May 12, 1906.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 

believe you are an Indian, even if your skin is 
white. Now, I want to be white, to live like 
white people, and I’m just going to make you 
do so, too. Do you hear? You must quit these 
Indian ways.” 
In June more than a foot of snow fell upon 
our fields of growing things, and when it 
melted, there came a frost and froze everything. 
Berry cursed loud and frequently. In July and 
August we tried to put up some hay, but rain 
spoiled it as fast as it was cut. In the fall we 
had no grain to thresh, no potatoes nor turnips, 
not even cabbage to put into our big root house. 
After the fall branding, we found that we had 
an increase in our cattle of only fifteen per cent. 
The wolves were accountable for the additional 
forty-five per cent we should have had.. ‘This 
here ranching and cattle raising,’ said Berry, 
“isn’t what it’s cracked up to. be. Let’s sell out 
and get back into the trade. There’s more fun 
and excitement in that anyhow.” 
Of course I agreed to that, and he went into 
Benton to find a buyer for the place. He found 
one, but the man would not make the deal until 
spring, so we put in another winter there, which 
was also a happy one for some of us—for Nat- 
ah’-ki and I, at least. Ah, me! why shouldn’t 
we have been happy? We were young, we loved 
each other; nothing else mattered. 
WaLTER B. ANDERSON... 
[TO BE CONTINUED. | 
A New Found Land of Promise. 
WITHIN the past year there has been organized 
among the mountaineers of western North 
Carolina a sportsmen’s club that has accom- 
plished more, with small means and no previous 
experience, than any other club that I ever heard 
of. Starting without a penny of capital, in a 
country where game protection has always been 
a farce, and urged by no money-making motives, 
but only by pure sportsmanship and concern 
for the future, this club has already secured 
exclusive hunting and fishing privileges over a 
greater area of virgin wilderness than is con- 
trolled by any other club in the United States, 
so far as I know. In return for these con- 
cessions it has obligated itself strictly to enforce 
the game laws, to restock grounds and waters 
needing it, and to protect the forests from fire. 
The tracts now held in lease by this club com- 
prise as nearly as may be, 250,000 acres, or about 
400 square miles, mostly primeval forest, in- 
cluding about 1,000 miles of trout streams, and 
some 200 miles of bass waters. 
As no account of this club and its territory 
has yet appeared in print, and as the story of 
what it has achieved, and how it did it, is inter- 
esting, I ask space for a brief recital. 
To go back to the beginning. In November, 
1904, when I packed my little outfit and moved 
up into the high Smokies, near the Tennessee 
line, the first man that I got acquainted with 
was Granville Calhoun, of Medlin. Granville 
is a native mountaineer; but one who has 
traveled a little, read a good deal, and thought 
a whole lot. He is a man of marked natural 
ability, and a persistent hustler. How he came 
by this latter trait, which is by no means in- 
digenous to the mountains thereabouts, is one 
of those things that are spoken of in the 
philosophy of Lord Dundreary; but, anyway, he 
has it with a vengeance. For example: 
I talked with him about the project—then 
seemingly asphyxiated in Washington—of a 
national forest reserve in the Southern Ap- 
palachians. He was interested, heartily in favor 
of it, and could not see why Congress did not 
go to work and push the thing through, be- 
fore it was everlastingly too late. I.told him 
that Congress would do it if the southern people 
demanded it, but that no legislators would 
listen to a mere handful of enthusiasts. The 
whole South must wake up. As the South at 
large did not bother its head with the matter, 
it seemed to me that the project, admirable as 
it was, could not succeed against the powerful 
commercial interests that were sworn to strangle 
it. “So,” I said, ‘you will soon see the day 
when hunting and fishing in these mountains 
have played out forever. On the grounds where 
you now hunt bear and turkey, your sons will 
hunt all day for a single squirrel, or fish all 
day and never get a bite.” 
Granville did not say much, but he did a lot 
of thinking. The danger, in his Opinion, was not 
so much from deforesting as from the utter 
improvidence of the native hunters and fisher- 
men, on both sides of the mountains, who defied 
all game laws, ran deer with hounds, hunted at 
all seasons, fished merely for count in the moun- 
tain trout streams, 
In this view he was,.no doubt, correct. But 
how to stop the slaughter? Who could educate 
a shiftless people who knew no law but that of 
time-honored custom and their own desires? 
Granville merely remarked that, “It ought to 
be stopped; and it shall be stopped.” And then 
he said no more. I was one of those of whom 
it was said of old time: “O ye of little faith!” 
Some months later Calhoun astonished me by 
showing his first trump. He had secured from 
the Ritter Lumber Co. an agreement to grant 
exclusive hunting and fishing privileges over its 
60,000 acres, for a period of ten years, to an 
incorporated club that would obligate _ itself 
to keep a warden on the property and enforce 
the game laws without fear or favor. Mark 
you! this concession had been won, single- 
handed, by a man who kept a little mountain 
store, seventeen miles back from the railroad; 
in a settlement so primitive that some of his 
neighbors have never to this day seen a loco- 
motive, a telephone, a sewing machine, a well, 
a cook-stove,.a starched shirt, or a corset. 
Even his club was not yet formed. 
Granville went to Waynesville, sought out 
some business men who were ardent sportsmen, 
and infected them with his own enthusiasm. 
He came back home, crossed the Smokies afoot, 
went down to Townsend on the Tennessee side, 
presented the case in his plain, honest way, to 
the head men of the Little River Lumber Co., 
and came back with concessions to another 
vast tract, in his pocket. Meantime his associ- 
ates in Waynesville had got to work. They drew 
up a charter and a constitution, incorporated 
the Appalachian Hunting and Fishing Club, put 
their plans before other big owners of timber 
land, and added another hundred thousand acres, 
or more, to the club’s backyard. And so the 
thing that any outsider -would have sworn to 
be a pipe-dream became a fait accompli, a thing 
actually done—done without a cent of capital, 
without a line of advertisement, without a 
particle of State or Federal aid—done by sheer 
force of character and plain, straightforward 
talk. 
I have not yet: seen a plat showing the club’s 
boundaries. Indeed a considerable part of its 
territory, particularly that lying between Cling- 
man Dome and the Balsam Mountains, is so 
wild and rugged that few white men have ever 
been over it. Undoubtedly there are many 
square miles of that savage wilderness that no 
human foot has ever trod, unless in some long- 
forgotten epoch before there was laurel and 
rhododendron on those mighty shoulders of the 
Smokies. It was somewhere in this fastness 
that the Eastern Cherokees succeeded in elud- 
ing the United States Army, which, in 1838, 
drove the great majority of the Cherokee nation 
westward, at the point. of the bayonet. About 
a thousand descendants of those who stuck it 
out in the high Smokies now live on their own 
lands in the valleys of the Okona Lufty, just 
south of the main divide and adjoining the club’s 
preserve. 
In general, the club’s grounds Poin on the 
west, at the Little Tennessee River, cover both 
the Carolina and the Tennessee slopes wherever 
there is virgin forest, and so on eastward to 
the Balsam Mountains, then down the Balsams, 
in more or less contiguous tracts, to the great 
-preserve of the Sapphire country (Toxaway, in. 
and dynamited the rivers. - 
Transylvania county), and also eastward in the 
Catalooshee Mountains to the similarly pro- 
tected Vanderbilt estate. 
The section of this region with which I am 
personally familiar is that of the Great Smokies 
from Thunderhead to Clingman Dome, which 
is a good bear and wildcat range, and in which 
formerly abounded both deer and turkeys. The 
deer and turkeys are now scarce in that section, 
but only because they have been “hogged out.” 
With a few years of protection they would 
swarm there again, for the range and feeding 
grounds are ideal. As for trout, a native and 
his little boy (the latter not fishing, but only 
gathering ‘“‘stick-bait,” which is the larva of 
the caddis-fly) caught over two hundred brook 
trout one day last summer, within three miles 
of home; but they counted fingerlings, as every- 
body has always done in that land where “there 
is no law beyond John Proctor’s house.” Those 
streams have never been stocked; but they soon 
will be, and there will be a law, enforced to the 
letter, beyond everybody’s house. The State 
cannot do it, but the club’s resident wardens 
can, and will, for they are a braw lot, and to the 
manor born. 
The policy of the club will be generous to- 
ward the native mountaineers, not interfering 
with their hunting and fishing so long as there 
is no hoggishness. nor clandestine work; but, 
as for these latter depredations, “we will spare 
no trouble nor expense,” said one of the officers 
to me, “to arrest every offender and push him 
to the limit; and if the first culprit eee out to 
be my own brother, into jail he pops!’ 
It would take many pages of this journal 
adequately to describe the superb wilderness that 
this club now controls. In brief, it is covered by 
the finest hardwood forest, and mixed forest, 
that is now left standing in the United States. 
It includes many of the highest mountains east 
of the Rockies. In western North Carolina 
there are 21 peaks higher than Mt. Washington, 
46 peaks and 41 miles of dividing ridges that 
rise above 6000 feet, 288 peaks and 300 miles 
of divide that are above 5,000 feet. (By con- 
trast, in the States north of Virginia and east 
of the Black Hills, there is but one peak, Mt. 
Washington, that reaches 6,000 feet, and only 
15 others that exceed 5,000 feet; the highest 
point in Pennsylvania is only 2,684 feet above 
sea level, the highest in Maine is 5,300, in New 
York 5,344; Ben Nevis, the highest mountain 
in Great Britain, is only "4,406; and the Brocken, 
highest of the Hartz, is 3,747. The apparent 
height of peaks in the Smokies and Balsams 
compares favorably with that of most peaks in 
_the Rockies, for our southern mountains rise 
from low plains, instead of from high table- 
lands.) In the southern mountains and valleys 
is the richest variety of vegetation to be found 
anywhere in the temperate zones, the flora of 
Canada here fringing on that of the southern 
lowlands. The waters are crystal pure. The 
summer nights call for blankets. The winters 
are short. There are no mosquitoes nor black 
flies, and hardly any ticks or chiggres. 
This region is within easy reach of the whole 
East and South; but what strikes me most about 
its location, is its nearness to the teeming 
Central West, which to-day needs an outdoor 
sanitarium worse than any other section of our 
country. I speak feelingly on this topic, for it 
is only two years ago that I found myself in 
the Central West, marooned, so to speak, by an 
infirmity for which there was no cure but the 
wilderness, Then, when I spread the map, I 
found that this vast section, the Old West, has 
not one solitary patch of wilderness left! 
Do eastern people realize that New York and 
Boston are closer to the wilderness, much 
closer, than are Indianapolis and Des Moines? 
And, as for semi-wild land, do they know that 
within 60 miles of Manhattan there is a Pennsyl- 
vania county (Pike) that is more desolate and 
thinly inhabited than any similar area from 
Pittsburg to Kansas City and from Minneapolis 
to St. Louis? I own that such facts as these, 
when I had dug them out, amazed me, although 
half my life has been spent beyond the Mis- 
sissippi. 
Consider, for a moment! Between the Alle- 
