Forest and Stream 
Terms, $3 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy, 
Six Months, $1.50. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1911. 
1 
VOL. LXXVII— No. 17. 
i No. 127 Franklin St., New York. 
A Week in the Sandhills 
I N the loop over which the hasp of my tackle 
box fits is a piece of red maple, about three 
inches in length, which serves as a fastener. 
When opening the box one day on the Red Cedar 
River in Wisconsin, it occurred to me that the 
stick was a long way from home, and thereby 
hangs a tale, for the stick was cut on the Calamus 
River in the sandhill country of Nebraska, at the 
end of a trip which lingers in memory “like 
some long dream of summer that haunts a winter 
night.” 
Several years ago there lived in our town a 
fat jovial miller named Arthur Smith who loved 
hunting and fishing as well as any man could. 
Arthur was born in Vermont and passed the 
years until early manhood in that State. After 
his removal to Iowa there came to him his father 
and his brother George, and when the former 
arrived in Iowa, it was plain where Arthur in¬ 
herited his sporting tastes, because the elder 
Smith was, and yet is, a hunter; and a better 
judge of dog or gun, or a keener sportsman I 
never knew. A few years ago Arthur Smith 
moved to Custer county, Nebraska, and bought 
a mill situated near the junction of the Calamus 
and North Loup Rivers, just in the edge of the 
sandhills. From the new home came tales of 
fish and game which, coupled with a desire to 
visit his son, moved George Smith, Sr., to make 
a visit to a land entirely different from his 
native State, Vermont, and when he returned 
his accounts of fish and game in the sandhills 
made his son George, Jr., and myself restless. 
Sport has grown poor in Iowa. The sloughs 
and lakes are drained, the streams contaminated, 
the prairie broken up and fenced with the devil's 
invention and the farmer’s friend, barbed wire, 
so that when in the fall of last year Mr. Smith, 
Sr., again visited Nebraska, and George an¬ 
nounced his intention of going out to see how 
his father was getting along, it did not take 
much persuasion to induce me to go and take 
care of George. 
We left Ft. Dodge, Iowa, at 4 a. m. on a train 
which landed us in Omaha at 7130 the same 
morning, and in a few minutes we were on board 
another train en route to Central City, where we 
arrived in time for dinner, and about 3 p. m. 
went on to Burwell. 
In the early eighties, when a resident of Sioux 
City, I hunted in part, of the country through 
which we passed on our trip, and which was 
then an almost unbroken prairie, and only now 
and then a sod house of some homesteader was 
visible. Now towns have sprung up, houses, 
churches and farms are on every hand and one 
By CONVIS 
is forced to acknowledge the truth of the lines— 
“There ain’t no West, it’s conquered, 
And I don’t know where to go.” 
We arrived at Burwell about 8 p. M. and it 
was good to meet Arthur at the station and 
clasp his good fat hand again and hear his cheery 
welcome. At the house we were heartily re¬ 
ceived by Mrs. Smith and Arthur’s father, but 
“early birds.” 
found the latter recovering from an illness which 
left him in a condition that made it impossible 
for him to accompany us on our trip to the hills 
and vexed him sorely. 
Early the next morning baggage, guns and 
fishing tackle were overhauled, hunting apparel 
brought forth and put on, and shortly after noon 
Arthur drove to the door with a two-seated 
spring wagon and the finest span of mules in 
the country. Into the wagon went grub box, 
guns, fishing tackle, clothing, ammunition and 
food for the mules until I suggested that the 
load would be sufficient without ourselves. 
Arthur laughed. “You don’t know these mules,” 
he said. The loading completed, we left town, 
crossed the Loup and set out to the northwest 
and the sandhills. 
After crossing the Loup River the road wound 
along the valleys, twisting here and there as it 
kept level ground the best it could. The bunch 
grass stood up stiff and brown, prickly pear and 
cactus lay in patches, the wind blew, twisting 
the sand dust into little eddies. Idigh overhead 
a hawk circled, the wagon sunk into the loose 
sand half way to the hub, the mules strained a 
little harder into their collars, but went steadily 
on. The town and out-lying farms faded from 
view; we were in the sandhills. 
Occasionally we passed a farm where some 
man had homesteaded a section in the hills under 
the Kincaid law, which permits 640 acres to be 
homesteaded instead of the usual quarter sec¬ 
tion. This law was fathered by the Hon. Moses 
Pierce Kincaid, of O’Neill, Congressman from 
Nebraska, and a classmate of mine at the Uni¬ 
versity of Michigan; a most wise law because 
a man can make a living from the valley land 
in a square mile of the hills, and indeed many 
of the farms so located show signs of prosperity. 
A drive of seven or eight miles northwest 
brought 11s to the Calamus River, a branch of 
the North Loup. We crossed the bridge and 
turned straight west along the valley. We were 
bound for Rheinhardt’s, a house on the road 
where travelers were kept, but en route the wind 
changed to the northwest, black clouds came up, 
there was an occasional spit of rain, and the 
sand-laden gale steadily increased in volume, so 
we were glad when Rheinhardt’s was sighted. 
The house was a “soddy” with a frame addition. 
There was a good barn and a fine spring. We 
stabled the mules and engaged quarters for the 
night. The proprietor was in bed from the ef¬ 
fects of a stroke of apoplexy, but his wife, as¬ 
sisted by her daughter and two sons, attended 
to our wants. Perhaps the less said about the 
meals the better, and though Arthur and I were 
hungry enough to eat almost anything, the qual¬ 
ity did not seem to be exactly to George’s taste. 
All three of us slept on the floor in the front 
room, and in spite of the roaring of the gale 
and the activity of the fleas, were soon asleep. 
George and I were out early, and before break¬ 
fast went to a small grove where someone had 
planted trees on a timber claim, taking with us 
a pointer bitch, a stray dog which had come to 
Smith’s about a month previous, and had the 
marks of a good dog. She turned out to be a 
queen in the field. We hunted along the bank 
