IO 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Jan. 4, 1908. 
eral States. The Montana Historical Society is 
active and important. Nebraska and Kansas 
have each an energetic historical society. 
In the articles which are to follow we shall 
present to our readers a number of interesting 
original sketches made of several old forts be¬ 
tween the years 1844 and 1846. Several of these 
sketches have never before been printed They 
were made by a fur trader of the day, who in 
his note-book drew rapid pencil sketches of 
the various forts, and through one of his 
descendants they have come into the hands of 
Forest and Stream. 
New Publications. 
A RECORD OF 1849. 
speaks of the practice of the young men of 
those days of scratching their initials or names 
on any smooth faced prominent rocks, and we 
all of us recall the inscriptions of El Morro, or 
Inscription Rock in the Southwest, and on the 
surfaces of many natural monuments over the 
West. 
As was written at the time: “The finding of 
this stone was a most extraordinary happening. 
Here was a common enough fragment of rock; 
hardly a bit of gravel, for it is too large; cer¬ 
tainly not a boulder, for it is too small. In an 
idle moment, these men scratched their names 
upon it, and thoughtlessly threw it away. Later, 
some freshet on the Heart River carried along 
this and a million other similar pieces of stone, 
and heaped them up in a gravel bank, where 
this one may have lain buried for half a cen¬ 
tury. Meantime, the old fur company had 
gone out of existence; buffalo and antelope and 
Indians had been swept away; the railroad had 
come; white settlers had filled the country. 
Then followed railroad plans for a change of 
grade, the choice of this particular gravel bank 
for filling, the steam shovel, and the transfer 
of many tons of gravel from one point to an¬ 
other. In this transfer, the stone was moved, 
came to the surface and happened to catch the 
eye of some one who could read the markings 
it bore. There was but one chance in a million 
that this particular stone should reach the sur¬ 
face, or, if it reached the surface, that it would 
fall under human eye. Yet it did so, and now 
its picture goes forth to the world, carrying the 
question, ‘Who were the men who carved their 
names on this imperishable register.’ 
“Things move fast in this country. Yester¬ 
day, as it seems to some of us, we rode across 
dusty plains, here and there black with buffalo, 
in other places dotted with yellow antelope 
whose slender black horns showed like lines 
against the blue sky, as the pretty animals stood 
on some nearby knoll and watched us, or trotted 
nearer and nearer to see what manner of 
creature it was that had intruded on their feed¬ 
ing grounds.” Through the same country we 
pass to-day, on the hurrying railway train, or if 
by wagon or on horseback, we are forced to 
follow the zig-zag roads which by half-mile 
rectangles follow the lines of the quarter sec¬ 
tions. Buffalo and antelope no longer meet 
the eye, but instead we see houses and barns 
and stacks, and fields in which feed heavy cattle, 
followed by rooting hogs. The sparse human 
population of those days has been swept away 
with the enormously abundant brute life. 
Trapper and Indian and United States soldier 
have moved onward; out of existence, to a reser¬ 
vation or to the distant islands of the Pacific. 
The modern resident knows no more about the 
conditions which prevailed before the settle¬ 
ment of the country than does the average resi¬ 
dent of Chicago or New York. 
Scattered about over the country in those old 
times were the first outposts thrown out by 
civilization—the trading posts—all of which 
have passed away. The people who used to in¬ 
habit these old posts by whose energy they were 
erected, by whose thought and laborious 
vigilance they were made successful, or through 
whose slackness and carelessness they failed, 
are dead now. It is hard to find records of 
these posts or of their situation except in the 
old books of travelers or in a few modern and 
most useful volumes, such as those which have 
been brought together by the genius and in¬ 
dustry of the late Dr. Coues, and of Col. 
Chittenden. For the most part these old forts 
are without visible monuments. 
Years ago the Forest and Stream urged the 
importance of marking the historic sites of the 
West by appropriate monuments, and in a few 
cases this has been done. Many of the newer 
States have historical societies which have done 
and are doing most useful work in collecting 
facts bearing on early settlement of their sev- 
Animal Artisans; and Other Studies of 
Beasts and Birds. By C. J. Cornish, M.A., 
F.Z.S., with a prefatory memoir by his 
widow. Illustrated, 274 pages. London and 
New York, Longmans, Green & Co. $2.50. 
This is a collection of the author’s contribu¬ 
tions to various English periodicals. His nature 
studies are peculiarly pleasing, shorn as they 
are of improbability and told with the earnest¬ 
ness born of long observation. One of his chap¬ 
ters deals with the animal life on both sides of 
railway tracks and the changes wrought by rea¬ 
son of travel on the steel rails. One of his anec¬ 
dotes relates to a sacred Brahmini bull that op¬ 
posed the passage of an engine on a new rail¬ 
way in India. The sacred bull, however, made 
but a poor showing against the iron horse, and 
when he was left dead on the field, the railway 
officials were fearful as to the effect of the in¬ 
cident on the Brahmins. They, however, decor¬ 
ated the engine with flowers and made offerings 
to it, as being the stronger divinity. 
In another place he relates how annoying were 
the depredations of wild monkeys, which boarded 
passing freight trains and threw off large num¬ 
bers of the sugar canes with which the open 
cars were loaded, then sprang to the ground and 
devoured the morsels, which may have seemed 
all the sweeter, procured, as they were, at some 
risk. He relates how wolves frequent the rail¬ 
way tracks in winter and follow them in search 
of bones and bits of meat thrown out. Foxes 
search for the bodies of birds killed by the tele¬ 
graph wires, and crows and rooks catch young 
frogs which, bred in nearby ditches, persist in 
their attempts to cross the rails until they are 
snatched up by their winged enemies. 
Mr. Cornish devotes chapters to the migra- j 
tion of animals; to those that in a sense con¬ 
struct roads or paths; to those that have been ; 
instrumental in changing the characteristics of 
wild and domestic landscapes. In one place he 
says: 
“As the cattle of the New Forest and the 
rabbits on the downs have dwarfed and sweet¬ 
ened the herbage, so the vast herds of game on 
the African veldt would in past ages have turned 
that fertile region into a grassy lawn were it 
not for the unfortunate cessation of almost all 
rain in the three summer months. During this 
time the surface becomes so arid that the tread 
of beasts instead of compacting it, helps to dis¬ 
integrate it and destroy the surface grass, anc 
thus the veldt never becomes turf.” 
Mr. Cornish’s versatility is remarkable and hi: 
knowledge of natural history, his logic and hi: 
philosophy combine to make of the volume any 
thing but dry reading. 
