20 
FOREST AND STREAM 
FISH OF A DOZEN NAMES 
WITH A FEW OBSERVATIONS AND INSTRUCTIONS 
ABOUT THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES 
By Carl Schurz Shafer. 
A LITTLE matter of one hundred and 
forty odd years ago—or, to be more 
exact, about the time General Bur- 
goyne, Sir John Johnson, Walter Butler 
and numerous others of a like kidney were 
actively engaging the personal attention of 
General Phillip Schuyler, General Daniel 
Morgan, Mr. Tim Murphy, Mr. Dave Eller- 
son, Old Man Stoner and his two strap¬ 
ping sons, as well as a few others Mr. 
Robert Chambers has made famous, or 
rather, who by their revolutionary activi¬ 
ties helped to make Mr. Robert Chambers 
famous as a delineator of events transpir¬ 
ing in those turbulent times when good 
men and true wore buckskins and red¬ 
skins had given up Saratoga vichy for the 
Dutchman’s more exhilarating schnapps 
and good red New England rum—a cer¬ 
tain elderly gentleman residing near the 
noble Hudson in the vicinity of Stillwater, 
suddenly found himself an object of 
suspicion. 
There was nothing uncommon about 
that. Everybody was more or less sus¬ 
picious of someDOdy else in those piping 
times of trouble when Uncle Sam was 
being ushered into existence. 
Being a frontiersman of long experience 
he held the popular view of the Indian 
question and carried on quite an extensive 
business in the way of bartering large, 
smoothly minted lead slugs for fresh 
Indian scalps, but being a conscientious 
man of very decided opinions who always 
drew a bead before he touched the trigger, 
he could not bring himself to the indis¬ 
criminate shooting of white men in battle, 
even for the love of his country, as a 
large body of the enemy, which ever way 
he chose to cast his fortunes, was com¬ 
posed of former friends and neighbors. 
So, after much quiet deliberation he de¬ 
cided to remain neutral, and, strange as 
it may have seemed to him, he quickly 
found that the territory bounded on the 
south by Barren Island and on the north 
by Crown Point was not what might be 
called a healthy residential section for 
non-partisans. 
What did he do about it? Exactly what 
any sensible man with his views on the 
subject would have done in those days. He 
wrapped up a package of pepper and salt, 
tied in his blankets a few essentials, to¬ 
gether with such spare powder and ball 
as he could obtain, and tossing old Get-em- 
every-time over his shoulder, disappeared 
into the western forest. 
A hundred miles more or less of travel¬ 
ing brought him to the shores of a beauti¬ 
ful lake in the heart of a virgin wilder¬ 
ness. Game and fish were abundant. There 
was not a settler in the neighborhood and 
when he felt inclined to break the mo¬ 
notony of a solitary existence with a little 
real excitement he could drop over to the 
Canadian trail and bag a Seneca, a Mo¬ 
hawk or an Erie almost any time, day or 
night; so what more could a peace-loving 
forest ranger ask in the way of a place 
to live! Selecting a cave on the side of 
a hill he became the first white settler of 
Otsego Lake. 
Peace found him leading the life of a 
cave man, quite oblivious to the fact that 
his strange existence was to accord him 
A—Rubber Band ^4x6 inches. 
BB—Line I % inches long. 
CC-Snell hooks, fastened into lead 
with wooden plugs. 
DD—Show wiring of snells to hold hooks 
in upright position. Very fine 
wire must be used. 
EE—Line. 
a brief paragraph in history. Probably to 
his way of thinking it was an ideal exis¬ 
tence. He fished a little, trapped a 
little, hunted a little, went to bed when 
he felt like it and arose when he was 
good and ready. So long as nothing 
troubled him but hunger and mosqui¬ 
toes he probably would not have given 
a pine tree shilling to have been accorded 
a whole chapter in history. However, fate 
does not consider human modesty when it 
dips its wings to alight. 
Shortly after the close of the Revolu¬ 
tionary War there came to the region a 
babe in arms who was destined to make 
Otsego Lake world famous. It was at 
Cooperstown, founded by his father, on 
the shores of the lake, that James Feni- 
more Cooper learned the ways of the 
Indians, the fur traders and the trappers, 
the habits of wild animals and the secrets 
of nature he knew so well. 
The neutral ranger, years after he had 
been persuaded to return to his former 
home in the Hudson Valley, became 
Natty Bumpo, the noble, true, kind-hearted 
woodsman, who has delighted thousands 
the world over, and Otsego Lake is the 
Glimmerglass of Cooper’s Leatherstocking 
Tales. 
S EVERAL generations of admirers of 
James Fenimore Cooper have made 
pilgrimages to Cooperstown to visit 
Leatherstocking Cave, where the old hermit 
lived, and to see the Glimmerglass and 
other historic points of interest. When¬ 
ever there is one among them whom 
Cooperstown particularly desires to honor, 
or a prodigal son returns, they feed him 
on crisp fried Otsego bass, fresh caught 
from the Glimmerglass, which they rightly 
reckon as fine a table fish as ever went 
over the coals in a spider. 
Some enterprising settler gave them 
their distinguishing name. Without re¬ 
gard for the true relationship of this in¬ 
teresting creature he called them Otsego 
bass, and Otsego bass they have remained 
to this day although in reality they are 
nothing more than the common Labrador 
whitefish, dwarfed in size by some peculi¬ 
arity of habitat. 
In 1822 DeWitt Clinton, a former Gov¬ 
ernor of New York State, published the 
first scientific description of the fish in an 
“Account of the Salmo Otsego or Otsego 
Basse. ’ At the time in which Clinton 
wrote the whitefishes were placed in the 
genus salmo. Therefore DeWitt Clinton 
is to be credited with the first scientific 
identification of the Otsego bass as a 
species of whitefish. 
While James Fenimore Cooper was 
busily engaged in moulding the old hermit 
into Natty Bumpo, and devising ways to 
make the red savages good, some inven¬ 
tive genius, who had grown sick and tired 
of continually catching lake trout—and 
there is still some mighty fine lake trout 
fishing to be had in Otsego Lake—was, in 
response to the clamoring of his gastro¬ 
nomic machinery, just as busily engaged 
in devising a way to catch whitefish with 
a hook and line. Tradition says that they 
both succeeded about the same time, so 
Cooperstown should be credited with giv¬ 
ing to the world two genii. 
Inasmuch as there is some eighteen 
species of whitefish floating around in the 
clear lakes of Asia, Europe and North 
America, with relatively the same habits 
and the same delicious flavor, the inven¬ 
tive genius of this unknown fisherman is 
far more important to the angling frater¬ 
nity than that displayed by Cooper in 
adding so richly to the world’s best 
literature. 
Having come into possession of an ef¬ 
fective method of taking these fish with a 
