surprise : "Indeed there is a post oflSce there, bitt have 
you seen ours in London?" R. T M 
The Rocky Mountain Goat. 
To the Ninth Annual Report of the New York Zoo- 
logical Society Mr. Madison Grant has contributed a 
beautifuly illustrated paper on the Rocky Mountain 
goat which possesses much interest for men of science, 
nature lovers and hunters. No such collection of photo- 
graphs of white goats has ever been brought together, 
and the hunter familiar with the white goat should by 
all means obtain, if possible, a copy of this paper. Ex- 
tremely interesting are the photographs of the four 
young goats and the little mountain sheep which are 
now on exhibition at the Zoological Society's park in 
New York. On the Atlantic coast only eight immature 
specimens have been had alive, and of those four are 
now to be seen in the New York Zoological Park. A 
full-grown male is living now in the London Zoological 
Garden. 
The term goat, as Mr. Grant remarks, is very objec- 
tionable, but it is a question whether it will ever be re- 
placed by another term. The great public has a fashion 
of adopting its own titles, and is not likely to substi- 
tute the terms snow antelope, wool antelope or white 
antelope — all of which have been suggested — for the 
monosyllable goat. 
It is well recognized that the goat belongs to the 
Rupicaprince, a group of mountain antelope, so-called, 
of which the chamois is the most familiar example, and 
the Asiatic genus, NcBmorhedus, the nearest relative to 
our goat. Oreamnos — our genus — which a few years ago 
was supposed to consist of a single species, has lately 
been split up into several subspecies, the distribution of 
which is not yet certainly known. 
The Rocky Mountain, _ or white, goat is an Alpine 
species, the range of which for the most part is to the 
north of the United States. On the other hand, it has 
been abundant in northern Montana, Washington, and 
Idaho and Oregon, though from some of these States 
it has largely been exterminated. That the goat ever 
existed in considerable numbers very far to the south 
of the States mentioned may perhaps be doubted. On 
the other hand, Mr. Grant can hardly be followed when 
he makes a statement so sweeping as this: 
"The writer has carefully traced out the legends re- 
garding the occurrence of goat in Colorado, Utah and 
California. There are persistent stories about the ex- 
istence of white goat in Colorado, which, when investi- 
gated, seem to have their origin in some domestic goat 
which are known to have escaped from captivity. It is, 
however, a certainty that Oreamnos has not existed in 
Colorado since the arrival of the white man, and there 
is no proof of its previous existence there. This state- 
ment. is made after a full examination of the evidence." 
A dictum such as this sweeps away apparently with- 
out any consideration a certain amount of positive 
evidence that has been recorded. It must be granted 
that twenty-five years ago the goat was very little 
known to hunters, and hardly better known to natur- 
alists; that the female mountain sheep was frequently — 
on account of ' its straight horns — taken for the goat, 
and that domestic goats — escaped from Mexican sheep 
herds and run wild— did exist in Colorado mountains. 
But even acknowledging all this, it appears impossible 
to ignore certain evidence which we recapitulate. More 
than thirty years ago a portion of the skull of a white 
goat with horns attached was seen nailed up over a 
butcher shop in Denver, Colo. It is hardly conceivable 
that any one would have brought this small fragment 
from the nearest now known range of the goat and 
used it for such a purpose as this. 
In Volume V. of the "Geographical Survey West of 
the looth Meridian," which contains the report on 
zoology by Drs. Elliott Coues and H. C. Yarrow, it is 
stated — absolutely without detail as to time or place 
of the occurrence — that an individual of this species was 
seen in Colorado by Lieut. Marshall's party. The 
description of the animal and of the characteristic man- 
ner in which it walked seems to make it quite clear that 
this was an Oreamnos. These two bits of evidence 
standing by themselves would rightly be regarded as 
valueless, but the written statement of Mr. John Willis, 
now or lately of Thompson's Falls, Montana, is much 
more convincing. About 1880, Mr. WiJIis moved from 
Colorado to Montana, where he became perfectly fa- 
miliar with Oreamnos, and frequently hunted and killed 
them. There can be no question of his knowing what 
a goat was, nor of his honesty. He said in a letter 
dated May 27, 1888. 
"It was in the winter of 1879, in February some time, 
that Chas. Snow, Reece Gephaert and myself were hunt- 
ing about twenty miles from the Carion City, Colo., 
when we saw something white going up the mountains. 
Snow and I went after them, not knowing that there 
was such a thing as a white goat in the mountains. 
They seemed to be traveling, and were going south to- 
ward some very high peaks. Snow went around to head 
them off, and left me to follow them. They soon saw 
we were after them, and got up in some cliffs and 
looked down at me. I shot and made a scratch shot, 
and killed what I thought was a small one, but it was 
about three years old, a nanny goat, which would have 
had a kid in the spring. When I shot it was standing 
out on a point of rocks. The bullet struck the shoulder, 
and It fell three hundred feet down the cliff. I dressed 
it and took the meat back to camp, but left the hide 
where I dressed it. These were the only goats I ever 
saw in Colorado, and everybody told us that there was 
no such a thing in the mountain, so I never told of it 
till I saw Mr. Roosevelt. 
"Snow v/as from Illinois somewhere, and Gephaert 
from Toledo, O. They both saw the band. There must 
have been fifteen or twenty of them from the amount 
of sign they made. 
"I do not know the name of the range of mountains 
where we found them, but it was on the west or south 
side of the Arkansas River. I have been in all the 
Territories south and never saw or heard of goats 
except m this case, till I came to Montana. They are 
very plenty in some of the mountains here " 
The locality here referred to would seem to be on the 
parallel of 38 30 , and perhaps in or near the Sangre de 
Christo Mountains. 
In October, 1884, Mr. Edward Johnson, then of 
Denver, Colo., and later of Platteville, Colo killed a 
white goat in that State about fifty miles west of Den- 
ver. Mr. Johnson's personal statement of the occur- 
rence is as follows: 
"The location was on the southeast side of Mt 
Evans,_about fifty miles west of Denver, and about one- 
half mile below timber line. I had just finished skin- 
ning a bear, and was starting for camp, when I saw a 
band of mountain sheep coming down the side of the 
mountain toward a spring, where I had just skinned the 
|?ear. In this bunch I saw what I at first thought was 
