FEB. 10, 1906.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 

A Day at Joggins. 
Up to the time of this narrative I had never 
heard of Joggins, much less knew of its location; 
it might have been a man or a country, so far as 
any information that I had was concerned; the 
gazetteers ignored it, and as for finding it on the 
map, where should one look? 
We had been spending our summer vacation 
among the trout streams of New Brunswick, 
which find their outlet into the Bay of Fundy. 
The speckléd beauties had crowded our creels al- 
most unsolicited, and the sport had palled in a 
measure, the odor of the pine forest mingled with 
the bracing salt breezes from the bay, had proved 
an elixir for “that tired feeling,’ and, like Alex- 
ander of old, we sighed for more worlds to con- 
quer. 
One day there came a rumor from somewhere, 
how I do not know, that “two days hence the 
great timber raft would be launched at Joggins. 
This was enough; I had heard of a venture of this 
kind made the previous vear of a great raft which 
had been sent out from somewhere, and which 
had met with an untimely fate, and whose bones 
were even then floating on the broad Atlantic, a 
menace to the swift ocean liners, as well as to 
slow going merchantmen, and now we were al- 
most within hailing distance of its home. 
The following day found us at the little seaport 
where we chartered two staunch boats which car- 
ried us across the arm of the bay that separates 
Joggins from civilization. 
Joggins proved to be a lumberman’s camp amid 
the great pine forest which had hitherto escaped 
the woodman’s ax; now the fell destroyer had 
set upon it and the huge trunks lying prone upon 
the ground gave evidence that its time, too, had 
come, 
With no thought how or where we should dis- 
pose of ourselves for the night, we pre-empted a 
lumberman’s shack, where a hastily improvised 
déjeuner a la fourchette satisfied our inner crav- 
ings, after which we inspected the raft, which 
was not a raft at all but a great cigar-shaped ship 
of logs, built upon ways several hundred feet 
from the shore. 
This was the conception of a New York con- 
tractor who evolved the idea of bringing the logs 
to market in their original shape. As intimated, 
the scheme had been tried the previous year, but 
during a severe storm the raft was broken in 
pieces and the logs scattered to all parts where- 
ever the currents might take them, and which 
afterward proved most dangerous derelicts. 
The present raft contained about 25,000 logs 
from ten to fifteen inches in diameter; these were 
strongly bound together by coils of wire cable 
tightly drawn by steam power, the whole making 
a cigar-shaped mass of timber about 300 feet long 
and thirty feet in diameter. 
Viewed from a distance it looked like an old 
sea monster, the Silver Lake sea serpent stranded 
upon unknown shores, but which on a closer in- 
spection resolved itself into a structure as harm- 
less as a Chinese dragon. 
How the members of our party passed the night 
will forever remain a mystery; the writer well 
remembers his experience upon the soft side of a 
pine floor in the loft of a rude shack, while below 
stairs the loggers were entertained by a wander- 
ing blind minstrel, who in some way had drifted 
hither, and whose doleful and pathetic songs in 
a minor key seemed to be more thoroughly en- 
joyed by these hardy toilers, than Faust at $4 a 
ticket at the Academy of Music. 
The morning dawned bright and clear and was 
an ideal day for a launching—the day, too, of the 
highest tide of the summer, and preparations were 
hastily completed. 
The ways had been thoroughly doped with 
grease and at 12 o’clock the last shore was cut 
away, and the huge mass began slipping toward 
the bay, first slowly, then with increasing speed 
until the ways smoked and seemed to be on fire, 
then the final plunge and the tugs lying in wait 
seized their victim and the event was over. 
The next day it was started in tow of powerful 
steamers for New York, where it eventually ar- 
rived in safety. The wind having risen during 
the afternoon the prospects for the return voy- 
age of our little party were not very encourag- 
ing, our skippers seemed to us landsmen, more 

From photo by Judge Nicholas Longworth. 
courageous than prudent, and despite our sug- 
gestions that perhaps “to-morrow would be bet- 
ter,’ decided to-make the venture. 
To be out on the Bay of Fundy in an open boat 
in a storm was not what we most desired, but it 
was: . 
Ours not to make reply, 
Ours not to reason why, 
Ours but to do— 
And take the chances, That we reached land 
safely, is evidenced by this article, and the satis- 
faction derived from the novel expedition fully 
repaid us for the hardships endured. 
It was with real regret that we broke our camp 
amid swaying pines and hemlock boughs to seek 
“fresh fields and pastures green,” which we found 
in beautiful Prince Edward Island, and along the 
quaint and historic shores of Cape Breton, where 
we lingered until a sense of duty called us from 
“refreshment to labor,” in our far away homes. 
Our summer outing had brought us a little 
nearer nature’s heart, and with a better under- 
standing of the hospitable people of the Prov- 
inces than we had hitherto possessed. 
B. M. Haraer. 
Col. Livingston’s Prairie Fire. 
OmaHA, Jan. 29.—Editor Forest and Stream: 
Clement L. Webster’s account of prairie fires 
in Iowa in the early days, printed in Forest AND 
STREAM, Jan. 27, reminds me of Col. Living- 
ston’s big fire, on the Overland Stage Route in 
fall, 1864. All summer the Cheyennes and their 
allies had been “jumping” the coaches and 
ranches in the Platte valley, and the small bodies 
of Nebraska and Iowa cavalry stationed on the 
road utterly failed to protect anything except 
the ground they stood on. The raiding-parties 
would watch behind the sand hills and bluffs 
which border the broad valley until the “pony- 
soldiers” were out of sight, and then they would 
ride out from their lurking-places, attack a 
coach, a wagon-train or a ranch and retreat to 
219 

CYPRESS TREES AT MUD LAKE, ARKANSAS, 
By courtesy of Dr. James A. Henshall. 
their villages in the wilderness south of the 
Platte. 
Col: Livingston, First Nebraska Volunteer 
Cavalry, who then commanded the troops on 
the road in the District of Nebraska, was at 
his wit’s end. The people of Colorado were 
yelling lustily about their supplies being cut 
off, California was mourning for her mails, 
which had been looted by the hostiles, and Ben. 
Holladay. was paying frequent visits to the War 
Department, to demand the removal of officers 
who could not protect his coaches. At last, 
early in the fall, Col. Livingston hit upon an 
ingenious scheme for protecting the road. He 
would fire the prairie and burn the hostiles out. 
Accordingly, in October, he ordered his troops 
to fire the grass on the first day when there 
should be a favorable wind to blow the blaze 
southward. The soldiers were stationed along 
the road in small posts and at the stage-stations 
—Craig’s, Platte Station, Plum Creek, Willow 
Island Station, Mullahla’s, Midway Station, Dan 
Smith’s Ranch, Gillman’s, Dan Trout’s, Fort 
Cottonwood (the largest post west of Kearney 
and east of Laramie), Box Elder Station, Jack 
Marrow’s place, commonly termed “Fort Mar- 
row,” Bishop’s Ranch, Fremont’s Springs, 
O’Fallon’s Bluffs Station, Elkhorn, Alkali Lake 
(nearest wood 70 miles away, buffalo-chips and 
sage used as fuel), Sand Hill Station, Diamond 
Springs, Beauvais Station (sod houses, stables 
and log stockade owned by Beauvais, an old 
Indian trader), Elbow Station, Butte Station. 
Julesburg, Colorado (also termed Fort Rankin, 
where the troops lived in pits covered with 
shelter tents; nearest wood 75 miles distant). 
I have named these stations and posts at length, 
as they have all disappeared along with the stage 
company which gave them birth and the troopers 
who guarded them. Not a trace of these old 
places can be found on a modern map. 
The troops from each station went out in 
detachments and fired the grass to the south of 
the Platte, all the way from Fort Kearney in 
Nebraska to Julesburg, Colorado—a line of fire 
