FOUNDERS OF THE AUDUBON SOCIETY 
Dr. WILLIAM BRUETTE, Editor 
Member of Audit Bureau of Circulation 
THE OBJECT OF THIS JOURNAL WILL BE TO 
studiously promote a healthful interest in outdoor 
recreation, and a refined taste for natural objects. 
August 14, 1873. 
EMERSON HOUGH—AMERICAN 
E MERSON HOUGH is dead. A conspicuous 
figure in American Literature has passed away. 
He will be mourned by thousands who knew 
him, and by millions who have followed him page by 
page as he unfolded those vivid pictures of the land 
of the Buffalo and the Indian; the trapper, the cow¬ 
boy and the scout; and those covered wagons that 
toiled over prairie trails in the conquest of the V\ est. 
The Houghs came from Virginia, and in the van 
of the movement that swept over the land in the 40’s 
moved to Iowa. There ,on June 28, 1857, Emerson 
Hough was born. He graduated from the State 
University of Iowa and shortly afterwards began 
practising law in New Mexico. 
It was in the picturesque days of the longhorn 
steer, Billy the Kid and soft-voiced Pat Garret. The 
Colt was a more important factor than Blackstone, 
and the young attorney with Time on his hands, be¬ 
gan writing the story of the Southwest in a charming- 
series of letters to Forest and Stream, and he shortly 
afterwards joined the editorial staff with headquai- 
ters in Chicago, and a roving commission. 
The years he spent in this position he always re¬ 
ferred to as the happiest of his life. 
It enabled him to gratify his love for sport. To 
explore wild places and come in touch with nature 
and nature’s creatures, and above all to be of public 
service. 
He followed the buffalo and the elk herds through 
the Yellowstone in the dead of winter, and his timely 
articles aroused the public to the importance of their 
protection. 
He explored what is now Glazier Park and his 
name will always be identified with saving that play¬ 
ground for the people. It was Emerson Hough’s part 
in life to portray one of the great phases in American 
pioneer history and he did so well. 
To Mrs. Hough, who has been his wife, his in¬ 
spiration and his loving assistant for many years, 
a Nation’s sympathy will be extended. 
STOPPING INDIAN DANCES 
C OMMISSIONER of Indian Affairs Burke has 
issued an order forbidding ceremonial dances 
by the Pueblo Indians, except in winter. “We 
found,” he says, “that the frequency of these cere¬ 
monies, some extending a week or more, was steadily 
increasing to the evident injury of the tribe. 
The last time the Pueblo Indians were in the news, 
Commissioner Burke was among the foremost for 
the passage of a bill that would dispossess the 
Pueblos of lands that they had rightfully held for 
centuries. The plight of the Pueblos was called to 
public attention, the public conscience was aroused, 
and the scheme was defeated. 
Now comes Commissioner Burke’s order forbidding 
ceremonial dances by the Pueblo Indians. \\ hy not 
forbid White people, the Jazz boys and the Jazz 
babies, to dance to syncopated music, Commissioner? 
Certainly the Commissioner will find people hurting 
themselves physically and economically by jazz. 
Then why not forbid it, Commissioner? 
When President Thomas Jefferson, who was a very 
able man, who did three very notable things (author 
of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute 
of Virginia for Religious Freedom and founder of 
the University of Virginia), sent Lewis and Clark to 
the Northwest, an expedition, by the by, that he 
planned, he instructed Lewis (his private secretary), 
to make observations of the native tribes, their tradi¬ 
tions, language, and everything relating to them that 
it was possible to collect. Those who have read the 
Lewis and Clark journal know how well they did 
their work. 
Three-quarters of a century after that expedition, 
the Bureau of American Ethnology was organized 
and placed under the auspices of the Smithsonian 
Institute. Their publications relating to the customs 
and habits of the American Indians north of Mexico 
would make a five-foot shelf groan, if it did not bend. 
If Commissioner Burke would read but the two 
volumes called “Handbook of American Indians, 
particularly those chapters on dance, busk and the 
like, he would see that busk was one of the most 
remarkable ceremonial institutions of the American 
Indians. 
Among the Creeks, busk began the new year, cele- 
brated by dance in August, or late in July. Each 
town celebrated busk, whenever their crops came to 
maturity. It was a period of amnesty, forgiveness, 
and absolution of crime, injury and hatred, a season 
of change of mind, symbolized in various ways. It 
lasted four days in towns of less note and eight days 
in the more important towns. It was a time to clean 
house, a sort of the modern “clean-up week”—worn- 
out things, clothes, household utensils, old food, 
everything pertaining to the old year, were placed 
in a common heap and destroyed by hre; the new 
year began with a clean house and new things. 
Everything had to be new or renewed, and calling, 
like our New Year’s day of the past, was indulged in. 
But all these traditions of the American Indians, 
that have been the custom of tribes long before 
Christopher Columbus sailed to discover the shores 
where the Indians lived, must now be done away 
with. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Burke says so. 
WAS IT A WOLF? 
C orrespondence from Lake Placid, n. y. 
(where is the farm and grave of John Brown, 
abolition martyr, of whom Union armies sang 
in the Civil War), tells of the killing of a five-foot 
wolf in the Adirondacks. Much controversy has 
been excited among sportsmen, game protectors and 
taxidermists as to whether or not the animal killed 
was a timber wolf. 
The animal was killed at Wilmington by Carl 
Lawrence. Dogs that were fox-hunting came upon 
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