And it is no myth; but a literal résumé of a five days' outing at Poplar Spring, on Marsh Creek, in Pennsylvania. Alas, for the beautiful valley, that once afforded the finest camping grounds I have ever known.
Never any more Can it be Unto me (or anybody else) As before.
A huge tannery, six miles above Poplar Spring, poisons and blackens the stream with chemicals, bark and ooze. The land has been brought into market, and every acre eagerly bought up by actual settlers. The once fine covers and thickets are converted into fields thickly dotted with blackened stumps. And, to crown the desolation, heavy laden trains of "The Pine Creek and Jersey Shore R. R." go thundering almost hourly over the very spot where stood our camp by Poplar Spring.
Of course, this is progress; but, whether backward or forward, had better be decided sixty years hence. And, just what has happened to the obscure valley of Marsh Creek, is happening today, on a larger scale, all over the land. It is the same old story of grab and greed. Let us go on the "make" today, and "whack up" tomorrow; cheating each other as villainously as we may, and posterity be d--d. "What's all the w-u-u-rld to a man when his wife is a widdy?"
This is the moral: From Maine to Montana; from the Adirondacks to Alaska; from the Yosemite to the Yellowstone, the trout-hog, the deer-wolf, the netter, the skin-hunter, each and all have it their own way; and the law is a farce--only to be enforced where the game has vanished forever. Perhaps the man-child is born who will live to write the moral of all this--when it is too late.
MORE HINTS ON COOKING, WITH SOME SIMPLE RECEIPTS--BREAD, COFFEE, POTATOES, SOUPS, STEWS, BEANS, FISH, MEAT, VENISON
We may live without friends, we may live without books, But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
It is probably true that nothing connected with out-door life in camp is so badly botched as the cooking. It is not through any lack of the raw material, which may be had of excellent quality in any country village. It is not from lack of intelligence or education, for the men you meet in the woods, as outers or sportsmen, are rather over than under the average in these respects. Perhaps it is because it has been dinned into our ears from early childhood, that an appetite, a healthy longing for something good to eat, a tickling of the palate with wholesome, appetizing food, is beneath the attention of an aesthetic, intellectual man. Forgetting that the entire man, mental and physical, depends on proper aliment and the healthy assimilation thereof; and that a thin, dyspeptic man can no more keep up in the struggle of life, than the lightning express can make connections, drawn by a worn out locomotive.