Memoirs of Travel, Sport and Natural History/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
NORTH AMERICA, 1895
The principal object of my third trip to the United States was to visit and report upon the assets of the Canadian Agricultural Company, in which a friend of mine was heavily interested, but which he was unable to inspect in person.
I left England at the end of April, 1895, and passed through New York to Montreal without stopping. A sudden burst of heat, such as often occurs in Canada in spring, had brought out the foliage with great rapidity and the journey through New England to Montreal was a very pleasant one. I had to enquire as to the rates and facilities which the Canadian Pacific Company afforded for conveying live-stock to the coast for shipment, and to transact other business. When this was done I went on to Ottawa to see the Government Experimental Farm, which was ably managed by the late Mr. Saunders, who gave me some useful information as to the prospects of agriculture in Alberta, where most of the Canadian Agricultural Company's farms were situated. This company was formed in England when the Canadian Pacific Railway was first opened to take up land for agriculture and stock-breeding in the Far West; and after various vicissitudes, caused by reckless extravagance, mismanagement, and the conditions of the soil and climate, had succeeded after eight or nine years in getting through a very large capital and into debt as well. In May, 1895, there was a mortgage on the stock to the extent of 80,000 dollars which would be foreclosed in a month or so if the money was not found to pay it off. On paper it looked as if the value of the property was immensely in excess of the mortgage, and what I had to do was to form an opinion and report on the actual value of the stock and plant. There was no time to be lost; so I started next day for Swift Current, a station west of Regina, and arrived there about two days later. This was the principal sheep station belonging to the company, and was one of eleven blocks of land of 10,000 acres each, which had been taken up by the company at various points on the line between Brandon and Calgary. I was met at the depot by a fine old Northumbrian, Mr. Rutherford, who was manager of the station and perhaps at that time the man who knew most about sheep in the whole of the North-West Territory. He drove me to his house and arranged to show me as much as possible of the land and stock. Most of the flock, which consisted of about 8,000 ewes and about 12,000 hoggs and wethers, were descended from inferior ewes of merino type imported from Montana and crossed with English rams of many breeds, amongst which Cheviots and Cotswolds seemed to have been the most successful. The first cross was in most cases a very fair mutton sheep, but many of the second crosses were of a very mongrel character. The extreme severity of the winter climate entailed the necessity of providing fodder at times when the snow was too deep to allow the sheep to get at the grass, and the number of coyotes and wolves made it necessary to have the sheep folded at night in wooden sheds which had been erected at convenient spots. A good deal of land had been ploughed at various times and sown with wheat and oats, but of late years recurrent droughts had made the growing of grain too uncertain, and oats for fodder only were now being grown on a very limited area. In the afternoon Rutherford drove me in his buggy round the 10,000 acre enclosure which had been fenced in by the company, but the greater part of the sheep were pastured on open land belonging to Government which lay behind it at some distance off, and a great part of the hay was also made on land outside the fence, the 10,000 acres being insufficient to support anything like the number of sheep kept there.
I found that the shepherds usually had charge of about 2,000 sheep each, which they watched by day and penned by night, sleeping three or four together in huts and receiving their rations from the farm. Most of them were Canadians or Americans, some English, and I found one from my own county. They were getting from thirty to forty dollars a month and their rations, and were all very anxious to know the future of the company, as they had received no wages for months in some cases and were only kept together by their confidence in Rutherford, whom they knew to be in the same boat as themselves. The lambing season was just commencing and the ewes had to be drafted out as fast as they yeaned to ensure the lambs being properly mothered. Coyotes hung about the neighbourhood and did much damage; and though the ewes were in very fair condition they did not expect to bring up more than about 80 per cent, of the lambs. At the farm was a well-built set of shearing-sheds and drafting-yards, and a lot of machinery and implements which had been brought from England and were in many cases quite unsuited to the country; I heard extraordinary stories of the way in which money had been spent. The wool seemed small in quantity and inferior in quality, and, after reckoning the heavy cost of shearing and transit to market against its low price, did not leave enough to pay the expenses of shepherding and wintering the sheep as it ought to have done. When the flock was first started there had been a fair market in British Columbia for fat sheep, though the cost of transit to the coast by the Canadian Pacific Railway was about a dollar a head; now, however, the importation of Oregon sheep to Victoria had closed this outlet, and shipments had been made to Great Britain with fair success. As, however, the sheep were not fat enough to send to England as mutton until they were two or three years old, and the cost of transit was about twelve shillings a head from Swift Current to Liverpool or London, plus the cost of feeding and insurance, I could not see how there was any sufficient margin of profit, after allowing for the various risks of the business, to make sheep-farming a tempting occupation in this country. It seemed that there was nothing to prevent other people coming in and grazing sheep on the Government land, and that if scab broke out, as was very probable, there was no sufficient law to deal with it, whilst it would be impossible to dip sheep during the severe frost, which here lasts three or four months.
After making enquiries all about from those who had been longest in the country, I found that the climate was getting steadily drier, and in consequence, hay for the winter fodder was scarcer and more expensive than at first. The losses of sheep during severe blizzards had at times been heavy, and though there was no foot-rot and the grass seemed of a very dry nourishing quality, I could not see how in this country sheep-farming on a large scale was going to compete with Australia or Argentina. The weather whilst I was in this district was dry, bracing and pleasant, with a cold wind at times, bright sun, and slight frost at night. Very little rain falls in summer, and from the observations which had been made, I found that in the last twenty months there had never been enough at once to saturate the ground after the snow melted, whilst the dry air and sun very quickly evaporate any surface moisture.
I went to one or two of the other farms of the Canadian Agricultural Company, and at one, where the hoggs were being herded, I arranged to purchase 400 ewe hoggs at two and a quarter dollars a head free on board the cars at Swift Current in July; the wool to be shorn at my cost and credited to me. This was an experiment to see how these sheep would do in England. They arrived in August in very fair condition, with a loss of only three during the long journey, and were one of the last lots of sheep which were admitted without being slaughtered. Half of them went to a friend in the Cotswold Hills and did very badly—as I think, from want of management and suitable food; the remainder, which I divided between a grass farm in Essex and Colesborne, did very well. I fatted some on roots, and I think these paid the best. Some I wintered on grass and sold fat in the following summer, and some I bred from. I do not think that, if store sheep were to be again admitted from Canada, as it is possible they may be if store sheep were dear in England, I would care to buy any which had merino blood in them, as the mutton of all these sheep retained the peculiar woolly flavour which merino mutton has, and was not liked either by my own household or by the butchers who bought it. It seems remarkable that this flavour should not be eradicated by two crosses of English blood and a grass feeding in England, but such was the case, the sheep fed on roots having least of this woolly taste.
After seeing all that was necessary at Swift Current I went on to a station called Crane Lake, which was the principal cattle and horse ranch of the Canadian Agricultural Company, but as at this season most of the cattle were on the range at some distance and could not be rounded up for inspection without much trouble, I was unable to estimate their number. I saw the English bulls, some Hereford, some Shorthorn, and some Polled Angus, which had been imported at great cost and had survived three or four winters in the country. The cross with Hereford and Polled Angus were said to be the best beef cattle, but from what I could learn the country was not so suitable for wintering as the more sheltered country near Calgary, where the most successful cattle ranches in the North-West are situated. The horses were of a very mixed type; stallions of various English breeds had been used on native mares without much judgment, and though there was a fair sale for horses of a heavy enough type for ploughing and hauling, yet the lighter, smaller and better bred horses were almost unsaleable in the North-West at this time. The fact was that the breeding of all kinds of stock had been carried on in the United States during the last fifteen years on such a large scale that the supply was everywhere in excess of the demand; which had been further diminished by the slackness of trade, the scarcity of money, and the substitution of cable-cars for horse-cars in many cities and towns during the last three or four years. At that time the export of horses to Europe had hardly begun, though a few breeders in Montana and other States of the North-West had tried to find a market for the best of their horses in England; but the cost of breaking, handling, railway-carriage and freight swallowed up most of the proceeds. Horses of the cayuse or mustang type were at this time so cheap on the Pacific Coast that I heard of a sale of 5,000 having been made to a firm at Portland, Oregon, for slaughter at five dollars apiece on the range. Whether they were really converted into corned beef or whether the story was only a Western yarn I cannot say; but I was offered my pick of the four-year-olds on a Western ranch, unbroken on the range, at forty dollars apiece, and as these were all got by English thoroughbreds they were of a superior type, of which many would have been fit for hunters in England. I have never seen a country which appears to me so suitable for breeding cavalry horses as this, and notwithstanding the prejudice that many Englishmen have against them, I have found prairie-bred horses as hardy, enduring and sound as any in the world; and if time and patience enough were given to break them and get them into condition, I believe that they would stand far more work and last longer under the hard conditions of warfare than English-bred horses.
I found that Crane Lake, which had been quite a large piece of water when the railway was made, was now, like many of the lakes and streams in the country, rapidly drying up, and I was told that some people who had settled after the opening of the railway had been forced to leave their homesteads owing to the lack of water.
After seeing all that I could at Crane Lake I went on to Calgary, where I had been two years before, and found that agriculture was not at all prosperous in the district, though those ranches which had been properly managed and looked after were still fairly prosperous. Very few of the young Englishmen who had come to this district, and often invested their capital in ranching, had succeeded; many had lost everything and had left the country in despair. Some had struggled on and, having learned by experience, were in a fair way to make a living if not a fortune. A few, mostly Canadians, were in possession of herds which were steadily increasing, and which were turning out annually a large number of good four-year-old bullocks at an average price which then was about forty dollars.
As I wanted to see for myself a few of the principal cattle and sheep ranches near Calgary before making a report on the prospects of the Canadian Agricultural Company, I hired a buggy from the livery stable of a well-known character, Johnny Hamilton, I had already made the acquaintance of this worthy at the hotel, where he and I were always the first down to breakfast, and had sympathised about the difficulty of getting that meal in Calgary at a reasonable hour. He explained to me that the general slackness, apathy and want of go which then pervaded Calgary were largely caused by the fact that the daily mail trains bound east and west both arrived in the night, and as their hours were very uncertain a number of people were in the habit of sitting up half and sometimes all the night to meet or see friends off. To this and to the fact that many people came into Calgary from their ranches oftener than was necessary, and in consequence neglected their work, he attributed the failure of so many settlers. Johnny Hamilton had driven the Cariboo coach in British Columbia during the days when gold-mining was on the boom, and told me some good Western stories in the flowery language for which Western coach-drivers are often distinguished. For five dollars a day he lent me a buggy with a pair of capital horses, and found me a driver who knew the country; and with this outfit I covered a distance of 270 miles in five days, halting two full days on the journey. Considering that this was all over prairie trails with many coulees to cross, that one of the horses was a cast troop-horse and the other only just caught up from the prairie, I thought this was very good travelling. We used to start as soon as we could in the morning, between six and seven, drive at a trot till about eleven or twelve, halt for two hours at some ranch, feed the horses and then drive another three or four hours. The country was all undulating grassy prairie with scrub-covered hills towards the mountains; in a few places land was being ploughed and sown with oats, but it seemed to be generally admitted that irrigation was necessary to ensure a good crop, and that even then the grain was liable to be spoiled by early autumn frosts except in favoured spots. The most successful and best-managed ranch that I visited was the Pekisko ranch of which Mr. Stimson had for many years been in charge. I spent two very enjoyable days under his hospitable roof and came away with the impression that he was the most capable and energetic ranchman in the district. The struggle between the great ranches which own cattle by the thousand, and the small men who have only a few which take their chance on the free range in company with those of others, seemed to be assuming a more strained character as the number of cattle increased; and the necessity of giving the calves food and shelter during their first winter was now becoming recognised. Older cattle when not too thick on the ground get through the winter with little or no loss, especially in the foothills of the mountains, but it is found that calves must have some shelter and food; wolves and coyotes were troublesome, but Mr. Stimson employed Indians to trap and poison them, and he gave a very favourable character to the Indians in this district, if you knew how to treat them. An Indian and his squaw walked into his sitting-room and squatted on the floor whilst Mrs. Stimson was giving me tea, and made themselves quite at home; and as far as I know there has never been any serious trouble with them in this district, though they no doubt occasionally steal cattle when hungry.
Up to this I had had but little opportunity of collecting, but now as a few warm days had brought some butterflies out, I began to catch a fewThe butterflies of the country round Calgary are not numerous in species, but some of them are very interesting, especially the Colias or Clouded Yellows, Fritillaries, and most of all some Satyridæ which I was very anxious to get, because I had described one of them as new in the previous year from three specimens taken near here by Mr. Woolley-Dod. When I had learnt what I wanted to know about the ranching business, I went to stay a day or two with this gentleman at a small ranch he had lately started near Calgary. I found that since my last visit he had bought a small bunch of cattle and was, in company with another Englishman, in a fair way to increase his herd, though making money in this business is a work of time, and there is at first a great deal more hard work than many of the men who try it seem to care for. In his spare time he collected lepidoptera and had discovered many new moths, especially Noctuidæ, which have been described in the United States. Œneis alberta and its near ally Œneis varuna were both abundant near his ranch, and, though they fly on the same grassy hills, are quite distinct. Another rare butterfly is abundant on these prairies from the middle to the end of May—Erebia discoidalis; it has been found also on the east side of Hudson Bay and in northern and eastern Siberia. Mr. Woolley-Dod has also taken at Moiley, a little east of Calgary, a very rare species of Œneis, Œ. Macouni, which had hitherto only been found at Nepigon on the north side of Lake Superior, though it probably occurs in other parts of western Canada. During my excursions about Calgary I saw few game birds, and the only nest I took was one of Buteo hudsonicus with four eggs, which was on a rocky pinnacle in a valley. The birds of this country are, however, so well known in comparison with the insects, that I did not think it worth while to collect them during such a short stay in the country. It was too early in the season for many flowers to be out, the most conspicuous being an anemone, which resembles the one found all over the Siberian steppes at the same season.
On returning to Calgary I determined to visit Victoria, as I wished to see what prospect there was of a future market for sheep on the coast. The mountains at this season were still very snowy, and at Laggan, where I stopped a short time to see my old companion Bean, I found a single Pieris, the only butterfly yet out. The route to the west coast by the Canadian Pacific Railway has been so often described that, beautiful as it is, I need say nothing about it. I reached Victoria on May 22nd, and found an old acquaintance, Mr. Phillipps-Wolley, who was now living there. Victoria enjoys one of the nicest and most English-like climates in North America, and as there were now a good many butterflies about, I enjoyed two or three days' collecting. I also went forty miles up the railway to see the son of a friend in England, who was learning farming here with a settler. A good many English and Canadians were farming with more or less success in Vancouver Island, but the difficulty of clearing any extent of land in such very heavily timbered country makes it a long and costly process to establish a farm. At this time, the general depression which affected all parts of the United States and Canada made prices too low to be remunerative, but I heard that the great boom which had prevailed both in Alaska and the Kootenay district during the last three years had now very much improved the position and prospects of farmers in British Columbia. In a chemist's shop in Victoria I saw the most superb pair of cariboo-horns which I have ever seen; they were said to have come from Cassiar, and had, if I recollect right, fiftyfour points which were of perfect symmetry, a circumstance not usual in reindeer or cariboo. Since that time moose-horns have been brought from Alaska far surpassing any which are found in Canada or elsewhere, but the heavy cost of carrying them from the interior has hitherto made these splendid trophies, some of which measure six feet and upwards, very expensive. It is only the extreme cost and difficulty of travelling which has hitherto kept all but a very few of the most adventurous biggame hunters out of Alaska, but, as besides moose and cariboo there are great numbers of wild sheep (Ovis Dalli) in the mountains between Cook's Inlet and the Yukon, and bears are in many places very numerous, it is probable that this will soon be a new hunting-ground for sportsmen as well as fur-traders, I found the Museum at Victoria, under the care of Mr. Fannin, making good progress, though the number of people in British Columbia who take an interest in natural history was still very small, and the insects of the northern part of it were still quite unknown,
I had no time to go up the coast, and was obliged to return to Calgary to see some sheep-farms near there before returning east. Though the grass on the rolling hills north of Calgary seemed as well or better suited for sheep than at Swift Current, and two large flocks had been established there for some years, it seemed to be the general opinion that they did not pay so well as cattle, and certainly required a good deal more attention and care than cattle do. Few people will eat mutton in this country if they can get beef, and there are very few who really understand the management of sheep. The extreme solitude of a shepherd's life and the hardships of winter make it very difficult to find trustworthy shepherds who can keep sober, and the errors of a drunken one may be very serious here in winter both to shepherd and sheep-owner. As time goes on, no doubt sheep will be kept in smaller flocks in enclosures, as part of the stock of a mixed farm; but I feel convinced that Alberta will never be the seat of a sheep-breeding industry of any great importance as compared with Australia, New Zealand or Argentina. After coining to this conclusion, and before making a report, I desired to visit Chicago, the most important market for live-stock in America, to see if there was any outlet for Canadian sheep and cattle there. A railway now connected the Canadian Pacific Railway with Chicago, and I made the journey in about forty-eight hours, passing through a great extent of very flat and uninteresting country in the States of North Dakota, Minnesota and Nebraska. The country was being rapidly settled, at any rate along the lines of railroad, but though a great many small towns which serve as local agricultural centres had sprung up, these seemed to me the least attractive part of the United States I have passed through. Though a vast number of people succeed, by dint of hard work and strict economy, in getting a bare living out of it, there is little to attract in the climate or scenery, and the life of the people seems, as far as one can judge from what one sees and hears, very devoid of social and other enjoyment. The great mixture of races which have immigrated to these north-western plains, amongst whom Scandinavians, Finns and Russians are numerous, must produce eventually a race of men very different from the inhabitants of New England, the Southern or Rocky Mountain States.
It is very hard for a stranger passing through a country as rapidly as I did to form a correct opinion as to the actual condition of the settlers; many of those you converse with are personally interested in making things appear better than they really are, and little reliance can be placed on the statements of real estate agents, railway agents or settlers themselves, when they smell a possible investor, and until you live amongst the people you can hardly tell how many there are who are fairly prosperous and out of debt. There have been a great many utter failures, mostly among people who came into the country insufficiently supplied with capital, and among those who, having capital, had not enough energy, health, industry and business ability to hold their own in the very hard struggle which every settler in a new country must go through. A great many who had these qualities were still more or less crippled by mortgages; and the position of a heavily mortgaged farmer in America is much worse in a bad season than that of an English farm tenant; because the creditor of the one is a hard man of business whose only object is to keep his debtor in a condition to pay his interest regularly and who will foreclose and sell him up without mercy if he cannot, whilst the English landlord is usually not a strict man of business, and, if he is, does not like to get the reputation of dealing hardly with his tenants, A most interesting account of the actual condition of settlers in the agricultural township of Harrison in Hall County, Nebraska, will be found in a pamphlet published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, in 1893, called The Condition of the Western Farmer, by Arthur F. Bentley. This county was selected as a fair example of the land in the State, where not influenced by the proximity of towns, and certainly presents a very unfavourable picture at the time it was written. It gives in detail the number of settlers who have settled on land purchased either from Government, from railway companies, or from settlers who wished to move, and gives minute particulars of their number, length of residence, amount of indebtedness and other facts. It shows that between 1873, when this part of the State began to be settled, to 1892, a period of twenty years, 190 persons purchased and resided in the township, of whom 106 have resold, 10 have moved, and 74 still reside; the duration of ownership has been seven years for those who have sold and twelve years for those who still own. It gives the causes of selling for the 106 as follows:
| Owing to prevalent agricultural conditions | 14 |
| Sales by those who had bought in hopes of a rise | 19 |
| Failure to improve or cultivate the land | 9 |
| Involved in other troubles | 16 |
| Died | 7 |
| To move to better farms | 16 |
| To move to cheaper farms | 7 |
| To move to towns or villages | 18 |
| 106 |
When I reached Chicago wheat was approaching, if it had not actually touched, a dollar a bushel; the Exchange at Chicago, where gambling in options is carried to a point most detrimental, as I believe, to the interest of producers and consumers everywhere, was in a state of furious excitement, and to a looker-on the operators seemed more like a crowd of madmen than the serious men of business they would like to be thought. Turning with disgust from this gambling-hell, I visited the stock-yards and found, just as I had found elsewhere, that the markets were overstocked, prices very low, and a heavy import duty imposed on Canadian sheep which had the effect (probably intended) of closing the market to Canada. I was then convinced that though the assets of the company in buildings, stock and land were no doubt still worth more than the debt on them, yet the management of such a large and complicated business with a view to ultimate profit sufficient to justify the risk would require the whole time of a very competent and trustworthy man. I therefore advised my friend not to throw good money after bad unless he was prepared to give a lot of time and wait for some years, when agricultural affairs in the Canadian North-West should be more prosperous. A new company was afterwards floated to finance the concern, but I have not heard what has been the result of it; though no doubt the great boom in mining in the Kootenay district and Alaska has since done a great deal to better the position of farmers and stock-breeders in Western Canada and British Columbia.
Having now concluded my business, I intended to finish my trip by a visit to the forests of the Southern Alleghany mountains of which I had heard much from my friend Professor Charles E. Sargent. He had recommended me to visit Asheville, North Carolina, close to which town Mr. Vanderbilt had lately purchased a large tract of forest, built himself a splendid house, and established a large nursery and garden under the direction of an accomplished professional forester, Mr. Pinchot.[1] His idea was to bring a tract of natural forest under good management, and instead of allowing it to be burnt, grazed and destroyed, in the reckless way favoured by most American owners of forest, from the State downwards, he endeavoured, by natural reproduction and protection against waste and improper felling, to bring it into a condition of permanent profit. By the time I reached Asheville, in the first week of June, the weather became excessively hot, and the change from the dry, cold and bracing climate of Alberta to a damp, tropical heat of 8o° to 90° in the shade was very trying and upset me a bit for two or three days. I found Asheville a new and rising town in a beautiful situation, but not high enough in the mountains to make it suitable for a pleasure resort, as I believe was the hope of those who were booming it. In spring or autumn it might be very charming, but the lack of decent roads and the difficulty of getting good guides and riding-horses at reasonable prices make excursions in these southern highlands still rather too arduous for the ordinary tourist.
I heard many curious stories, which no doubt must be accepted as only partially true, of the way in which Mr. Vanderbilt's attempt to found a great country estate on the model of an English one was thwarted by the settlers, whose desire to get all the profit they could out of the presence of so wealthy a man in their midst seemed curiously mixed with a democratic objection to a man who was so rich that he could afford to spend money on things they had no idea of. There was also no doubt a feeling of hostility among those who had for generations looked on the forest as a feeding-ground for their stock and hogs, as a hunting-ground free to all, and a place from which they had a prescriptive right to take whatever timber they wanted without questions being asked. It appeared that when Mr. Vanderbilt's agents had purchased as much as possible of the land in order to form a block of 30,000 to 40,000 acres, there remained a few bits occupied by whites and negroes who could not prove their titles, or who declined to sell at all; and these men, backed by local lawyers, were encouraged to make their presence as objectionable as possible to Vanderbilt, in order to force him to buy them out at exorbitant prices. Such stories are made the most of, and I cannot say how far they are true, but from what I saw of the class of people who inhabit the mountain forests of North Carolina and East Kentucky, I can well believe that they would be most difficult and even dangerous under such circumstances.
Mr. Pinchot being away, I was not able to learn so much of the workingplan of the forests in his charge as I had hoped; his assistant, however, showed me some of the forest which was nearest to a state of nature, but it did not seem to me as fine as what I saw later on near Marion. The great feature of these Alleghany forests is the great number of species of deciduous trees which are associated in them. Mr. Sargent has told me of forests in Southern Illinois where no fewer than seventy different deciduous trees grow on a square mile.[2] Oaks, magnolias, hickories, black walnut and maples, are the most valuable timber trees, but there are many others of great beauty and some utility. Except in certain parts of North-Eastern Asia such as Manchuria, Amur land and Korea—with the flora of which the Alleghany mountain forests have a great deal more affinity than, their geographical position would lead one to suppose—there is no country out of the tropics where such a wonderful variety exists, the usual feature of the forests of the north temperate zone being the presence of one or more species of trees associated in great masses of the same kind. A beech forest in Denmark or Prussia, an oak forest in Hungary or Bulgaria, or a chestnut forest in Italy, I had seen, but never a forest with such infinite variety as this, in a temperate climate. The shrubs and herbaceous plants are also very varied and beautiful; in some places Kalmia latifolia was the prevalent under-shrub, forming lovely masses of pink flowers. Cypripedium and other terrestrial orchids, Trillium, Solomon's Seal and other pretty herbaceous plants mostly known in English gardens were not so common here as they are in some more northern States. Notwithstanding the great heat, I was still too early for butterflies, which, excepting the Hesperidæ, or Skippers, were not yet abundant, and I failed to see the magnificent Argynnis diana which a month or so later is the pride of this district. I was also unable to visit the locality where that rare and very lovely little plant Shortia galacifolia grows.[3]
After three or four days at Asheville I went on by rail to a place called Marion, from whence I intended to visit the mountains known as the Blue Ridge. Marion was a primitive little forest town or village where I found a lodging in a boarding-house, and shared a meal of fried chicken, corn bread, hominy and pork, with some typically Southern boarders who were curious to know my business. I hired a buggy the next day for a thirty-five miles drive through some of the most lovely forests I have ever seen; here and there were small clearings with farms where maize and tobacco seemed to be the principal crops. In the valleys and on the hillsides alike the soil seemed excessively rich, but the slovenly and neglected state of most of the farms did not indicate much prosperity among the farmers, and in some places corn was being hoed by bare-footed and rather sickly-looking women, such as I have never seen working in the fields in other parts of the States. The people of these mountains are a very peculiar race, quite unlike the Americans of the Northern or Western States, and seem to have remained in much the same condition as when these mountains were first settled more than a century ago. The more energetic no doubt have emigrated or gone to the towns, and those who remain do not encourage strangers to settle amongst them. I was told that they will not allow negroes to come into many parts of the mountains, and have established a boundary over which no nigger dares to set his foot on pain of being shot.
About midday, after a long ascent through virgin forest over a very rough and bad road, we reached some open meadows where I caught, amongst other butterflies, a Clouded Yellow, Colias chrysotheme, which though very common in the Western and Southern States, I had not expected to find here. We came to a log house where my driver said we could get dinner, and an old man with bare feet, who was in the house, invited me to sit down in the porch and wash my hands at the pump. After a little while his son, also bare-footed and with a great half-healed scar on his forehead, came home and sat down by me without a word. The driver afterwards told me that he was the only survivor of three brothers, the others having been killed in a family feud which still went on, and of which the scar was the latest evidence. At intervals three little boys rode up on horses which they hitched to a rail; they washed their hands and sat down to wait for dinner. At last a tall gaunt woman came out and guessed that the stranger looked hungry; which he was. We all went in and sat down before a bare wooden table, on which was a great wooden dish of boiled pork and another of Indian corn mush; a pitcher of milk and another of water, and a jar of molasses, completed the menu. We all helped ourselves with our own spoons, and fell to with a good appetite. The rather suspicious reception which I had received was gradually changed as they learned that I was a Britisher, and when they discovered that I was also a "bug-sharp" which in American means an entomologist, they realised that I was perfectly harmless. The old man tried hard to sell me a mica mine which he owned, and the produce of which was being cut into square sheets for sale by the women of the house. He informed me that the three boys were his grandsons, and, as their father had been killed in the feud, he had got them appointed mail carriers at fifteen dollars a month each. I asked if there were many letters to carry; he said very few, but hinted that as a prominent politician in the county his influence was sufficient to get over that fact. When, however, he discovered that I was interested in "sang," which is the local name for the valuable root ginseng—which used to be largely exported from this country to China, where it is sold to adulterate or as a substitute for the more valuable Korean ginseng—he became more communicative, and told me how when he was young he could make five dollars a day by collecting sang in the forest; now it was nearly all gone and, owing to its being cultivated in Pennsylvania, or for some other reason, the price was lower too. I asked him why they did not grow it here too; he said it took five or six years to produce a good-sized root from seed, and that unless you sat over it with a shot-gun you would not get much for yourself. There are still many other medicinal plants whose leaves, roots and stems are collected and dried for sale on a large scale by the people in these mountains, such as Podophyllum, and when I stopped at a wayside store a day or two afterwards I found the people bartering these drugs for coffee, sugar and other goods, just as Indians would trade furs. The old man also told me that the people of this section had never been slave-owners, and had sympathised with the North during the Civil War. They were forced by the Confederates to serve as teamsters with their own mules and horses during the greater part of the war, being allowed only a month in the spring to plant their corn and another month in the fall to harvest it. He had during one of these visits home hidden two Federal officers who were escaped prisoners of war, and at last enabled them to rejoin their own side. I should much have liked to stop here the night, but my driver was for some reason very unwilling to do so, and it is not easy to get these mountain-men to do anything against their will; so we drove on to a small country town where I got lodgings in a private house, as there was no hotel.
The next day I got a guide and horses to ride up to the top of the Blue Ridge, where there is a mountain hotel where I meant to stop. It was a lovely ride and the forest very fine, reminding me more of the temperate Himalayan forest than of anything in Europe, though without the mass of climbing plants, ferns and epiphytes which cover the trees there. Some of the magnolias (here called cucumber tree) were live or six feet round, with clean trunks up to about fifty or sixty feet. Most of the best black walnut had here been cut out and sold to lumber merchants, who employ agents to travel about the country and buy fine and valuable trees. Only the very best will in most places pay to haul out, and there are still great tracts of virgin forest quite untouched; I met a timber merchant's agent, who gave me glowing accounts of a block of forest 160,000 acres in extent which he had got the option to purchase at a dollar an acre, and he said that in many parts of it there was timber standing on one acre which would pay for a hundred more. Such a speculation might be very profitable if managed by a company of Americans, but as a matter of fact no large enterprise of this kind can be carried out in the Southern States until you have a controlling interest in the railways or other means of transport. The value of any produce depends on what it costs to get it to market, and if it does not suit the railway companies' interest to have a particular section of country opened up, they can and often do, by heavy rates of transport, cripple any enterprise in which they are not interested. All over the States one cannot help observing how much more development of the country depends on railways than in. other countries, and how entirely the settlers are at the mercy of a railway company when there is no competing line; even when there is competition, it is usual for combination to be made in the interest of the companies, whereas any combination of the agricultural interests is almost impossible. The farmer, who has created the wealth, and to a great extent the commerce of the country, seems to get always the hardest part of the work and to receive the least share of the profit, and the knowledge of this drives most of the really clever young men off the land into business. I believe that the greater part of this forest land, which has since been opened up by big lumber companies, is now worth from ten to thirty dollars an acre, without the mineral rights which in some places are valuable.
When I got up the mountain on to a beautiful open top with groves of spruce, azaleas, and other trees and shrubs, I saw a great barn-like wooden hotel, but found it was still closed, the season not beginning till the middle of June. I had lunch with the caretaker, and, finding that it was too early for butterflies as well as for flowers at this elevation (about 5,000 feet), I returned. I had hoped to find the little Lilium Grayi, a species peculiar to the Southern Alleghanies, which was undiscovered when my book was published.[4] The hotel is reached by a driving road from a distant station. If ever I visit this country again, I would travel with a waggon and tents, as the country is too thinly settled and too little developed to be properly explored when you are dependent on the hospitality of the farmers for a lodging. I cannot imagine a more charming or productive trip than this for a naturalist, and with a good driver and a team of mules you might get about almost anywhere; the mountains are usually not very steep, and the forests not too thick or encumbered with fallen timber. I do not think much game would be found, as though black bears, deer and wild turkeys exist in remote places, I never saw any sign of these during my short stay in the country.
On my drive back to Marion I caught a few more butterflies, including a beautiful Argynnis and a rather rare species of Thecla confined to the Southern States. From Marion I went on by rail to Washington, where I was lucky enough to meet that very distinguished Tibetan traveller Mr. Rockhill, who is now appointed United States Minister at Pekin, and whose intimate knowledge of the language and people of China and energetic and determined character ought to make him a most admirable man for the post. I visited for the first time the Smithsonian Institution, which seems to be a most admirably arranged and conducted museum. Though it is especially rich in birds and mammals, and has perhaps the best collection of economic entomology in the world, the collection of American lepidoptera is very incomplete at present; and there are so many public museums springing up in the principal towns of the United States that there must be a good deal of competition among them to secure specimens, which would be far more useful to naturalists, at least to foreigners, if they could be brought together for study. I do not think there is at present any single collection of lepidoptera in the United States which contains anything like sufficient material to enable a catalogue of the lepidoptera of North America, or even of the United States, to be made. I have now seen all the principal collections, including those of Dr. Holland at Pittsburgh, which contains the greater part of the material used by Mr. W.H. Edwards in preparing his beautiful but incomplete work on the butterflies of North America; those of the late H. Edwards and Neumogen at New York; that of Dr. Skinner at Philadelphia, which contains perhaps the best set of American Hesperidæ in the United States; and that of Mr. Herman Strecker at Reading. All these collections united would perhaps, if well arranged, be sufficient for the purpose; and if the work was in the hands of a broad-minded specialist who had a sufficient knowledge of the distribution and variation of the species in other countries, especially Mexico, Northern Asia and Europe, we should have a work which would enable lepidopterists to work in future on a firm foundation. At present, however, American lepidopterists are far behind their colleagues in ornithology and mammalogy, and systematic work seems to be rather at a standstill. There are some beautiful and well-stuffed groups of mammals in the Smithsonian Museum, especially of the buffalo, which show the high standard of art to which taxidermy has now reached in the United States. I say art, because though the stuffing of animals, birds and fish has not been treated as an art, and until quite recently has been done by workmen of a low grade, it is certainly deserving of a higher and more educated treatment. The lovely groups of birds in the South Kensington Museum are to my mind works of art of higher type than much of the painting and sculpture which one sees, and, if there were more men capable of combining a knowledge of the anatomy and habits of living animals with the technical handicraft of taxidermy, we should have a great deal more pleasure in looking at museums than at present. The old-fashioned cases in which a pair of birds sat facing each other in an erect position on the conventional branch, and decorated with the same lichens, the same grasses and the same pebbles, are the best we can now get from the ordinary English bird-stuffer. Such work is often nasty and anything but cheap, and the exorbitant prices which are often charged for such work in London shops disgust people who would be glad to pay, as I should, from three to five pounds a week to a man who took pride in his work to do it in one's own house. For such men there is both in America and England ample scope, and the best among them would be certain of regular employment; but unless they improve their style, their occupation will get, as so much other work does, into the hands of foreigners. The three best specimens of taxidermy in my house were done at Brussels, at Trondhjem and at Moscow; and I do not know where to find a working bird-stuffer in England whom I could trust without constant personal supervision to do anything which would be a pleasure to the eye and in accordance with nature.
From Washington I returned to New York, and went home by the White Star Line, which I have found the most comfortable of all the Transatlantic lines I have tried.
- ↑ Mr. Pinchot later became Chief of the Forest Department of the United States, and developed that service into one of the best managed and most successful that exists in any country.
- ↑ In 1904 I visited the remains of this forest, which has been fully described by Professor Ridgeway.
- ↑ Shortia is also found in Japan and Formosa (see p. 341).
- ↑ "Monograph of the Genus Lilium," 1880.