March 15, 1913 
FOREST AND STREAM 
337 
them not to change the House bill. The close 
time advocates had no desire to add to their 
arguments made in the House Committee, which 
were printed and in the possession of the 
Senators. 
Raleigh Raines has fumbled his ‘Tacts,” I 
admit; but Charles Sheldon is just as poor a 
guide on the straight and narrow road of truth¬ 
ful diction. 
Let me give you another instance of Sheldon 
“facts.” He says on page 204 that there is not 
a particle of evidence that yearlings and females 
were killed. 
This is a fairly ludicrous misstatement, for 
there is not a particle of evidence that these 
small yearlings and females were not killed. 
When those “experts,” Lucas, Townsend, 
Merriam, Evermann and Stejneger, were sworn 
and put under oath, they all refused to assert 
that yearlings and females were not killed. They 
all plead ignorance of what a yearling seal was 
when killed and skinned. 
But one man was hauled into this commit¬ 
tee who had killed all the seals since 1890 to 
date, one W. I. Lambkey. He swore that a 
yearling skin was 3654 inches long; he knew it, 
because he had identified it and measured it him¬ 
self. 
Then what happened? He was compelled 
to identify 12,929 skins which he had taken in 
1910, and swear to the committee that “only 
7.733 of them were less than thirty-four inches 
long!” Just 7,733 “particles of evidence” up to 
Sheldon. 
I think on the whole, Raleigh Raines has 
given your readers far the best exhibition of 
good sense in writing about a question which 
neither he nor Sheldon knows much about. 
Give Raleigh the reins; take Sheldon off the 
road. Amos Allen. 
Candlemas Day. 
Passaic, N. J., Feb. 3. — Editor Forest and 
Stream: Without a doubt the American mar¬ 
mot, woodchuck, vulgarized as groundhog, saw 
his shadow yesterday morning and retreated to 
his hole to prolong his snooze during the com¬ 
ing six weeks of biting cold weather. It is 
astonishing that so many common sense people 
believe that this uninteresting animal can com¬ 
pete with the Hackensack weather provider. 
This absurd superstition was unknown to me 
when in my boyhood I had my first encounter 
with the woodchuck who occupied a hole under 
the roots of a big tree in a woodland gulf a 
mile or more from my father's farm. He owned 
a yoke of oxen which I admired very much and 
was fond of driving about the farm and to 
occasional house or barn movings. A whip lash 
was needed to grace the ox goad, and one very 
early morning found me ensconced within rifle 
range of the chuck’s front door. When he 
emerged and settled down for a look about the 
woods, I took very careful aim and put a ball 
into his head, dropping him so dead that he 
could not slide back into his habitation. His 
hide was taken off, tanned and made into the 
lash required, in complete ignorance of my hav¬ 
ing put out of commission a famous prognosti¬ 
cator of near spring weather. Memoir. 
God makes opportunitys, but men must hunt- 
for them.—Josh Billings.' 
Guide, Friend and Philosopher. 
BY FRANK A. WAUGH. 
tlis grandfather was a Scotchman, and 
from him he inherited his name of Black¬ 
burn. His grandmother was an Indian; from 
her he took eye-trouble and a dignified tacitur¬ 
nity which made him an ideal woods companion. 
His mother was of the pure French-Canadian 
breed and gave him his religion and his canny 
thrift. As for Louis Blackburn himself, he was 
born and bred in the woods, there he got his 
whole education, and there he lived his life. 
And there, in one of the most beautiful of the 
north country lakes, as the winter was closing 
down, he went to his last accounting. 
His son, who is a foreman at the St. Mau¬ 
rice and has charge of an important drive every 
spring, wrote me a letter. It was not such a 
LOUIS BLACKBURN. 
letter as one gets from an automobile company 
or from a magazine editor, but a very human 
note, filled with pure and honest literature. 
Everyone who has been in the North Woods 
knows the dialect, but it is not often that one 
hears it so tenderly and solemnly spoken: 
“Mois je suis Joe le fils; celui qu’est noye 
dans lac a Vassal etait mon pere. II fasait la 
chasse dans les environs quand les lacs com- 
mencait a prendre. II est parti le matin et n’est 
pas revenu. C’est seulement apres huit jours 
que nous avons su qu’il est perdu. Nous fais- 
sons le cherce et la derniere trace que nous 
pouvons trouvez etait a lac a Vassal. Nous ne 
pourrons pas le retrouver que le printemps pro¬ 
chain au mois de Mai. * * * Je suis bien content 
de vous dire qui votre champ est en bon ordre, 
et c’est moi qui continuera conduire vos affaires, 
et j’espere vous rencontrer sur le St. Maurice 
I’ete prochain.” 
And so good old Louis left our camp in 
good order, and they expect to find him again 
next spring in the month of May. Then the 
trapping season is over, for all the others as 
it is for Louis, and the ice goes out of the lakes, 
and Louis’s sons will find him faithfully sepul¬ 
chred in the bosom of Lake Vassal. Thus that 
noble lake, which for us has always been asso¬ 
ciated with Louis Blackburn in his life, becomes 
an everlasting monument in his death. 
Every man who has hunted and fished in 
the North Woods has doubtless known some 
friend of Louis Blackburn’s type—some were of 
mixed pedigree, but of the unique forest train¬ 
ing, one in whom the teachings of nature held 
a heavy balance against the teachings of society 
and of the schools. And the men who have 
gone often enough and stopped long enough to 
learn to love the great wild country have formed 
their own personal attachments for good and 
trusty guides. I have heard (always at third or 
fourth hand) of tricky and unfaithful merce¬ 
naries who prey upon the summer vacationists, 
but I think most of us have found better treat¬ 
ment. Remembering Louis Blackburn, it will al¬ 
ways be hard for me to suspect evil of any of 
his race. 
The outstanding capabilities of this old 
woodsman were always a delight to us. He was 
small, withered and old, but he could shoulder 
a big pack, take an ax in one hand and his old 
rifle in the other and set us a pace along some 
blind trail which gave us hardly time to see 
the blazes go by. He was always ready with 
a fire when it rained. He always washed the 
dishes, and he was as neat about it as a woman. 
But those things which impressed us most lay 
deeper yet in his character. There was an ob¬ 
vious adjustment of his life to his surroundings 
which we are not accustomed to find in the 
haunts of civilization. There was a quiet 
serenity of the wild lakes and mountains—a 
quality which we have all longed for in our 
own lives. There was a simple religion of faith, 
which we could never have the heart to call 
superstition. He used often to say, “Oh! je 
suis bon catholique!” There was the dignified 
self-respect, characteristic of the Indian. 
His language was an excruciating patois— 
French, Indian, English and tobacco juice in¬ 
extricably mixed; but he had a quiet voice, and 
when from his end of the canoe he spoke, his 
words did not break, but rather blended with 
the harmonious silences of the lakes. He was 
a good companion who never spoke of politics, 
motor cars, markets, history, literature, or any 
other trivial matter. He said that loons were 
good eating, that the Indians frequently ate 
them and preferred hroussard to the best truitt 
rouge. 
The next time our canoe paddles down the 
lake from the portage past the familiar islands 
and through the narrows and slowly toward the 
waiting log camp, there will be the same exhila¬ 
rating all-enfolding silence, but in this case the 
lake, the islands, the trees from the shores, and 
most of all the great silence will speak to us 
in .sympathetic eloquence of Louis Blackburn. 
The most profitable way to communicate 
with the sportsman’s world is to advertise in 
Forest and Stream because, as an outdoor 
weekly, it has no equal, and its readers are 
scattered throughout the land. 
