A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright. 1904. by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts, a Copy. 
Six Months, $3. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 5, 1905. 
VOL. LXV.— No. 6. 
No. 846 Broadway, New York. 
EDWARD RUSSELL WILBUR. 
Edward Russell Wilbur^ Secretary and Treasurer of 
the Forest and Stream Publishing Company, passed away 
at his summer home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, on 
Sunday, July 30. His age was seventy-seven. 
Mr. Wilbur was born in Chatham, N. Y., and came to 
this city in 1849. He first found employment as clerk 
in the shipping house of Russell Sturgis & Co., in whose 
service he remained several years. Failing health 
obliged him to give up business, and on the advice of 
Dr. Willard Parker, the most eminent physician of the 
time in New York, he was sent south, as it was feared, 
to die of consumption. There he led an out- 
door life, and in the course of a year or two 
regained his health ; and returning to New 
York, entered business again, but still kept 
■ up the regimen of vigorous outdoor exercise, 
to which, ,as he was long after wont to say, 
he owed life and health. 
I Mr. Wilbur was a member of Company A 
[ of the Seventh Regiment, New York National 
I Guard, and w'hen the Civil War came he 
I went as a non-commissioned officer with his 
regiment on its historic march to Washing- 
ton. Among the experiences he loved to re- 
• call was that of the company’s bivouacking 
in the Senate Chamber of the Capitol, where 
i they were addressed in a characteristically 
terse and pithy speech by President Lincoln. 
Mr. Wilbur shared the services of the Sev- 
enth at the front, and had part wdth others 
of his regiment in the quelling of the draft 
riots in this city. It is interesting to note 
that one of the prized friendships of those 
years was that of Major Robert Anderson; 
among Mr. Wilbur’s mementoes of the time 
none was more cherished than a letter writ- 
ten to him by Major Anderson from Fort 
Sumter a day or two before that fateful April 
day when the fort was fired on. 
Soon after the close of the war he funned 
a partnership with Mr. William H. Hastings 
under the firm title of Wilbur & Hastings, 
wffiich soon became a well known house, in 
the stationery trade in this city. . 
From his youth he had been interested in 
all outdoor sports. He was one of the foun- 
ders of the first baseball association in 
New York at a time when the game was 
purely a recreation for amateurs; and was one of the 
incorporators of the Blooming Grove Park Association, 
whose extensive preserve in Pike county. Pa., was one 
of the first of such enterprises in America. Among his 
associates in the Blooming Grove Park was Charles 
Hallock, and when Mr. Hallock established the Forest 
AND Stream in 1873 he invited Mr. Wilbur to become a 
stockbolder. As time passed his interest in the paper 
and its welfare grew, until he became one of the prin- 
cipal owners. In 1880 he retired from active partnership 
in the firm of Wilbur & Hastings, and from that time 
devoted his attention to the Forest and Stream, in 
which was found a field most congenial to his tastes. As 
a sportsman he was fond of the gun and the rod and had 
enjoyed a wide experience with both. He had fished in 
many of the famous waters of the continent from Cali- 
fornia to Florida. In 1882 he was one of the organizers 
of the National Rod and Reel Association, and often 
.served as judge or referee at the tournaments. In Fred 
blather’s “My Angling- Friends” a* chapter is deyoted to 
Mr. Wilbur, and Mr. Mather recalls that it was a chance 
remark by Mr. Wilbur at one of the Rod and Reel Asso- 
ciation dinners which led eventually to the experiment 
of stocking the Hudson River with salmon. 
Mr. Wilbur was a close observer of nature; he loved 
to study the trees and flowers and birds. For many years 
the summers were spent on his country place at Sayville 
overlooking the Great South Bay of Long Island, and no 
field conquest ever afforded him more genuine satisfac- 
tion than his success in overcoming the shyness of the 
birds and tbe squirrels on his place and winning their 
confidence, as he did in a remarkable degree. 
Mr. Wilbur was not of a demonstrative nature; his 
was a personality which was revealed only tO' those who 
EDWARD R. WILBUR. 
From a photograph in 1897. 
long enjoyed his companionship. The qualities which 
made up the man were such as stood the proving of 
time. His integrity was sterling and uncompromising. 
Plis cheery kindliness and the readiness and the tender- 
ness of his sympathy made him to all who saw much of 
him a dear and valued friend. The sense of loss and 
sorrow that is felt by those associated with him in the 
office of b OREST AND Stream — some of us for more than 
twenty-five years — is not to be expressed by any written 
words. 
Dr. Hiram Byrd, of Jacksonville, Fla., suggests that 
as a complement to such remedial measures as draining 
ditches, screening cisterns and oiling standing water for 
the abatement of the mosquito plague, each household 
might maintain an artificial breeding place to trap the 
young for destruction. A pail of water set in a shady 
place in the yard will, in the absence of other breeding 
places, be resorted to by the insects for depositing their 
eggs, and the water being emptied out, the eggs will be 
destroyed. As the larvae require about ten days to ma- 
ture, th? pails need to be emptiej 'only once a week. 
SOME PRIMITIVE PLANT FOODS— II. 
While the sugar and the syrups were both keenly en- 
joyed by the Indians for their sweetness, they were also 
highly valued as furnishing a most nourishing food. 
Mixed with cornmeal, as stated, or with wild rice or 
bear’s fat, or even with walnuts, they made a wholesome 
and favorite article of diet. 
There is some reason to believe that the Indians of a 
hundred years ago were better farmers than those of to- 
day. At all events, we know that not a few early travel- 
ers starting out on their travels across the plains spoke 
with enthusiasm of the attractions of some of the Indian 
farms which they passed. 
Of the implements used by women none were more 
important than the hoe and the root digger — a sharpened 
stick from three to six feet long with which the women 
unearthed their roots. They had a wide ac- 
quaintance with certain facts of practical 
botany, these young girls and mothers and 
old women who used to start out in consider- 
able companies to dig roots or to gather 
berries. They knew what plants were nour- 
ishing and palatable and what w-erenot; they 
knew at just what' season of the year each 
root was at its best, when it must be dug, 
and bow it must be treated after being se- 
cured. Their patient industry, extended 
through almost the whole summer, gathered 
together what in the aggregate was a vast 
deal of food — sacks of dried berries and great 
caches of dried roots. 
Take for example the camas, each root of 
which — shaped somewhat like an onion — is 
about as large as a good-sized chestnut and 
each one of which must be dug individually. 
It took a long time to fill a parfleche — a sack 
— with these tiny roots, which must then be 
carried home, spread out in the sun to dry, 
roughly cleansed of the dark earth in which 
the root had grown, and then cooked. In 
those primitive times the labor of digging a 
great pit in tbe ground was not slight, for 
the only tools were a sharpened stick and the 
hand. In such a pit the camas roots were 
steamed or baked, and after the cooking 
process was over, the bulbs were spread oqt 
in the sun and dried. Or if not dried they 
were sometimes pressed together while still 
moist in cakes to form a sort of bread. 
The cultivation of the land. in the South- 
west — in what are now Arizona and New 
Mexico — was made possible by extensive irri- 
.rating systems, built with remarkable engi- 
reenng skill, the canals being lined with 
tamped clay, which was impervious to water 
and prevented all seepage. These great 
works to-day excite the astonishment of the 
traveler and the ethnologist. 
After all it was the wild fruits on which 
the Indian depended, outside of that wonder- 
ful plant, the maize, about which cluster so many 
beautiful traditions and which , in many tribes has a 
sacred character, so that it was called “mother,” 
“our support,” “our helper.” If the Indians of the 
north, the west and the southwest had their corn, 
not less did those of the south raise this plant, on 
whose grain they also depended. They cultivated also 
peas, beans, -pumpkins and tobacco, but besides gathered 
roots, berries and nuts. A dish spoken of by the old 
writers with some enthusiasm was hickory milk, being 
the pounded hickory nuts and water, which the people 
ate with their bread. They gathered the water chinquapin 
and the seeds of a great water lily which to-day gives 
food to the wild ducks in many places in the South. The 
seed of another species of lily more like our common 
yellow pond lily is extensively gathered to-day and eaten 
by the Klamath Indians, and its collection and prepara- 
tion have been interestingly described by Mr. F. V. 
Coville, of the Department of Agriculture. 
Another curious use to which the -seed of this water 
lily are put by some Indians is the forming of packages 
to bind about the head of the infant tied to its board, for 
the purpose of flattening the head, as was formerly the 
custom with very many Indians of the >yest 4ncj south, 
