270 
FOREST AND STREAM 
March i, 1913 
History of a Tent. 
BY DILLON WALLACE. 
On my second Labrador expedition of 1905- 
1906, a balloon silk tent was the only shelter our 
party had. It was 7x9 feet in size and origi¬ 
nally weighed nine pounds. From June 26, 1905, 
when our expedition struck inland from Hamil¬ 
ton Inlet, Eastern Labrador, until Sept. 3, when 
we reached Lake Michikamau on the interior 
plateau, it housed five, and during the first three 
weeks of the journey, six men. 
From Lake Michikamau all save Clifford H. 
Easton and myself returned to Hamilton Inlet. 
Easton and I, with an 18-foot canoe, this tent 
and a light outfit, proceeded northward over 
the northern divide, located the headwaters of 
George River and continued down the river to 
Hudson Straits. 
On Sept. 26 our canoe, while running a rapid 
in the George River, collided with a submerged 
rock. We were overturned and swept over a 
low fall. Our axes, arms, cooking utensils, prac¬ 
tically all of our provisions and other valuable 
outfit were lost. The tent and canoe, however, 
together with such portions of the outfit as 
floated ashore, were recovered. The ground was 
covered with snow, and the temperature close to 
zero, but making the best of our misfortune we 
continued our journey, reaching tidewater on 
Oct. 16. 
Here we engaged the services of three Eski¬ 
mos with a small open boat, and though the sea¬ 
son was far advanced, undertook to reach the 
Hudson’s Bay Company’s post, Fort Chimo, 150 
miles to the westward. 
We were now beyond the tree line and de¬ 
pendent for fire wholly upon stray bits of drift¬ 
wood picked up along the coast. We were at 
once beset by heavy snow storms and high 
winds, and with a 6o-foot tide running, progress 
in our little boat was slow and difficult. At 
length we were driven to refuge upon a small 
wind-swept island, where for several days a 
northeasterly gale held us inactive prisoners. 
When the gale finally subsided, the waters 
were choked with heavy arctic ice, our boat could 
no longer be of service, and we were forced to 
abandon it, together with our tent and other out¬ 
fit, and with light packs upon our backs continue 
on foot without shelter. After some minor 
hardships, including a period of five days with¬ 
out food, we at length reached Fort Chimo. 
Here Easton and I outfitted for the winter and 
returned to civilization with dogs and snowshoes. 
The following summer our Eskimos re¬ 
turned to the island, recovered the abandoned 
boat and tent, and the Factor of the Hudson’s 
Bay Company shipped me the tent on the com¬ 
pany’s one steamer which annually visits the 
region. This is the tent shown in the photo¬ 
graph herewith. 
Killing the Man Behind the Gun. 
Deer Lake, Mont., Feb. 13 .— Editor Forest 
and Stream: The editorial, “Killing the Man 
Behind the Gun’’ in a recent issue makes me 
curious to know whether any such statistics for 
Montana have come to the notice of Forest and 
Stream. Who knows how many hunters have 
been killed in this State in the past few years? 
I think the comparison would be very interest¬ 
ing. 
Although I do not know and have no means 
of ascertaining, I am going to venture the asser¬ 
tion that such deaths and injuries have been 
very few, even when considering the relative 
number of hunters in Pennsylvania and Mon¬ 
tana. For the past few years I have had occas¬ 
ion to read the papers of the State very care¬ 
fully, and during the hunting season I have been 
especially observant in watching for accounts of 
shooting accidents. As well as I can remember 
there has been less than a dozen reported in 
the last three years, one or two from the Libby 
country, one near Hardy and the others scat¬ 
tered over the western part of the State. 
The Hardy accident is well fixed in my mind, 
for I happened to be on a train passing through 
that place on the day the accident occurred. It 
appears that a rancher had killed a deer and was 
dressing it when another hunter fired from a 
nearby hillside. Wonderful to relate, the bullet 
did not strike a vital spot, but merely broke the 
man’s leg, under such circumstances a very lucky 
ending. 
If the cause of so few shooting accidents 
is as I believe, namely: so few ignorant or ten¬ 
derfoot sportsmen, that condition was disrupted 
in the fall of 1912 in the Sun River section of 
the Rockies. This country has long been known 
as a sportsman’s paradise, although I now deny 
it that title. My idea of this kind of a paradise 
does not include a nice graded wagon road, a 
telephone line and hunters occupying nearly 
every available camping place. 
Last year a road was completed from the 
North Fork Canon to the springs. Several dams 
will be built by the U. S. Reclamation Service 
for irrigation purposes, and the road was built 
by the Service so that supplies could be hauled. 
When it became noised about in the surround¬ 
ing country that the road had been built at last, 
every homesteader and dry land farmer within 
a radius of one hundred miles bought ten or 
twelve boxes of shells, called the dog, hitched 
his plow horses to the lumber wagon and started 
forth as confidently as though he was about to 
slaughter a steer in the corral. 
You who know, think of going into the 
Rockies with two or three horses and no pack 
saddles! Well, that is what hundreds of them 
did. Of course they did not get very far from 
the road, and very few of them saw any game, 
but the wonderful part of it is the fact that any 
of them returned alive and uninjured. Bullets 
flew in every direction along that road, and we 
were actually so afraid of being mistaken for 
game when we came out that one of the party 
argued that we ought to post guidons at the 
van and rear of the pack train. 
I only heard of one accident, although there 
were several close calls. Just before we came 
out, a lad of about fourteen was shot, the bullet 
passing through the lower part of the abdomen 
and lodging in front of one of the pelvic bones. 
The boy’s escape was miraculous, for the re¬ 
port sounded very close, and the hunter could 
not have been more than fifty yards away in the 
green timber. It was perfectly evident that it 
was another case of “thought it was a deer,” 
for in spite of the boy’s screams the hunter did 
A LABRADOR CAMP. 
Dillon Wallace and party in camp in Labrador on their history-making trip in 190t!. 
