Library of Congress Trouting on the Brule River ... TROUTING ON THE BRULÉ RIVER, OR SUMMER-WAYFARING IN THE NORTHERN WILDERNESS. BY # JOHN LYLE KING. “The innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only Anglers enjoy to the utmost.”— Bulwer Lytton. NEW YORK: ORANGE JUDD COMPANY. 1880. # F572 .N8K5 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, By John Lyle King, In the office of the Librarian, at Washington. 1-5920 Stereotyped. Printed and Bound BY The Chicago Legal New Company. iii PREFATORY AND PERSONAL. The exhaustion that comes of the inordinate and exacting frets and activities of business, the languor and inertia of summer fervors, the ennui and satiety that follow the dissipations of social life, may find in the great wilderness retreats a grateful reprieve and a speedy reparation. When the haunts of game in the woods and the lairs of fish in the streams incite the passion for sport to couple itself with the quest and yearning for rest and vitalization, the wayfarer's pathway in the wilderness becomes a pilgrimage through abounding scenes of diversion and into a realm of fascination. The restraints and stress Trouting on the Brule River ... http://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbum.15921 Library of Congress of civilization and the city, for the time, are exchanged for exhilarating freedom and simplicity of nature. The respited sportsman, with only the rod or gun as the sceptre of his commanding will throughout the rude domain, gratifies himself and luxuriates alike in the footsteps of the advance and in the repose of the halt. He realizes in a fulness of meaning gained from happy experience, that, indeed, “there is a pleasure in the pathless woods.” The wilderness of North-West are free, vast franchises of gunning and fishing. The many rivers which vein these immense tracts with running iv waters, and the numberless lakes in recesses of the woods, are inexhaustible commons of piscary, of whose affluent stores whosoever will, may, without let, partake. For an excursion, and on a vacation furlough, to one of these streams noted for trout, three of the Chicago lawyers in August joined in a party. These were James L. High , author of the works on “Injunctions,” “Extraordinary Legal Remedies,” etc., Josiah H. Bissell, compiler of “Bissell's Reports,” and the writer, together with Lorenzo Pratt, a Chicago capitalist. The party sought recreation and mental rest. Other members of the bar had journeyed some of those regions, in their vacation freedom, on a tour of rest, sport and pleasure. They had found and reported a full and rare fruition of enjoyment, in their wanderings to and on the Brulé river. A like expedition, with identical purposes, following the path of Cook, Campbell, Judge Blodgett and others, promises equal and similar delight and good. It was a journey and sojourn in open air, made up of canoeing, tenting, portaging and roughing generally, with the incidents of shooting and fishing. The outfit and supplies were provided in Chicago, and sent by the Chicago & North- Western railway to Section Eighteen, a station of that road eighteen miles beyond Marinette, Wisconsin. The other accessories—a team for the land route and the guides —were engaged in advance at Marinette, and v met the party at Section Eighteen. The canoes were to be procured at Badwater, on the Menominee, where the water travel began. Trouting on the Brule River ... http://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbum.15921 Library of Congress The guides were Indians. One of them was George Kaquotash, a full-blooded Menominee, muscular, lithe, active—a veteran of the woods and of the Brulé. The other was Mitchell Thebault, mostly Menominee, with a French infusion of blood and name, with his complexion paled to a hue a little lighter than the usual Indian copper tint. Though with the manners and habits, in some degree, of civilized life, they were essentially, in nature and native dialect, Indians. In another August a second excursion to the Brulé river was made by the same Chicago party, excepting that Mr. Franklin Denison, also a Chicago lawyer, took the place of Mr. Bissell. This volume is an intinerary or narrative of these excursions. It is made up and revised from diaries whose notes were jotted down on the way. They were kept chiefly to vary or to fill up and divert idle intervals, or otherwise vacant leisures. The notes were off-hand, and took the impromptu and form and pressure of the body of the time when pencilled. It was sought to retain and reflect to the writer, perchance to his fellow tourists, images of summer revels that might, in the light of memory, re-appear and vivify into their original charm and freshness. Their present vi publicity is more at the instance of others than at that of the writer himself. They are now given to the press, in the trust that they may, in this form, prove acceptable to those who have sympathy with and interest in matters of forest and stream. Their merit is in their minute and faithful portrayal of the real life and adventures of real persons in pursuit of holiday pastime and respite. In the realism of delineation they may be serviceable, and so justify their reproduction, as faithfully revealing the really “jolly good time” that may easily, surely, inexpensively and quietly be had by any reasonable party exchanging briefly the toils of business for a temporary business of pleasure, and that in distance and with appliances within ordinary reach and possibility. They may show how that business sped prosperously while the party was gliding in canoes, footing portages, dwelling in tents, sleeping balmily on hemlock couches, eating with eager appetite, and withal affiliating into a genial free-and-easy fraternity, knowing Trouting on the Brule River ... http://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbum.15921 Library of Congress and having only that which was mirth-inspiring, health-helping, reposeful and invigorating. Of course, this is simply narration. And while angling was the main diversion and is the chief theme of its pages, the work is not that of an expert or proficient angler, who can speak by the card, or from a professed sportsman's point of view, or of one who can claim to discourse instructively vii on angling itself, or generally on its delights. Nor does it aim to be of the nature of guide book or gazeteer. “Though dear to him the angler's silent trade, Through peaceful scenes in peacefulness pursued,” the writer's experiences with the rod have been infrequent and not varied, and were those of an amateur and not of an adept. While he cannot discourse generally or didactically on this sport or the pleasure of angling, yet in portraying the real lights and shadows of a brief period with the rod, and somewhat with the gun, and the content, the cheer, the fruitions and happenings of a particular party of anglers while roughing it in the open air, he may indicate and illustrate some of that charm with which angling has always enamored so many persons of various pursuits, temperament and genius, and which has made it a devotion and practice of their lives. Probably the secret of the infatuation of this amusement to most or many of the brothers of the angle, is to be found in the close and quiet communion and sympathy with nature essential to the pursuit of the spoil of the water. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton avows that he can palliate the wanton destructiveness of angling by a consciousness that its pleasures have not come from the success of the treachery practised towards a poor little fish, “but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance viii of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost.” Even that Dryasdust book-worm, the recluse of Oxford, Burton, has perceived a hint of this, and tells us in the “Anatomy of Melancholy” of angling, “it is still and quiet; and if so be the angler catch no fish, yet he hath a wholesome walk to the brook, pleasant shade by the sweet silver streams; he hath good air sweet smells of fine fresh meadow flowers; he hears the melodious harmony of birds; he sees the swans, herons, ducks, waterhorns, coots, etc., and many other fowl, with their brood, which he thinketh better than the noise of hounds or blast of horns, and all the sport that they can make.” Trouting on the Brule River ... http://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbum.15921 Library of Congress It needs little experience on the stream to realize that this sympathy and converse with nature in her myriad forms of air, sky, woods, water, and the teeming life of bird and brute and fish, are a great part of the boundless delight of the “angler's silent trade.” These mysterious influences and attractions of nature impart to the use of the rod a refinement and fascination which elevate it above the rank of a merely gross, illiberal, and vulgar sport. This is verified in the instances of many noted persons who while swaying masterly sceptres over the minds of men, have yet also lovingly plied angling-rods in the secluded and quiet streams. The recall of a few names will illustrate how ix even genius has ennobled and accredited the silent and contemplative recreation. Many men of fame, even equal to Dr. Johnson's, have been eminent as anglers, and have redeemed and disculpated angling from his surly and foolish sneer. Gay, author of the “Fables,” and of the “Beggar's Opera,” must have fondly haunted and fished the stream and learned, while swaying a rod, what he has sung in his “Rural Sports.” Who can say how much of the prelate and moralist Paley's speculations were meditated when he was seclusively and dearly trouting the streams of Cambridgeshire? He was, as Christopher North says, “a pellucid writer, and bloody angler —a ten-dozen-trout-a-day man.” We know that Sir Humphrey Davy worshipfully frequented trout-pools and salmon- streams with boyish delight, and captured their glittering spoil with rapture akin to that of a successful experiment in his laboratory, and that he prided himself, perhaps, more on his “Salmonia, or Days of Fly-fishing,” than he did on his invention of the safety-lamp.