146 
FOREST AND STREAM 
When The Boat Was Loaded 
An Accident Which Caused A Huntsman’s Wife to Learn Navigation 
By Sandy Griswold. 
When man was young on this little world of 
ours, and it was a struggle between him and 
other species of animal life to determine the 
question propounded at later date by Darwin as 
to which was the fittest to survive—in those 
days when books were neither written nor read, 
when the flint was made to do that which at a 
later date could not be done with anything short 
of Schultze’s powder and a hammerless gun, all 
mankind, regardless of “age, sex or previous 
condition,” lived out their lives in the open air. 
Hunting and fishing was not so much a pastime 
as a necessity; and necessary labor, generally 
speaking, seldom has much of the charm of sport 
about it. A man’s reputation in those days de¬ 
pended on his ability to capture game and fish. 
Our love of field sports is simply an inherit¬ 
ance handed down to us by those early ances¬ 
tors, a taint of the free and easy life led by 
them that assumes in us the importance of in¬ 
stinct. So we find the best men and some of 
the best women going to the ducking lakes and 
bass streams for their sport and recreation. The 
green woods, the smiling lakes, and the sparkling 
streams infuse new life and vigor into the stiff¬ 
ening sinews and hardening clay. The heart 
throbs quicker and its energy draws from the 
pure, fresh, balm-laden air a new lease of life. 
The eye sparkles, the blood dances, and we for¬ 
get that time already has commenced to fore¬ 
close its mortgage on our dust. If women were 
encouraged to take this tonic instead of the doc¬ 
tor’s pills, our race would grow healthier and 
better, instead of weakly and more vicious. 
And this reference to women hunting and fish¬ 
ing reminds me of a little story one of our prom¬ 
inent Omaha sportsmen told me while I sat with 
him in a blind up on the Metz wild fowl preserve 
in Cherry County last fall. 
“My wife,” said he, “has her own little No. 20 
Parker, the kind you are always cracking up 
above anything on earth; her own shell-case, rod 
and reel, etc. And she knows how to use them, 
too, as the roses in her cheeks will forcibly tell 
you. The pride in making a neat- cast and a 
good shot does not seem to interfere with her 
household and culinary accomplishments, either, 
and she can broil a jack snipe, bake a mallard 
or plank a bass as grandly as the most artistic 
chef that ever came over from that dear old 
Paris. 
“Well, one day last spring, late in March, we 
went out on the Platte for a few days with the 
ducks. We reached our shack on the turbid old 
stream all right, and found everything as we had 
left it the previous November. We pulled and 
hauled the -boat through the willows, and finally 
got her afloat, with crew and cargo about as fol¬ 
lows: In the bow of the boat two sacks of 
decoys, then two shell sacks, next two guns, 
next wife, next dog, and lastly your humble 
servant,' with barely standing room in the stern 
of the boat. The water was so shallow that I 
had to pole the boat out to deep water. The 
good ship had just reached the edge of deep 
water when the pole broke, throwing me off my 
balance. 
“Now, all hunters are agreed that if ever an 
accident occurs the dog is just where he ought 
not to be and does just what he ought not to 
do. As I said, I lost my balance, and, throwing 
my right foot back to re-establish myself, stepped 
on the dog. Of course, he did what any edu¬ 
cated dog would do under the circumstances— 
he jumped. I fell on the side of the boat. The 
boat did what any staunch duck boat would do 
under the circumstances—it dipped and filled. 1 
don’t propose further to disgrace my family by 
describing the scene that followed, or relating 
how we got out, but the dog swam ashore, sat 
on the bank, and for about an hour and a half 
watched one of the most remarkable exhibitions 
of very civil engineering, on a small but in¬ 
teresting scale, ever seen. 
“My wife was too proud a hunter to get hys¬ 
terical and would not acknowledge much, but 
I noticed that she afterward questioned me closer 
than usual as to what I would do without her. 
Honestly, I believe she thought she was going 
to drown. Our soundings showed seven feet of 
water and seventeen feet of quicksand. Old Mr. 
Murphy and his good wife, with dry flannels 
and most thoughtful care, made us both soon 
forget the shipwreck, but I noticed that during 
the balance of our stay my wife did the bulk 
of her shooting from a towhead she could reach 
in her waders. Her confidence in her liege as 
navigator had evidently diminished considerably, 
and since then she has learned to handle a boat 
as well as she can cast a frog or stop a chicken 
on the wing.” 
“WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE WILD 
PIGEONS?” 
By William C. Marsden. 
What has become of the wild pigeons which 
used to live in this country over forty years ago, 
and used to come north every spring by the hun¬ 
dreds of thousands, and remain in the north 
throughout the summer, and return south again 
in the fall only to return again the following- 
spring? 
This is the question that many have asked, 
and several have undertaken to say what have 
became of them, as evidently they are gone and 
no one can positively say they have seen them 
since their last trip north, which was early in 
the spring of the year 1868 about forty years 
ago. 
The writer, William C. Mardsen, at present of 
Towanda, Pa., has seen answers based prin¬ 
cipally on opinion that they have either migrated 
to some foreign country and have left this 
country for good, or else in their annual flights 
north and south they have been driven by storms 
out in the ocean and perished, but I can give a 
belter reason than that of what has become of 
them based on facts and living witnesses, and 
having been requested by the manager of a pa¬ 
per to write out what really did become of the 
wild pigeons, I will proceed to do so. 
In the spring of the year 1868, I lived on a 
farm in Sullivan County, Pa., about nine miles 
from what is now known as Eaglesmere, and 
about three miles from the village of Forksville, 
which at that time was our nearest store and 
post office to which I frequently made trips, 
as farmers used to do. Now, adjoining Forks¬ 
ville on three sides was at that time a dense 
forest of thousands of acres, and at that time 
along the road between my farm and Forkes- 
ville a man by the name of *Isaac Rogers, who 
is still living near Forksville, owned a large 
slashing, that is, a piece of ground where the 
timber had been slashed and cut down without 
taking off the lumber and then burned over and 
seeded with grass for pasture for cattle and 
sheep, and, as I had kept a diary regularly from 
the year 1S60 and have done so up to the present 
time I can be positive about the dates I am about 
to mention, so there can be no mistake in dates. 
On the 7th day of April 1868, my diary says, 
it began snowing before daylight and continued 
all day, and at night it was a foot deep—this 
was on Tuesday. Now on this day the wild 
pigeons evidently arrived on their trip from the 
south and flew into this storm and stayed in 
this dense forest around and about the village 
of Forksville apparently waiting for the snow 
to melt as it usually did in a few days, intending 
I suppose to resume their usual nesting grounds 
in the beech woods of Bradford and Sullivan 
counties where they lived on beech nuts, which 
in those days always covered the ground in the 
spring of the year, but the pigeons were disap¬ 
pointed as the weather continued cold and the 
snow did not go off for over a week and the con¬ 
sequence was that they stayed right there and 
actually all starved to death, for I was informed 
by woodsmen that for miles and miles around 
the forest back of Forksville and toward Eagles¬ 
mere or Lewises Lake, as it was then called, the 
- ground was covered with dead pigeons. 
On Friday, the 10th, following the storm, I 
started for Forksville on business and had to 
go through or along the edge of Mr. Rogers’ 
slashing when I first noticed the pigeons. The 
slashing had grown up in places with sumack 
bushes which were covered with sumack bobs or 
bunches in which the seed was held and the 
pigeons were picking these bobs to pieces to get 
the seeds. When I saw them I returned home 
and got my shot gun and came back and shot 
about a half dozen of them, and took them home 
and my wife cooked them, and they were in fair 
condition and were good eating. The Saturday 
and Sunday following the weather continued 
cold, the snow remained, and on Sunday after¬ 
noon I took my gun along and went to the 
slashing and the pigeons were still there, and I 
shot one or two of them, and found that they 
were so poor that they were not fit to cook, 
and then I did not shoot any more. On Tues¬ 
day I went to Forksville again and the snow 
was still there, and 'there were dead pigeons lying 
around on the ground, and I saw lots of them 
too weak to fly, and again on Thursday, the 16th 
I went to Forksville and the pigeons were still 
there but they were dead, and the snow was still 
there and did not all go off until about the '20th, 
so that is what became of them. I have never 
seen one live wild pigeon since nor have I ever 
met any person who has. 
I moved on the above mentioned farm in the 
year 1858 from Philadelphia, my former home. 
Just ten years previous to the disappearance of 
the wild pigeons the nesting grounds of the 
pigeons were some six or seven miles north of 
my farm on what was know as Burnetts Ridge 
