298 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Sept. 6, 1913. 
Men I Have Worked With 
By JOHN B. BURNHAM, President of the American Game Protective and Propagation Association 
M Y connection with Forest and Stream be¬ 
gan in the summer of 1891, a month after 
my graduation from college, and I was 
on its staff until the fall of 1897, when I went 
to the Klondike. 
George Bird Grinnell was president and E. 
R. Wilbur, treasurer of the Forest and Stream 
Publishing Company, and Charles B. Reynolds 
managing editor. On the staff of the paper dur¬ 
ing my time were Emerson Plough, Bernard 
Waters, W. P. Stephens, Harry Lacey, Charles 
Townsend, Edward Banks, Josiah Whitley, Nel¬ 
son Cheney and Fred Mather. 
With all these men in one way or another 
I came into close touch. Friendships were 
formed which with the living continue to this 
day, while those who have gone are remembered 
with affection. 
I became business manager of the paper, but 
being devoted to shooting and field sports, and 
also because I was the youngest man on the 
staff and willing, I was often given editorial 
assignments, 
With Charley Townsend I helped report the 
Brewer-Fulford matches, the most important 
event of the day at the traps. Townsend in¬ 
vented a set of hieroglyphics to show graphically 
the flight of each bird—it was live pigeons in 
those days—and I helped out with pen and ink 
sketches, featuring the picturesque incidents of 
the shoot. 
Poor Townsend ! He died in harness. He 
contracted a severe cold at a shoot in Baltimore 
and soon developed alarming symptoms. I help¬ 
ed pack his trunk when he went South, never 
to return alive. He was a typical newspaper 
man, devoted to his work, warm-hearted, care¬ 
less of his own affairs, generous to a fault. 
He enjoyed life and left his stamp on 
sporting journalism. Townsend was succeeded 
as trap editor by Edward Banks, who came from 
Altoona, Pa. His work as a correspondent at 
that place had attracted the attention of Editor 
Reynolds, and never was a managing editor’s 
judgment better justified in the selection of a 
departmental head. 
Banks made good from the start, and in 
my humble judgment there has never been a 
better edited trap department than that for which 
he was responsible during his incumbency. While 
a good shot himself, Banks always had a lot of 
sympathy for the neophyte, and many a good 
marksman to-day owes his original instruction 
to Ed. Banks, who gave it sometimes in person, 
but more often perhaps through his writings. 
His “Hints to Beginners,” published by the 
DuPont Company, with whom Mr. Banks is at 
present connected, is the classic of its field. 
With Harry Lacey I went around to dog 
shows and made sketches of dogs that must 
have amused the kindly critic—amused him be¬ 
cause of their utter failure to bring out the 
points of breeding that made the subjects of 
the sketches noteworthy. Lacey was one of the 
best dog judges in America, and often officiated 
in this capacity at the shows. Like Banks, he 
was an Englishman, and like Banks his chief 
interest in life was his specialty. It is this kind 
of men, knowing and loving their subjects, that 
makes a paper great. 
Lacey was very deaf, but this did not han¬ 
dicap his usefulness. Nor did he lose much of 
the beauty of life through his affliction. He 
was a lover of good music, and in some mysteri¬ 
ous way heard it. One night, through the 
courtesy of the younger Salvini, who was a great 
sportsman, the staff had a box at the old Star 
Theatre to see Monte Cristo. Lacey enjoyed 
the performance as much as anyone, and after¬ 
ward in Salvini's dressing room as the actor 
changed his make-up for the habiliments of the 
street, Lacey made the keenest comment of any 
on the performance. 
Josiah Whitley conducted for Forest and 
Stream the revolver shoots given for the 
Winans trophy emblematic of the amateur re¬ 
volver championship of the United Satets. I 
used to help him out at times and found him 
another big-hearted, very human kind of man. 
Of Lacey and Whitley I know nothing at the 
present time. If they are living I should like 
to meet them again. 
Nelson Cheney, poor fellow, did not long 
survive his wife’s tragic death. He was one of 
the sportsmen fraternity who have whipped so 
many streams in little frequented corners of 
the earth. To him angling was the joy of exist¬ 
ence. While perhaps not remarkable for scien¬ 
tific attainments, he was an ideal angling editor. 
Probably no one in a similar position had a 
greater corps of correspondents. 
P'red Mather, who has also-joined the silent 
majority, was a most delightful writer, and I 
commend to anyone who has not read it his 
kook “Men I Have Fished With.” 
The day I left New York for Alaska he 
called me aside and advised me to include in 
my outfit a bottle of concentrated vinegar as a 
preventive of scurvy, and he told me this 
story. He was confined in Libby Prison during 
the Civil War at a time when some were spit¬ 
ting out their teeth and all making hourly in¬ 
spections to see if there were dark spots on 
their bodies or places where the flesh, when 
pressed, would not spring back again, but re¬ 
main depressed like putty, and he said that his 
coterie kept off the dreaded disease by stealing 
vegetables from the sutler. Each day a man 
was chosen to make the raid, and this day it 
was Mather's turn. 
He was hanging around watching his chance 
when the sutler's eye fell on him. Mather 
started to slink away, but the sutler called him 
back. “Can you keep books?” he asked. Mather 
told him he could try and the sutler set him to 
work on some accounts. 
Mather was so weak that he could hardly 
stand at the high desk to which he had been 
assigned, and presently the sutler noticed his con¬ 
dition, and calling him over to the place where 
his supplies were kept, handed him a tumbler 
and told him to take a drink of whiskey for a 
bracer. Mather was about to comply, when 
from a neighboring barrel came the odor of 
something that affected his senses with a de¬ 
licious craving. It was vinegar. Mather filled 
the tumbler full and drank it all and felt like 
a new man. He said that vinegar saved his life. 
"Don’t bother to take whiskey with you,” was 
his concluding advice. “Take vinegar; it will 
do you more good.” 
With Stephens I reported some of the in¬ 
ternational yacht races, and quite often I talked 
boat with him in his little cubby of an office. 
Stephens is a specialist from the ground up. 
He is an author and a designer of note, equally 
at home in the higher mathematics or guiding 
a single sticker in a race. 
Sometimes our yachting advertisers did not 
like Stephens’ frank commendation of English 
designers, builders or methods, and advertisers 
have a way of making their dislikes known, but 
it never made any difference with Stephens. He 
knew what he knew, and he was adamant in his 
honest convictions. 
Hough and Waters came out of the breezy 
West, though Hough was born in Virginia and 
Waters" in Connecticut. Both at one time were 
on the staff of the American Field. Hough 
started his famous “Chicago and the West” de¬ 
partment in Forest and Stream first and then 
brought his friend Waters into the fold. For 
keen, incisive English with sarcastic or witty by¬ 
play, Hough stood alone as a writer in sports¬ 
man’s journalism. Flis reports of the U. S. Car¬ 
tridge Company's pioneer trapshooting tour of 
the country are good reading to-day, even if 
you are not a trapshooter and care nothing about 
sport. 
Of recent years Hough has turned novelist 
and devotes his time to writing best sellers 
when he is not hunting bears in Alaska or musk 
ox on the tundra. I should have preferred to 
see him stick to his original field even at the 
cost of financial success, for the great move¬ 
ment of game protection to-day needs trenchant 
pens. 
When Ben Waters died, only a little group 
of intimate friends and immediate associates on 
Forest and Stream followed his body to the 
grave. I have talked with a great many men 
since who, had they known of it, would have 
felt honored to have stood with bowed head at 
the last rites. 
Ben was alone in the world except for his 
friends among the shooters and dog lovers. In 
the lives of these men a gap has been left which 
will never be filled. 
Waters was an author and an authority on 
dog handling and hunting dogs and also on trap¬ 
shooting. He was a quiet, resourceful fellow, a 
good writer and a staunch friend. 
Another who has gone to the great beyond 
is E. R. Wilbur, who with Mr. Grinnell, owned 
the paper and directed its energies, chiefly, how¬ 
ever, along business lines. 
While essentially a business man, Wilbur 
was a great lover of nature, and much of his 
enjoyment in the latter days of his life came 
from his country place at Saybrook, L. I., where 
he had fish ponds and similar interests. He 
was one of the founders of the Blooming Grove 
Park Association, and its second president. 
“Gruff and uncompromising” was the judgment 
