558 
FOREST AND STREAM 
May 4, 1912 
and there is no end of running water with trout 
in practically all of it. The average maximum 
temperature will not average 70 degrees, even 
for these months. 
To be sure, there are drawbacks. High up 
there is a frost almost every night. I have seen 
20 degrees in July, and there are in the park 
eight different insect plagues, besides mosquitoes. 
Some of the larger members of the stinging- 
fraternity are nearly as big as bumble bees, and 
their ministrations drive horses almost frantic. 
All day long until the latter part of August the 
wearing of netting and gloves is practically en¬ 
forced, unless one is moving rapidly. 
And the summer is so short. “The year has 
only three months,” said a soldier to me; “July, 
August and winter.” And such winter! Snow 
six feet on the level and the temperatures arctic. 
The minimum record at Fort Washakie is 56 
degrees. 
Notwithstanding the warm water, the fishing- 
in Heart Lake was excellent. The trout (black- 
spotted natives) were in fine condition, and per¬ 
haps the best-flavored I ever ran across. This 
would seem to dispose of at least one of the 
theories advanced to account for the fact that 
most of the Yellowstone trout are diseased. 
Curiously, the Heart Lake fish all have pink 
flesh. In the Snake, into which the lake empties, 
the same trout practically all have white flesh. So 
also in Shoshoni, another park lake, the trout 
{Cristovomer namaycush) all have dark mark¬ 
ings and rather a yellowish tinge to the flesh, 
and never exceed a couple or three pounds in 
weight, while the same fish in Jackson Lake, a 
few miles further down stream, are without the 
dark markings, have white flesh and attain a 
weight of more than fifteen pounds. In Jack- 
son Lake also the black-spotted natives occasion¬ 
ally reach a size of ten pounds or even more, 
while in Colorado or Montana the largest I ever 
caught weighed less than half that. No doubt 
these- differences are due to some peculiarity of 
environment, such as food supply, but that is 
merely restating the problem in another way. 
In every other Rocky Mountain lake I ever 
fished, these native trout were found pretty close 
to shore, in not over ten feet, or at most fifteen 
of water. Here in Heart Lake we had to fish 
for them with spoons in mid-lake, with a couple 
of hundred feet of line. And let me emphasize 
the exceeding usefulness of the collapsible can¬ 
vas boat. They are entire practicable, staunch 
little craft, readily assembled or knocked down, 
durable and compact, easy to pack even on a 
horse. No one contemplating a trip in the wilds, 
where there is navigable water, should fail to 
get one. The eleven-foot size, with metal ribs, 
is the best. 
The fishing, good as it was, was not what it 
should have been in a lake several miles long, 
where it is doubtful if ever before anyone had 
put a boat. Wyoming has no closed season on 
trout, and while the Snake and its tributaries 
within the park boundaries are not overfished, 
further down the river there has been too much 
fishing by far, and the park suffers in conse¬ 
quence. There is much fine water in the park 
that has scarcely a fish in it, and the visitor who 
expects to have exceptional sport with a fly 
is pretty sure to meet with disappointment. 
The truth is, that to one who has seen much 
mountain scenery, the park is a pretty tame 
place, and unless for its geysers scarcely worth 
visiting. It was a great mistake that the park’s 
southern boundary was not drawn about twenty- 
five miles further south to take in part of the 
Tetons. It is not too late yet, inaasmuch as 
there is practically no land occupied north of 
the outlet of Jackson Lake, and such an exten¬ 
sion would embrace some of the most beautiful 
scenery in the United States. 
The world is too much with us in the park. 
Whatever may be the record of the United 
States Army at the Isthmus of Panama, its suc¬ 
cess in handling the park has not been conspicu¬ 
ous. There may be several good reasons, or 
excuses, for this. For one thing, the command¬ 
ing officer, who acts as park superintendent, is 
under the jurisdiction of the Interior Depart¬ 
ment, and in his administration politics has been 
at times allowed to intrude. And the superin¬ 
tendents are men assigned from the regular army 
without special knowledge of park management, 
or of forestry, or of game preservation, and 
changes in tenure are too frequent to permit 
any incumbent to acquire the knowledge or ex¬ 
perience which he lacks. The soldiers have in 
times past destroyed the very game which it 
was their duty to protect, and they have little 
Interest in, and still less knowledge about, the 
purposes supposed to underly the park’s creation 
and maintenance. Men recruited from the cities, 
subsisting on army rations and drawing the 
scanty pay of a soldier, are not the proper per¬ 
sons to whom should be intrusted the enforce¬ 
ment of game laws. It has seemed to me that 
far better results would be achieved if the park’s 
administration were handed over to the Forest 
Bureau. And there should be an expert land¬ 
scape gardener, as well as a trained forester on 
the payroll. Some of the “improvements” are 
unsightly in the extreme. 
In the neighborhood of the hot springs and 
geysers, snow must lie very thin or vanish alto¬ 
gether in winter, and here it was that we saw 
the most frequent sign of buffalo. These are 
not the tame variety, fed every winter, but a 
remnant of the vast herds that used to range 
the Wyoming plains. Even now buffalo skulls 
and horns are still fairly plentiful in the hills 
south and east of the park. It is odd that the 
buffalo should have adapted themselves as readily 
to changed conditions, amid heavy timber and 
deep snow, as they have also done in Canada, 
where the few survivors are known as wood 
buffalo. No doubt if they persist long enough 
under these new surroundings, changes of type 
will be evolved. 
One day we saw an elk standing close to a 
geyser when it made its play. The feeding ani¬ 
mal never raised its head nor betrayed by any 
sign that it heard the roar. The truth is, as I 
have often observed, it is not noise itself that 
alarms wild creatures so much as unwonted or 
unexplained or incongruous sounds, or those 
known to portend evil. 
When a herd of elk are feeding through the 
timber, sticks snap frequently and in every direc¬ 
tion, without causing the slightest alarm, and in 
watching or following them I have very little 
fear of a stampede caused by my treading on 
a twig. But a succession of such sounds, com¬ 
ing from the same spot, or an unwonted sound 
like the click of a heel on a stone, are not ex¬ 
pected, .will always excite suspicion, and if not 
explained, alarm. ' 
One evening as I was returning to my camp 
near the Hoback, leading my horse, with half 
an elk on him, I passed close to a bunch of elk, 
feeding up from water to the top Of the ridge, 
as is their custom. They did not see me, nor 
did a couple of blacktail bucks feeding nearby. 
The latter with their heads down heard the 
clatter which my horse and I were making in 
the loose rock, but not until we got almost on 
top of them did they distinguish our noises from 
those made by the elk. And not even then did 
they accept the situation and get to cover until 
their eyes had carefully confirmed the evidence 
of their ears. 
On the other hand, I have seen a bunch of 
elk, even when bedded for the night upon the 
snow, manifest acute alarm on hearing a gunshot 
so distant as to be the merest pinprick of s.bund 
through the stillness. 
There is something queer about a wild ani¬ 
mal’s senses. While it was still dark of a morn¬ 
ing, I have walked right among a herd of feed¬ 
ing elk, without causing them to run, though of 
course they showed considerable uneasiness. A 
friend of mine, an old-time trapper in Wyoming, 
once rode straight through the middle of a 
bunch of bedded elk late at night, and they did 
not bother even to get up. Baillie-Grohman once 
wrote of a similar experience he had with 
chamois one very foggy day high up in the Alps. 
Most of our wild creatures seem to yield 
readily to the pressure of advancing civilization, 
though it is of course too early to say whether 
all can manage to survive ^n a new environment. 
Last summer I saw the western meadowlark 
at an elevation of 8,500 feet, and the sage grouse 
even higher. Late in November, when the snow 
was deep and the weather bitter, I frequently 
ran across the blue grouse at an altitude of 
over 9,000 feet on the top of some cold high 
ridge, subsisting entirely on the needles of the 
pinon. With all the birds, I think it is anything 
to get away from the coyote, which has prob¬ 
ably done more to exterminate the fauna of 
the Rockies than all other causes combined. 
Even the fish change their habits. In Sho¬ 
shoni Lake the only food for namaycush is a 
minute species of fresh water shrimp, about as 
large as a small housed}'. And on this trip I 
saw these lake trout rising readily to suck in 
insects on the surface. I tried them with arti¬ 
ficial flies, but they had not advanced as far 
as that. 
Clark’s crow, when hard put to it at the end 
of the season, will store scraps stolen from 
camp, evidently in anticipation of winter and in 
imitation of his cousin the camp-robber jay. 
Fish also learn the aspect and danger of cer¬ 
tain kinds of artificial bait. When the whirling 
spinner was first patented in the Eastern waters 
I used then to fish, the pickerel and bass fairly 
cried for it, but after a little it became little, if 
any, more effective than the old brass and copper 
spoons. And I repeated this experience more re¬ 
cently in several Rocky Mountain lakes fishing 
for trout with this same spoon. The greatest 
success I ever had with the black-spotted trout 
of the Rockies was with a royal coachman fly, 
yet that same fly in these same waters is to-day 
almost worthless. 
Heart Lake is not shaped at all like the organ 
after which it was apparently named. As a 
matter of fact its real name is Hart, derived 
from a trapper who made this region his head¬ 
quarters in the early part of the last century. 
